古村治彦です。
今回は昨年（２０１５年）の９月に『』誌に掲載された記事をご紹介します。記事の著者であるアダム・ゴプニックは、２０１１年にホワイトハウス担当記者協会が年１回開催する夕食会に出席し、そこで目撃した情景を大統領選挙に絡めて書いています。
夕食会の席上、バラク・オバマ大統領は挨拶に立ちました。その挨拶の中で、出席者の一人であったドナルド・トランプを材料にしたジョークを長々と語りました。出席者たちは大笑いでしたが、ジョークの材料となったドナルド・トランプは笑いもできず、ただこわばっていた、ということです。
当時、オバマ大統領には「ケニア生まれで、アメリカの市民権を持っていない」という批判がなされていました。ドナルド・トランプもその主張をしていました。そこで、オバマ大統領はハワイ州政府に対して、自分の詳しい出生記録を公表するように求め、実際に公表された後でした。オバマ大統領としては、自分の出生の疑惑を主張したトランプを笑いものにして、うっぷんを晴らそうとしたのでしょう。それに対して、トランプは、屈辱感でこわばるほどに怒りました。
２０１１年のホワイトハウスでの夕食会におけるドナルド・トランプ
ゴプニックは、トランプの大統領選挙出馬とトランプの台頭の原動力になったのは、ホワイトハウスでオバマ大統領から受けた侮辱と恥辱（屈辱感、humiliation）だろうと推測しています。トランプ当選が現実のものとなった今、トランプを大統領にまで押し上げたのは、オバマ大統領が気軽にトランプを笑いものにした行為が原因とも言うことができ、「オバマ大統領の自業自得」です。
トランプはオバマ大統領から屈辱を受けましたが、南部とラストベルトのトランプを支持した人々（大学教育を受けていない白人男性の労働者たち）もまた、屈辱感を基礎にして動いていると論稿の著者ゴプニックは書いています。民主党、共和党両党のエスタブリッシュメントから無視されているという屈辱感やもちろん、自分たちの祖父母や両親の時代に比べて生活水準が下がっているという屈辱感、外国から侮られているという屈辱感を感じています。
私が翻訳した本に『野望の中国近現代史 帝国は復活する』（オーヴィル・シェル、ジョン・デルリー著、ビジネス社、２０１４年）があります。これは、アヘン戦争以降の歴史を中国の近代化に貢献した人々を各省で１人ずつ取り上げたもの（列伝）です。この本の背骨（バックボーン）となるテーマは、「中国はアヘン戦争以降、恥辱の世紀（a century of humiliation）を過ごしてきた（これ以降、中国は外国に侵略され、富を奪われていきました）。近代化に貢献した人々（改革者）は、この恥辱をそそぎ、富強（wealth and power）の復活を目指してきた（アヘン戦争直前まで中国は力を落としつつありましたが世界最大の経済大国でした）」というものです。
トランプを支持した人々は、トランプの掲げた「アメリカを再び偉大に（Make America Great Again）」こそが、自分たちの主張そのものだと感じ、トランプを支持しました。逆に言うと、トランプが時代の「空気」を的確につかむことに成功しました。この「昔偉大だった我が国は今凋落している。それを再び偉大にするのだ」という思考は、中国近現代史と相通じるものがあります。
今回の大統領選挙のキーワードは、「屈辱感」であったと言えると思います。トランプがオバマ大統領から与えられた屈辱感、戦後アメリカの輝ける中産階級（アメリカの勝利と帝国化の富の配分にあずかった人々）の子孫の抱えている屈辱感、これらが結びつき、トランプが大統領となりました。屈辱感は大きな物事をもたらす原動力となるということは、今回の事例でまた歴史上の教訓となりました。
トランプは「改革者」としてワシントンに乗り込みます。『野望の中国近現代史』をお読みいただけると分かりますが、清朝末期には改革派と守旧派の間で、激しい権力闘争があり、近代化が中途半端になってしまいました。この点では日本の幕末から明治維新にかけては、ある意味であっさりすぎるほど、近代化（西洋化）がほぼ抵抗なく受け入れられていきました。ワシントンにも守旧派が手ぐすね引いて待っています。この人々を如何に御していくか、トランプの手腕に注目が集まります。
（貼り付けはじめ）
TRUMP AND OBAMA: A NIGHT TO REMEMBER
By Adam Gopnik , SEPTEMBER 12, 2015
http://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/trump-and-obama-a-night-to-remember
Once, and only once, in 2011, have I
attended the annual White House Correspondents’ Association dinner in
Washington, D.C., on the grounds, as I explained then, that Voltaire is said to
have cited when he declined a second invitation to an orgy: once a philosopher,
twice a pervert. Luckily for the philosopher in me, it turned out to be an
auspicious night. Not only, as we did not know then, was President Obama in the
midst of the operation that would lead shortly to Osama bin Laden’s killing; it
was also the night when, despite that preoccupation, the President took apart
Donald Trump, plastic piece by orange part, and then refused to put him back
together again.
Trump was then at the height of his
unimaginably ugly marketing of birther fantasies, and, just days before, the
state of Hawaii had, at the President’s request, released Obama’s long-form
birth certificate in order to end, or try to end, the nonsense. Having referred to that act, he then gently but acutely mocked Trump’s
Presidential ambitions: “I know that he’s taken some flack lately—no one is
prouder to put this birth-certificate matter to rest than the Donald. And that’s because he can finally
get back to the issues that matter, like: did we fake the moon landing? What
really happened in Roswell? And—where are Biggie and Tupac?” The President went
on, “We all know about your credentials and breadth of experience. For
example—no, seriously—just recently, in an episode of Celebrity
Apprentice”—there was laughter at the mention of the program’s name. Obama
explained that, when a team did not impress, Trump “didn’t blame Lil Jon or
Meatloaf—you fired Gary Busey. And these are the kinds of decisions that would
keep me up at night.”
What was really memorable about the event,
though, was Trump’s response.
Seated a few tables away from us magazine scribes, Trump’s humiliation was as absolute, and as
visible, as any I have ever seen: his head set in place, like a man in a
pillory, he barely moved or altered his expression as wave after wave of
laughter struck him. There was not a trace of feigning good humor about him,
not an ounce of the normal politician’s, or American regular guy’s “Hey, good
one on me!” attitude—that thick-skinned cheerfulness that almost all American public
people learn, however painfully, to cultivate. No head bobbing or hand-clapping
or chin-shaking or sheepish grinning—he sat perfectly still, chin tight, in
locked, unmovable rage. If he had not just embarked on so ugly an exercise in
pure racism, one might almost have felt sorry for him.
Some
day someone may well write a kind of micro-history of that night, as historians now are wont to do, as a pivot in American life,
both a triumph of Obama’s own particular and enveloping form of cool and as
harbinger of—well, of what exactly? A lot depends on what happens next with the
Donald and his followers. Certainly,
the notion that Trump’s rise, however long it lasts, is a product of a special
skill, or circumstance, or a new national “mood,” is absurd. Trumpism is
a permanent part of American life—in one form or
another, with one voice or another blaring it out. At any moment in our modern
history, some form of populist nationalism has always held some significant
share—whether five or ten per cent – of the population. Among embittered white
men, Trump’s “base,” it has often held a share much larger than that. Trump is
not offering anything that was not offered before him, often in identical
language and with a similarly incoherent political program, by Pat Buchanan or
Ross Perot, by George Wallace or Barry Goldwater, or way back when by Father
Coughlin or Huey Long. Populist nationalism is not an eruptive response to a
new condition of 2015—it is a
perennial ideological position, deeply rooted in the nature of modernity: a
social class sees its perceived displacement as the result of a double
conspiracy of outsiders and élitists. The outsiders are swamping us, and the insiders are mocking
us—this ideology alters its local color as circumstances change, but the essential
core is always there. They look down on us and they have no right to
look down on us. Indeed, the politics of Trump, far from being in any way new,
are exactly the politics of Huck Finn’s drunken father in “Huckleberry Finn”:
“Call this a govment! Just look at it and see what it’s like . . . . A man
can’t get his rights in a govment like this.” Widespread dissatisfaction with
all professional politicians, a certainty of having been “sold out,” a feeling of complete alienation
from both political parties—“Not a dime’s worth of difference between
them” was George Wallace’s formulation, a half century ago—these are permanent
intuitions of the American aggrieved. The feelings may be somewhat aggravated
by bad times, or alleviated by good ones, but at the height of the prosperous
fifties a significant proportion of Americans were persuaded that the entire
government was in the hands of saboteurs and traitors at the pay of a foreign
power, while in the still more prosperous nineties a similar faction was persuaded
that the liberal President was actually a coke dealer who had murdered a
friend.
Nor
is it at all surprising to find a billionaire businessman representing this
ideology, because it is not really members of the economic élite who are its
villains—it is the educated élite, and the uneducated outsiders, who are. It is, on the historical record, much more a response to the
ceaseless anxieties of modern life than to any financial angst of the moment.
Probably the best student of this modern ideology is the conservative historian
John Lukacs, whose 2005 book “Democracy And Populism: Fear and Hatred” makes
clear how different the nationalist formula is from patriotism properly so
called: it rests not on a sense of pride in place or background but in an intense
sense of victimization. The cry of the genuine patriot is “Leave us alone to be
the people we have always been.” The populist nationalist cries, “We have been
cheated of our birthright, and the Leader will give it back.”
The ideology is always available; it just
changes its agents from time to time.
And
this is where memories of the President’s performance come into play and take
on a potency that one might not have understood at the time. For the politics
of populist nationalism are almost entirely the politics of felt
humiliation—the politics of shame. And one can’t help but suspect that,
on that night, Trump’s own sense of public humiliation became so overwhelming
that he decided, perhaps at first unconsciously, that he would, somehow, get
his own back—perhaps even pursue the Presidency after all, no matter how
nihilistically or absurdly, and redeem himself. Though he gave up the
hunt for office in that campaign, it does not seem too far-fetched to imagine
that the rage—Lukacs’s fear and hatred—implanted in him that night has fuelled
him ever since. It was already easy to sense at the time that something very
strange had happened – that the usual American ritual of the “roast” and the
roasted had been weirdly and uniquely disrupted. But the consequences were hard
to imagine. The micro-history of that night yet to be written might be devoted
largely to the double life of Barack Obama as cool comedian and quiet
commander—or it might be devoted to the moment when new life was fed into an
old ideology, when Trump’s ambitions suddenly turned over to the potent
politics of shame and vengeance. His even partial triumph in the primary still
seems unlikely—but stranger jokes have been played on American philosophers
over the centuries.
（貼り付け終わり）
（終わり）
