重塑民主的想象力：为什么系统化变革是摆脱政治困局的唯一出路？

民主的动态契约：从建国宣言到代际继承

两百五十年前，美国建国先贤在《独立宣言》中确立了民主的核心原则：人人享有生命、自由和追求幸福的权利，并且政府的权力源于被统治者的同意（Consent of the governed: 政府合法性源自公民的普遍授权）。这一大胆的政治想象力不仅赢得了独立战争，更在全世界范围内激发了关于民主制度的广泛讨论。然而，现代人往往忽略了一个根本事实——民主制度从未被设计为一个静态、完美且定型的产物。相反，它是一项代代相传、需要每一代人根据时代挑战注入创造力和积极参与的持续性项目。如果我们停止发挥民主想象力（Democratic imagination: 针对时代变迁主动调整、优化和重构民主运作机制的思维与勇气），这个共和国就可能陷入僵化、停滞甚至犬儒主义的陷阱中。

英文原文

What happened 250 years ago was a spark that ignited the world. When the founders articulated the principles of democracy and proceeded to fight for and win them, it inspired democratic conversations around the globe. Now, almost all of us can remember those inalienable rights identified at the start of that Declaration of Independence, right? Life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness. If you remember your civics class, that next sentence was arguably the more important one. Because that's when they go on to say that governments exist to secure those rights and that governments derive their power from the consent of the governed. Right? In 1776, that was the proverbial shot heard around the world, right? And their audacious act of democratic imagination also inspired a particular form of civic pride and identity in this country. This is a country united around common principles, not a common ruler, a common history, a common faith, a common creed. In a way, what binds us is this very idea that this nation can be, hopes to be, an inspiration to future generations and a beacon to the world. What we sometimes forget though is that this system was never meant to be static. The founders didn't hand us a finished product. They handed us an ongoing project that requires engagement and creativity from one generation to the next. Right? So, our responsibility is to carry that democratic imagination forward to make sure that this democratic republic doesn't become static, right? Or stuck, or rigid, or even cynical.

美国社会的“分裂困局”：三大恶性循环的交织

根据皮尤研究中心（Pew Research Center: 追踪公众态度、社会趋势与民意走向的非党派研究机构）的长期民意调查与数据分析，当前美国社会正处于一个危险的“末日循环”之中，这主要由三个交织在一起的恶性趋势构成。首先是空前的党派极化（Partisan polarization: 政治意见分裂为两个极端，且伴随对立阵营的强烈互信缺失与敌意）。这已不仅是对政策和候选人的分歧，而是上升到了公民层面的互不信任，甚至是去人性化的言语攻击。在疫情期间，相较于全球其他被调查的国家，美国人在疫苗、防疫政策和政府响应等方面展现出了最深刻的分裂，81%的美国人认为这场危机让他们走得更远。其次是社会关联的断裂（Civic disconnection: 公民与社区、邻里及同胞之间信任纽带的弱化）。过去40年里，美国邻里间的基础信任持续下滑，美国人感觉自己与同胞以及当地社区相连接的比例在全球24个受访国中垫底，这直接动摇了“大众智慧”这一民主基石。最后是对政治体制的极度犬儒（Cynicism about the political system: 认为政治代表无法体现民意，政府运作偏离法治轨道的消极心态）。公众对政府做正确决策的信任在过去20多年中持续低迷，绝大多数人认为民选官员更关心党派斗争和自我捞取利益，而非倾听和代表选民。这三个趋势在算法推荐和碎片化媒体的加速下互为因果，使高达59%的美国人感到国家最好的日子已经成为过去。

英文原文

So, why am I standing here today? I'm at the Pew Research Center, and we care deeply about understanding where Americans are and how they're thinking. And to do that, we ask people a lot of questions. And we don't take that process lightly. We believe that when we ask people to offer us their views and values and opinions and concerns, we're asking you to give us something precious, something private, right? And so, our obligation is to listen with respect and to report out on what we hear with care and with clarity. And so, what brings me here to share is that what we're hearing from Americans recently is pretty dark. It's a public that feels scared and stuck and divided. But, when we listen even more closely, we hear a determination and a readiness for innovation in the voice of Americans that echoes that spirit of the founders, right? And I think offers a path forward. So, let me start with the dark part, right? Where are we today? What is this public mood? And bring a little bit of data behind it. Americans are feeling sort of stuck in a doom loop of sorts, and it's made up of three key components, three trends. And the first, I almost don't need to say out loud, is partisan polarization, right? We no longer just disagree over issues and which candidates can best lead us forward. We've grown to, at a civic level, mistrust and even use dehumanizing language about each other. And America really stands apart globally for this level of polarization. We surveyed around the world during and after the pandemic, just to use one recent example we remember. And throughout, the American public was the most or among the most divided, whether it was the outbreak, vaccination, government responses, civil society. And after the worst of the pandemic was over, 81% of Americans said that that collective experience just drove us further apart. That's more than in any other country that we surveyed. The second trend in this is we become more disconnected from each other. Basic trust in our neighbors has fallen over 40 years. And Americans have come to doubt the very wisdom of the crowds, right? The collective wisdom that really is the foundation of democracy. And again, America stands apart from other countries in this sense of disconnection. Last year we surveyed people in 24 countries around the world, and American public was the least likely to say they feel connected to their fellow citizens in their country. And among the least likely to say even that they feel connected to people in their local communities. And the third factor in this is that many Americans have become come to believe that our political system is just fundamentally flawed. Basic trust in the government to do what's right, it's vacillated, but it's just fallen and flatlined for over 20 years. And Americans today are more likely to believe their elected officials care more about winning those partisan skirmishes and even enriching themselves than they care about the act of listening and representing their constituents. And these three factors, partisan polarization and civic disconnection and cynicism about the political system, they all sort of feed off of each other. They they each reinforce the other and they're accelerated by a fragmented media ecosystem, by an algorithmically driven digital ecosystem to the point where what Americans are telling us they just feel the country's the centrifugal forces, right? That we're just getting pulled farther and farther apart. That the the common bonds feel strained. As we came into this semiquincentennial year, 59% of Americans versus 40% told us that this country's best days are behind us, not in front of us. 59 to 40. I don't know. How how would you answer that question? And if if if your thinking is maybe behind us, like what does it take to to turn that lens, right? I mean, it's easy to get discouraged and depressed even. The question is, what do we do about it? And in my experience, that question almost always starts with each of us.

从个人连结到系统破局：通往动态民主的自我迭代

面对积重难返的系统性困局，重建民主必须在微观与宏观两个层面同时发力。在微观层面，我们需要摆脱技术对注意力的剥夺，放下手机，重新在现实生活中与他人建立人性的连结，打破围绕恐惧与分歧设立的对话叙事，转向基于共同希望和协同合作的探讨。而在宏观层面，必须承认民主系统具有天然的动态特性，解决旧问题不可避免地会伴随新挑战的产生。美国建国先贤虽然无法预见到诸如人工智能（Artificial Intelligence）、2026年的政党格局、庞大的人口规模与多元化分布，以及海量资金对政治的侵蚀，但他们在其撰写的宪政原则中明确指出，任何在权力和自由之间失去平衡、陷入长期僵死的政府系统都是危险的。

调查表明，大多数美国人已经对重大的政治体制改革做好了准备，包括国会议员任期限制、法官与官员的年龄限制、取消选举人团制度，以及限制政治献金以提高代表质量等。然而，由于害怕改革可能在党派博弈中利好对手，整个社会在长达55年的时间里没有进行过任何重大的宪法修正——这一停滞期在历史上唯有南北战争前的时期可比。改变一个显而易见的系统性故障，需要我们重温《独立宣言》所赋予的自我调整与革新的权利，发挥出与两百五十年前先辈们同等的勇气，共同推动民主这一庞大系统的自我迭代。

英文原文

Um so, let me offer three quick things. The first, I might see a little glow off of a couple faces in the dark theater. We probably should put the phones down, right? They're not helping. Um and maybe the way to think about it is that our addiction to or commitment to, you know, whatever language works for you, um those devices is really taking away our most valuable asset in our communities. It's our attention, right? Our our ability to connect at a human level. And that gets me to my second point is we do need to be talking to each other more. And in a way, the American public today has become afraid to have conversations about their democracy because we've allowed the frame to be set around our grievances and our fears and our differences. But there's a different kind of conversation we can be having. It's what we're here for today. It's about our hopes for this country and what we can be doing together. Now, I grant you that's still a hard conversation to start, especially with someone you don't know. But nobody can take that small step but each of us, and that's what becomes cumulative. And then third, we have to remember that solutions are possible. Right? That the Constitution of this nation, signed just a mile from here in 1787, gives us the right. It It actually gives us the obligation to take things into our own hands. Because the founders, in all their wisdom and all their flaws, understood that when any system of government becomes static, it becomes stuck. Right? So, we have to remember that our democracy is dynamic. And what I mean by that is not just that our democracy has to figure out how to address emerging issues and technologies, right? To be sure, the founders, I'm pretty convinced, couldn't imagine this thing we're calling artificial intelligence and offer us advice about how we should think about what it means for our society, for our politics, for our economy. I mean, that that We're going to have to figure that one out. I'm actually talking about something more fundamental, which is that the founders understood that any system of government that's carefully balancing our liberties and governance, if left still for too long, sort of becomes trapped. So, take partisanship. The founders couldn't have imagined the Republican and Democratic parties of 2026, but they absolutely understood that political polarization was fundamental. It was going to happen in any democratic system and needed to be attended to or it would become dangerous. They couldn't have fully understood how large the population of this country would grow and its distribution and its diversity. But they absolutely understood that how we take the voice of that public and convert it into effective representation through elections was going to require constant attention and adaptation or it would get trapped or even hijacked. I mean, look at what we're doing with redistricting today. Right? They couldn't have fully understood how huge this country's economy would be and the amount of money in our system and it and and how that would influence politics, but they did understand and you can see it in their writing that money was a fundamental challenge that every democracy was going to have to balance if it cared about representation. And in all of these spaces, they never thought that there could be one solution because every time you fix a problem, another problem arises. That's not a flaw. That's the nature of a democratic republic. That's what we signed on for. Right? So we can all think about our biggest problems with government today but I'm here to also say that we can think of solutions. Last year, we interviewed Americans across the country and asked them, "What would you do to fix our political system?" Boy, did they have a lot to say, right? Um at the biggest level a vast majority of Americans are willing to engage with major reform to our political system out of scale actually with other countries of our means. Their priorities would be improving the quality of representation, reducing the influence of money in our political system, diffusing that negative partisan tone that our dialogue just gravitates towards. And they're willing to engage with conversations about a whole host of reforms from long-standing ideas like term limits for members of Congress to newer ideas like age limits for elected officials or judges or getting rid of the Electoral College or other electoral reforms. There are so many ideas out there that a majority of Americans are ready to think about. Now, I'm not here to advocate for any of those particular reforms. Each of them can be debated for their pros and their cons. What I'm here to say is we really need to be having those debates. And we need to take them seriously. And we need to have the courage to be willing to change a political system that a majority of Americans feel is obviously broken. When we sit here in 2026 and we haven't our society, our public hasn't engaged in a conversation about constitutional amendment in 55 years since we lowered the voting age from 21 to 18. How many people here remember that conversation? Right? It was a while ago. The previous time our Constitution went unamended for a stretch that long was in the lead up to the Civil War. We have to remember that our democracy is meant to be dynamic and through our action. But we've sort of become so afraid of what could be worse, particularly could it benefit the other side, right? That we've stopped really imagining how we can make it better. So, I want to go back to the Declaration of Independence because after enumerating those inalienable rights and after asserting that authority comes from the governed, they go on to say that whenever any system of government becomes destructive to those ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish that government. Now, in the context of 1776, there's no doubt that they were saying they had no choice but to abolish the system they were living under and start from scratch. But it was their hope that future generations could alter and iterate on the framework they built. The solutions are not just going to drop down magically on us. It's going to take hard work. But if this country is going to stay whole, is going to thrive, is going to be an inspiration for future generations, we have to be willing to commit to make those same brave leaps of democratic imagination. Thank you.