素质论——一种替你作主的理由

“中国人素质太低，所以现在还搞不了民主。”

这句话很多人都听过。奇怪的是，说这句话的人通常并不认为自己的政治判断也因为“中国人素质低”而失效。

这一期从1845年的阿根廷讲起。

萨米恩托在《法昆多：文明与野蛮》中，把城市、教育、欧洲和共和国放在“文明”一边，把草原、高乔人和考迪罗放在“野蛮”一边。但他写得最有生命力的几页，偏偏是在赞美那些“野蛮”的高乔人。

一百七十多年后，政治理论家 Diego von Vacano 提出：理解特朗普，也许不该总拿希特勒和墨索里尼作参照，而应该往美国南边看，看看庇隆、考迪罗，以及拉丁美洲漫长的个人化政治传统。

这两个问题放在一起，会出现一条很有意思的线索：

“文明”与“野蛮”看似是在评价一群人，其实也在分配政治资格。一个人宣布别人“不够文明”“素质不够”的同时，也默认了自己拥有判断他们是否成熟的资格。

所以这一期真正想谈的不是“中国人到底有没有素质”，而是另一个问题：

当我们说“人民还没有准备好自己作主”的时候，这句话在政治上做了什么？

它怎样把制度问题变成人口问题；怎样让一些人自动获得“判断别人是否成熟”的位置；又怎样在任何强人真正出现以前，先生产出一种对政治监护的需求。

从萨米恩托的“文明与野蛮”，到拉丁美洲的 caudillo，再到特朗普和中文世界的“素质论”，这一期讨论一种很容易被忽略的政治逻辑：

强人的供给出现以前，强人的需求可能已经存在。

#政治哲学 #素质论 #民粹主义 #特朗普 #阿根廷 #萨米恩托 #考迪罗 #拉美政治 #民主 #政治思想

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《素质论——一种替你作主的理由》

大家好,欢迎来乔治街22号做客,我是你们的朋友乔治.这期我们来谈谈“民粹主义”。

过去一提民粹主义，人们很容易想到拉丁美洲。阿根廷的庇隆，巴西的瓦加斯，后来还有藤森、查韦斯、莫拉莱斯。政治立场可以相差很远，最后却经常被塞进同一个抽屉。

这个词背后其实一直藏着一张世界地图。地图北边是制度、政党、法治和成熟的自由民主；往南，则是个人崇拜、群众激情和政治表演。拉丁美洲长期承担着一种很特殊的知识功能：它不断给美国政治学提供“现代政治出了问题以后会变成什么样”的案例。

如今的世界，这张地图忽然有些不好用了。

研究拉丁美洲时熟悉的那些词，强人、个人主义、群众动员、领袖崇拜，开始出现在美国自己身上。

有一篇文章叫《American Caudillo》。他的建议很简单：理解现在的美国，可以少往欧洲看一点，多往美国南边看一点。

它做了一件很有价值的事。过去讨论民粹主义，最熟悉的结构是“人民对精英”。作者von Vacano 把领袖重新放回画面中央。在他那里，关键关系是一个具体的人和群众之间形成的直接联系。这个人尽量绕过政党、官僚、专家和其他政治中介，用声音、姿态、形象和情绪直接面对“人民”。

这使民粹主义变成了一个权威问题。领袖当然会攻击精英，但攻击精英只是手段之一。更值得注意的是另一种主张：制度不能正确表达你们，我可以。

到了这里，拉丁美洲的考迪罗传统就变得有用了。

Caudillo 很难准确翻译成中文。军阀不太对，独裁者又太宽。这个词更接近一个政治共同体的“头”。西班牙帝国瓦解以后，新生的拉美共和国并不缺宪法。议会、选举、共和国、权利，这些东西很快都出现了。比较稀缺的是制度本身的权威。选举输了以后为什么认输，地方武装为什么服从中央，省份为什么接受一个共同政府，这些事情并不会因为宪法已经写好就自动解决。

于是，具体的人际忠诚有时比抽象制度更可靠。一个人有军队，有地方网络，有追随者，有分配资源的能力，也有人愿意跟着他冒险。他可以参加选举，可以接受议会授权，可以使用共和国的语言，但政治秩序真正依附的仍然是这个人。

所以考迪罗和共和国并不是两种截然分开的东西。考迪罗完全可能生活在共和制度里面。von Vacano 抓到的正是这一点：现代政治并不会随着宪法和选举出现，就自动从个人身上撤退。

文章里最值得中文读者认真看的，其实还不是特朗普，而是另一条线。

1845年，流亡在智利的阿根廷人多明戈·萨米恩托写了一本书，叫《法昆多：文明与野蛮》。二十三年以后，他自己当上了阿根廷总统。

这本书后来成了阿根廷最重要的建国文本之一。它把阿根廷历史组织成一个很清楚的对立：城市、教育、欧洲、法律属于文明；草原、高乔人、考迪罗和暴力属于野蛮。一个现代共和国要从后者走到前者。

可是萨米恩托真的写到高乔人的时候，笔调常常很好。他写草原上的追踪者，能够从普通人几乎看不见的痕迹里判断谁从这里经过；他写向导，在没有道路的旷野里辨认方向，军队反而要依靠这些没有受过正规教育的人。《法昆多》最有生命力的几页，恰恰落在那些被归到“野蛮”一边的人身上。

von Vacano 把“文明与野蛮”和考迪罗放进同一条拉美政治思想传统。这个处理给了我一个启发。文明和野蛮这两个词，看上去是在评价一群人，实际还完成了另一件事：它们分配了判断资格。

当一个人说另一群人“不够文明”的时候，他已经默认自己拥有辨认文明的能力。被评价的人得到的是一份关于自身不足的诊断，评价者则在同一个动作里获得了一个位置。他知道标准，也知道别人距离标准还有多远。

所以《法昆多》里的问题不能简单归结为萨米恩托看不起高乔人。他其实相当欣赏高乔人的勇气、敏锐和生命力。后来他推动公共教育，也支持欧洲移民和一整套文明化工程。在他的世界里，这些并不矛盾。现有人口身上可以有值得保存的品质，同时仍然需要接受教育、改造和重新组织。

这种结构在中文里并不陌生。

有一句话人们听了很多年：中国人素质太低。

它有许多版本。中国人现在还不适合民主，一放开就会乱，制度当然很好，但是人口条件还没有成熟。说话的人未必支持威权，很多时候恰恰相反。他可能真心赞成自由、宪政和政治参与，只是认为这些东西需要等一等。

这句话有一个很有意思的语用习惯。一个人说“中国人素质低”的时候，通常并不会认为自己的政治判断也因为“中国人素质低”而失去效力。否则，他首先就没有资格判断另外十几亿人是否具备自治能力。

“中国人”在句子里是一个“我们”，实际使用时却经常更接近一个“他们”。

素质论于是完成了一次很安静的政治分层。一部分人被判断为还没有准备好，另一部分人因为能够作出这个判断，已经站到了准备好的那一边。这种分层不需要任何正式头衔，也没有人公开申请“监护人”的职位。它只需要一个看上去很常识的判断：多数人目前还不能充分为自己作主。

到这一步，政治讨论已经改变了方向。原本的问题可能是怎样建立制度，让一个社会在参与中形成自治能力。素质论把它换成了另一个问题：既然大部分人现在还不行，那么这段时间谁来判断？

我觉得这才是素质论最值得注意的政治效果。它对威权的贡献未必发生在供给端。世界上从来不缺愿意掌权的人。更稀缺的是一种广泛的确信，相信总得有人暂时替别人作决定。

国家说“人口素质有待提高”并不令人意外。更有意思的是，这套语言也会进入反对专断的人那里。一些赞成自由主义制度的人，同时又相信实施这些制度所需要的人民并不存在。于是，一套原本要求限制权力的思想，在人口判断这一层，替无限期的政治监护留下了位置。

“暂时”尤其方便。人民还没准备好，等教育再普及一点；社会还不成熟，等中产再多一点；现在放开会乱，再等经济发展一些。这种说法最大的特点不是它完全错误。一个社会的教育、组织能力、信任水平当然会影响制度运转。麻烦在于，它几乎没有内生的结束标准。谁来判断已经准备好了，仍然是原来那批判断者。

这样再回头看萨米恩托对高乔人的赞美，会发现所谓“野蛮人”根本不需要被写得一无是处。相反，他最好拥有一些非常珍贵的品质。勇敢、淳朴、坚忍、真实，这些品质可以让他成为国家精神的来源，却不必使他获得同等的政治判断地位。

中文语境里也经常出现类似的组合。人们会说农民最淳朴，普通人最能吃苦，底层最有生活智慧，同时又很自然地认为这些人容易被煽动、不懂制度、缺乏现代公民意识。这两种评价可以长期共存，因为它们处理的并不是同一个问题。前一种评价承认他们的道德价值，后一种判断限制他们的政治资格。

于是人民可以成为民族精神的来源，可以承担牺牲、坚韧和善良这些美德，却仍然被放在需要解释、教育和代表的位置。赞美没有取消等级，很多时候反而让等级显得更温和。

这也帮助我们重新理解文明与野蛮和考迪罗之间的关系。文明/野蛮并不会机械地产生一个强人。历史当然没有这么整齐。不过，它很容易制造一种认知上的不对称：有些人知道什么对大家好，有些人连自己的长远利益都未必知道。

到了考迪罗政治那里，这种不对称获得了一个人的身体。

领袖开始声称，政党不能真正表达人民，媒体不能，官僚不能，法院也越来越可疑。制度对他的限制，会被重新解释成制度对人民的阻挡。个人和人民之间原本只是代表关系，慢慢带上了另外一种意味：没有这个人，所谓“真正的人民”就无法被准确表达。

这一步比 charisma 更值得留意。一个人有魅力，只能说明很多人喜欢听他说话。个人化权威发展到更深的阶段，发生的是替代。职位原本先于个人存在，谁当总统都只是暂时进入那个职位。后来方向反过来了，政党越来越等于这个人，政治运动越来越依赖这个人，到最后，人民本身也开始通过这个人得到定义。

这时候，攻击领袖很容易被感受成攻击他的支持者，调查领袖被理解成国家机器针对“我们”，一场普通的权力更替也可能被体验成某种共同体被夺走了本来属于自己的位置。

von Vacano 用拉丁美洲解释特朗普，最有意思的地方也许就在这里。那些长期被美国政治学当作“现代化不完全”的经验，并没有老老实实留在过去。制度化不会永久消灭个人权威，选举也不会自动把人民和某一个人的身体分开。

对中文世界来说，这个问题甚至可以再往前放一步。强人出现以前，一个社会已经可能积累了相当丰富的监护语言。“他们没有准备好”“他们容易被操纵”“他们素质还不够”，这些话未必出自强人，也未必服务于某一个具体领袖。它们只是逐渐让一种政治安排显得合理：总有人比另外一些人更有资格判断什么时候人民才算成熟。

这也是我现在听到“中国人素质低”时最在意的部分。我并不太关心这句话是不是冒犯了谁。人口素质当然可以讨论，教育、公共行为、政治知识也都可以比较。更麻烦的是，从一项经验判断跨到政治资格之间的那一步通常走得太轻松。

一个人缺乏某些知识，不等于别人因此获得替他作主的长期授权。一个社会的制度运行有困难，也不能自动推出政治权利应当由某个更有见识的群体代为保管。

“人民还没有准备好”一旦成为政治常识，很多后面的事情其实已经容易了。剩下的问题只是由谁来替他们判断，以及这个等待究竟什么时候结束。

萨米恩托写《文明与野蛮》将近一百八十年以后，阿根廷又选出了一个极度个人化的总统。米莱自称自由意志主义者，最痛恨的恰恰是庇隆留下的国家。他拿着电锯，要砍掉那个由考迪罗政治塑造出来的制度遗产。

可是他动员人民的方式，又如此熟悉。仍然是一个人站在群众中央，仍然是把复杂社会划成两个道德世界，仍然是告诉支持者，旧制度之所以阻挡我，是因为它一直靠你们生活。

阿根廷真正有趣的地方可能就在这里。从萨米恩托到庇隆，再到米莱，左右变了，政策变了，连“文明”究竟是什么都变了。一直没有完全消失的，是究竟,谁有资格替这个国家说出它真正是谁?

谢谢来乔治街做客,下次见,Chau

The Suzhi Argument: A Reason to Rule on Your Behalf

There is a word that American political science has used for decades.

Populism.

For a long time, the word seemed to point south.

Perón in Argentina. Vargas in Brazil. Later, Fujimori, Chávez, Morales. Politicians with very different programmes and very different constituencies were repeatedly placed in the same conceptual box.

Behind the word was an unstated map of the political world. In the north were institutions, parties, constitutionalism and mature liberal democracy. Further south lay caudillos, personal rule, mass emotion and political spectacle.

Latin America came to perform a peculiar intellectual function. It supplied American political science with examples of what politics looked like when modernity had somehow gone wrong.

After 2016, that map became harder to read.

A man known mainly for real estate, celebrity branding and reality television entered the White House under the existing rules of the American electoral system. Words that had long belonged to the study of Latin America suddenly appeared in discussions of the United States itself: strongman politics, personalism, mass mobilisation, leader worship.

In 2019, the political theorist Diego von Vacano published an article with a deliberately provocative title: “American Caudillo.”

His suggestion was simple. If Americans wanted to understand Donald Trump, they might learn something by looking south rather than always looking east, across the Atlantic to Europe.

The article itself is uneven. Some parts are stronger than others, and its section on Trump sometimes feels like a series of correspondences between contemporary headlines and themes from Latin American political history. But it makes one move that is genuinely useful.

Most theories of populism begin with a conflict between “the people” and “the elite.” Von Vacano puts another figure back into the picture: the leader.

The crucial relationship, in his account, is between one person and the many. The populist leader tries to reduce the distance between himself and “the people,” bypassing parties, bureaucracies, experts and other institutional intermediaries. Politics becomes intensely concerned with voice, gesture, image, spectacle and emotion.

That changes the problem.

The leader may attack elites, of course. But the deeper claim is something like this: institutions do not express you properly. I can.

And that is where the Latin American tradition of the caudillo becomes useful.

There is no exact English equivalent of caudillo. “Warlord” is too narrow. “Dictator” is too broad. The word is closer to the head of a political community, a person around whom authority becomes organised.

After Spanish imperial rule collapsed in the Americas, the new republics were not short of constitutions. Quite the opposite. They produced constitutions, congresses, elections, declarations of rights and republican forms with remarkable speed.

What they often lacked was settled authority.

Why should the loser of an election accept defeat? Why should a provincial army obey a distant central government? Why should different regions accept the same political centre? A constitution could state the answer on paper without making the answer socially real.

Under those conditions, loyalty to a person could be more reliable than loyalty to an institution. A political figure might possess military followers, local networks, patronage, personal prestige and people willing to take risks on his behalf. He might enter elections and accept legislative authorisation. He could speak the language of republicanism. Yet the actual order still rested heavily on him.

The caudillo, then, does not necessarily stand outside the republic. He can grow inside it.

That is one of the most useful implications of von Vacano’s argument. Modern politics does not automatically withdraw from personal bodies simply because a country acquires constitutions and elections.

But the part of this tradition that matters most for Chinese listeners is not Trump.

It begins much earlier.

In 1845, an Argentine exile living in Chile published a book called Facundo: Civilization and Barbarism. His name was Domingo Faustino Sarmiento. Twenty-three years later, he became president of Argentina.

Facundo became one of the foundational texts of Argentine national life. Its world appears to be divided quite cleanly. On one side stand the city, education, Europe, law and republican government. On the other stand the pampas, the gaucho, the caudillo, violence and barbarism.

A modern republic, in this telling, has to travel from the second world towards the first.

Yet something strange happens whenever Sarmiento actually writes about the gauchos.

His prose comes alive.

He describes trackers who can read traces in the earth that ordinary people cannot even see. He describes guides who can cross vast stretches of open land without roads, orienting themselves by terrain, stars and experience. Educated officers depend on men who possess none of the formal education Sarmiento regards as the basis of civilisation.

Some of the most vivid pages in a book called Civilization and Barbarism are devoted to the people placed firmly on the side of barbarism.

Von Vacano treats “civilisation versus barbarism” and caudillismo as recurring themes within the same Latin American political tradition.

That pairing suggests something important.

The words “civilised” and “barbarous” seem to describe populations. In practice, they also distribute the right to judge.

The moment someone declares that another group is not sufficiently civilised, he implicitly places himself among those capable of recognising civilisation. The people being described receive a diagnosis of deficiency. The person doing the describing acquires a position from which that deficiency can be identified, measured and corrected.

The language issues two permits at once.

One goes to the population being described: you are not yet fully capable of governing yourselves.

The other goes to the person making the judgement: you are qualified to explain them, educate them and decide how far they remain from the required standard.

Sarmiento’s later politics combined mass public education with European immigration and a far broader civilising project. There was no contradiction in his own mind between these things. The existing population could contain courage, intelligence and valuable forms of life while still appearing to him as material that had to be educated, transformed and reorganised.

That structure should sound familiar to anyone who grew up in the Chinese-speaking world.

There is a sentence most of us have heard in one form or another:

Chinese people have low suzhi.

Suzhi is difficult to translate. Depending on context, it can mean quality, calibre, cultivation, civility, education or civic competence. In political conversation, it often appears in familiar formulations.

Chinese people do not yet have the suzhi required for democracy.

If you liberalise too quickly, there will be chaos.

Democracy may be desirable in principle, but the population is not ready.

China has too many people, too little civic discipline, too little education, too little trust. Perhaps democracy can come later.

People who say these things do not necessarily support authoritarian rule. Quite often they believe themselves to be liberals. They may sincerely prefer constitutional government, political rights and greater participation. They simply think those things have to wait.

There is an interesting feature in the grammar of the claim.

When someone says, “Chinese people have low suzhi,” he rarely treats his own political judgement as invalidated by the same diagnosis.

Otherwise he would face an immediate problem. If Chinese people lack the competence required to make political judgements, why should his own judgement about the competence of more than a billion Chinese people command any authority?

The phrase “we Chinese have low suzhi” is grammatically a statement about “us.” In practice, it often functions as a statement about “them.”

And once you notice that, the political work performed by the sentence becomes clearer.

It appears to describe a population. It also allocates competence.

Some people are placed in the category of “not yet ready.” Others, precisely because they can recognise that lack of readiness, quietly position themselves among those who are ready enough to judge.

No office has to be created. Nobody applies to become a guardian. The hierarchy can emerge from something that sounds like ordinary realism: most people are not yet capable of governing themselves properly.

Once that proposition becomes accepted, the political question has already shifted.

The initial question might have been how to design institutions through which people acquire the habits and capacities of self-government.

The suzhi argument substitutes another question.

If most people are not ready now, who judges in the meantime?

That is a demand for guardianship.

And a demand for guardianship can exist before any particular strongman appears.

In fact, it can be produced by people who dislike strongmen.

This is the most interesting contradiction in the suzhi argument.

There is nothing surprising about an authoritarian state speaking about the population’s insufficient quality. Such language is useful to governments because it converts problems of institutions and power into problems located inside the population itself.

The more revealing case is when the same reasoning appears among people who oppose arbitrary government.

A person may believe that political rights should not depend on the goodwill of rulers, while also believing that the effective exercise of those rights depends on a level of population quality that has not yet been reached.

He may oppose a minority ruling permanently on behalf of the majority, while accepting that the majority cannot yet be trusted to rule itself.

A political language designed to limit power has now left an opening for indefinite guardianship.

The word “temporary” does a great deal of work here.

The people are not ready yet. Wait until education improves.

Civil society is too weak. Wait until a larger middle class develops.

Political liberalisation would produce disorder. Wait until economic development has gone further.

None of these claims is inherently absurd. Education, trust, organisational capacity and political knowledge obviously affect how institutions function.

The difficulty is that the argument contains no natural stopping point.

Who decides when the population has finally become ready?

Usually, the authority to answer that question remains with the same people who declared them unready in the first place.

This is why the suzhi argument matters politically.

The contribution it makes to authoritarianism need not come from the supply side. Human societies have rarely suffered from a shortage of people willing to exercise power.

The scarcer resource is demand: the belief that somebody must, for now, decide on behalf of everybody else.

“People are not ready” supplies part of that demand before any leader has arrived to claim it.

Now return to Sarmiento’s fascination with the gaucho.

Civilising language does not need its supposedly backward population to be worthless.

In fact, it often works better if that population possesses qualities worth admiring.

The gaucho can be brave, perceptive and authentic. He can embody something elemental about the nation while remaining politically subordinate to those who claim to understand where the nation must go.

The same combination appears easily in Chinese discourse.

Farmers are described as simple and honest.

Ordinary people have extraordinary endurance.

The poor possess a wisdom that educated elites have lost.

The countryside contains the “real China.”

And the same people can simultaneously be described as vulnerable to manipulation, insufficiently educated, lacking civic awareness or incapable of dealing responsibly with democratic politics.

There is no necessary contradiction between the two descriptions.

They allocate different kinds of value.

“Low suzhi” limits political judgement.

“Great people” recognises moral value.

A population can therefore become the source of the nation’s authenticity, endurance and goodness without receiving an equal claim to political competence.

Its virtues can be celebrated while its judgement remains under supervision.

Admiration does not necessarily abolish hierarchy. Sometimes it makes hierarchy easier to live with.

This is also where the relation between “civilisation and barbarism” and caudillismo becomes more interesting.

The language of civilisation does not mechanically produce a strongman. History is not that tidy.

But it can establish an asymmetry of knowledge.

Some people know where the country needs to go. Others do not fully understand their own long-term interests.

In caudillo politics, that asymmetry acquires a body.

A leader begins to say that parties no longer express the people properly. The media distort them. Bureaucrats frustrate them. Courts obstruct what they actually want.

Institutional resistance to the leader can then be redescribed as resistance to the people themselves.

The relation between leader and people begins as representation and gradually takes on another form.

Representation assumes that the people exist prior to the leader. A politician temporarily receives authority to act in their name. Someone else can occupy the office later.

Personalised authority moves in another direction.

The leader ceases to appear as one representative among others. He increasingly becomes the person through whom the “real people” can be identified at all.

That is the point at which representation begins to slide towards substitution.

Charisma does not quite capture this.

Charisma explains why people want to watch someone or listen to him. It does not explain why the fate of a political community can become bound up with the fate of one person.

A normal institutional office exists before the officeholder. The presidency remains the presidency while different individuals pass through it.

Personalised authority slowly reverses that relation.

The party begins to inhabit the person.

The political movement begins to inhabit the person.

Eventually, even “the people” begin to acquire definition through the person.

An attack on the leader can then be experienced as an attack on his followers. An investigation of the leader becomes evidence that the state is persecuting “us.” A routine transfer of power can feel like the political community itself has been dispossessed.

This is where von Vacano’s use of Latin America to understand Trump remains suggestive. Experiences that American political science once treated as symptoms of incomplete modernisation did not remain safely in the past. Institutionalisation does not permanently eliminate personal authority. Elections do not automatically separate “the people” from the body of a leader.

For a Chinese audience, however, the sequence can be pushed one step further back.

Long before a caudillo appears, a society may already possess a rich language of guardianship.

They are not ready.

They are too easily manipulated.

They lack education.

They lack civic discipline.

They do not understand their own interests.

None of these sentences needs to come from a strongman. None needs to be written for a particular regime.

Taken together, however, they can make one political arrangement feel perfectly reasonable: some people are more qualified than others to determine when the population is finally mature enough to govern itself.

That is what I now hear when somebody says, with complete confidence, that Chinese people have low suzhi.

The problem is not that the sentence is rude.

Population characteristics can be studied. Education can be measured. Public behaviour can be compared. Levels of political knowledge differ across societies and within them.

The dangerous move occurs when an empirical judgement about competence quietly becomes a judgement about political standing.

A person’s lack of knowledge does not by itself grant somebody else an indefinite right to rule on his behalf.

Difficulties in making institutions work do not automatically place political rights in the custody of a more enlightened group.

Once “the people are not ready” becomes common political sense, a large part of the argument for guardianship has already been completed.

What remains is to decide who gets to judge on their behalf, and how long the waiting is supposed to last.