2020年经济学人 莱克星顿专栏--美国大选之战的缩影(1)（在线收听）

United States

美国版块

Lexington

莱克星顿专栏

The battle in miniature

选举之战的缩影

A small town in Pennsylvania depicts a microcosm of the election—and how Americans are handling it

宾夕法尼亚州的一个小镇刻画了美国大选的缩影，也描绘了美国民众是如何对待选举的。

A modern-day Alexis de Tocqueville might find talk of America’s painful divisions baffling at first blush. Up close, as Bill Bishop wrote in “The Big Sort”, the country has never looked more cohesive. The leafy suburbs of America’s fast-growing, diverse cities are so uniformly Democratic it can be hard to find two people in serious disagreement. Republicans, an older, less mobile group, live equally clustered, farther out. The country is less fractured than ghettoised—as is especially apparent at election time.

即使是现代的亚历西斯·德·托克维尔，他乍一听到有关美国痛苦分裂的传闻，可能也会十分困惑。近观美国，正如比尔·毕肖普在《大人物》中写到的那样，这个国家看起来从未像现在这样如此具有凝聚力。美国快速发展、多样化的城市郊区绿树成荫，当地的民主党化程度很高，以至于很难找到两个意见分歧严重的人。共和党人是更古老、流动性更小的群体，他们同样聚居，生活在更远的地方。美国并不分裂，反而十分凝聚，在美国大选时，这一点尤为明显。

In Lexington’s suburb of the national capital (where Donald Trump won 4% of the vote in 2016), local opinion is expressed in a phalanx of Joe Biden yard-signs. Drive 20 minutes into the Maryland countryside and, as if some partisan border had been crossed, “Donald J. Trump” signs are everywhere. Yet there are still places along the frontier where rivals co-exist. One is Easton, an unshowy town in eastern Pennsylvania, where your columnist went to see some weekend canvassing for the president.

笔者生活在首都的郊区（2016年，唐纳德·特朗普在这里赢得了4%的选票），院子中一排排关于乔·拜登的标语牌表达了当地人的观点。驱车20分钟进入马里兰州乡村，就像是越过了党派边界一样，关于“唐纳德·特朗普”的标语在这里随处可见。然而，边界地区仍然有一些竞争对手共存的地方。其中一个是伊斯顿，这是宾夕法尼亚州东部的一个不起眼的小镇，笔者曾经前往那里观看一些周末举办的为总统拉票活动。

A former transport hub, at the confluence of the Lehigh and Delaware rivers, the town once thrived on its strategic site—and still relies on it. It is 70 miles from both New York and Philadelphia, a just-about-commutable distance, which has brought new families to the town, attracted by its house prices, and visitors to its main attraction, a theme-park for Crayola crayons. By no means rich yet not struggling, hardly dynamic yet replenished by incomers: the town sits between socioeconomic categories and political cultures. This has helped make it one of the most contested corners of one of the most competitive states in the country.

这个小镇位于莱哈伊河和特拉华河的交汇处，以前是交通枢纽，曾作为战略要地而繁荣，而今美国仍旧依赖这座小镇。它距离纽约和费城都有70英里，这差不多是可以进行通勤的距离，由此，许多受到房价诱惑的新的家庭涌入小镇，还有很多游客们为绘儿乐画笔主题公园所吸引来到这里。这座小镇不富有，也不困窘，没什么活力，却充斥着外来人口。它介于社会经济类别和政治文化类比之间。这使它成为美国竞争最激烈的州中的争夺要地之一。