Liberals worldwide met Donald Trump’s recent border bans with principled opposition, practical help for the victims and the occasional lapse into nonsense. Consider the Bathtub Fallacy, a staple of educated opinion for too long.

唐纳德•特朗普(Donald Trump)最近出台边境禁令，促使世界各地的自由派人士表达有原则的反对，为受害者提供实际帮助——以及偶尔发表谬论。“浴缸谬论”就是很久以来受过良好教育的人士喜爱发表的观点之一。

Whenever the state imposes a counterterror measure, especially one as brute as the US president’s, statistics are dug out to show that fewer westerners perish in terror attacks than in everyday mishaps. Slipping in the bath is a tragicomic favourite. We chuckle, share the data and wait for voters and politicians to see sense.

每当政府推行一项反恐措施，尤其是像美国总统的行政命令这样蛮横的措施，就会有一些统计数字被挖掘出来，表明死于恐怖主义袭击的西方人少于死于日常事故的人。在浴缸中滑倒是人们最爱的既悲剧又滑稽的戏码。我们轻声发笑，分享数据，等待选民和政治人士变得明白事理。

For good reason, that epiphany never happens. Leaving aside the many curbs on freedom that governments enforce to prevent accidents — product regulations and tort laws, we call them — most people can intuit the difference between domestic misfortune and political violence. The latter is an assault on the system: the rules and institutions that distinguish society from the state of nature. Bathroom deaths could multiply by 50 without a threat to civil order. The incidence of terror could not.

这样的顿悟永远不会发生，理由很充足。抛开政府为了防止事故而对自由施加的许多限制——产品法规和侵权法——大多数人能够凭直觉分辨家中发生的不幸事故与政治暴力的区别。后者是对体系的攻击，而体系是让人类社会有别于自然状态的规则和制度。即使浴室死亡事件增加50倍，也不会威胁社会秩序。恐怖主义事件则不然。

If the lawyers who volunteered to help unjustly detained arrivals at American airports showed liberalism at its best, the elision of terror with slippery porcelain is liberalism at its eye-rolling, clever-clever, unserious worst. In the coming years, reasonable people have to oppose populists while taking immense care in how they oppose them. Voters are watching. If they come to see a choice between demagogues who push security and national cohesion to paranoid extremes and liberals who take these things too lightly, the liberals should just forfeit the next few electoral cycles to save time and ballot paper.

如果说那些志愿帮助抵达美国机场后被不公正拘留的人们的律师表现出自由主义最好的一面，那么把恐怖威胁与滑溜的浴缸混为一谈则表现出自由主义翻着白眼、自作聪明、不严肃的最糟糕的一面。未来几年，合情合理的人们在反对民粹主义者的时候要非常小心他们反对后者的方式。选民在看。如果要让选民在二者之间做出选择：一是把安全和民族凝聚力推至偏执极端的煽动家，二是过于轻率地看待这些事情的自由派人士，那么自由派人士还不如放弃接下来几个选举周期，以节省时间和选票用纸。

The most insidious art in politics is the steering of one’s opponent into fringe positions, almost without their knowledge. Leaders of the Third Way, Tony Blair in Britain, Bill Clinton in the US, did it by holding the centre so greedily that their adversaries had nowhere to go but their ideological comfort zones. Boxers call it “cutting off the ring”.

最阴损的政治艺术是在对手几乎毫无知觉之间将其推至边缘立场。第三条道路的领导者们，英国的托尼•布莱尔(Tony Blair)和美国的比尔•克林顿(Bill Clinton)做到了这一点;他们死死守住中间立场，让他们的对手无处可去，只能缩回自己的意识形态“舒适区”。拳击手们称这种策略为“压缩拳击台空间”(cutting off the ring)。

Today, populists do it through their own extremism. They bet on it being enough to incite liberals into righteous overreaction, and then on voters to favour rightwing stridency over the opposite kind. The first bet looks promising so far, the second seems a sure thing.

今天，民粹主义者通过自己的极端主义来做到这一点。他们打了两个赌：这足以使自由派人士作出过度的正义反应;这进而会使选民更青睐右翼的强硬，而非左翼的坚定。第一个赌迄今看起来很有希望，而第二个赌似乎十拿九稳。

This does not call for total intellectual capitulation to the other side. There is little electoral need, and much less virtue or dignity, in the parroting of alt-right dogma by people who correctly abhor the stuff. But liberal politicians will need to at least hold the hawkish line — on national security, crime, welfare dependency — that took them into office in the very recent past, and harden it on migration. At a time when the authoritarian provocation is so great, when the natural reflex is to redouble one’s liberalism in defiance of the zeitgeist, this will be some feat of strategic discipline.

这不是呼吁整个知识界倒向对方。从选举需要(更不用提道德或尊严)上说，正确地憎恨另类右翼教条的人们无需鹦鹉学舌般地复述这些教条。但自由派政治人士将至少需要在国家安全、犯罪、福利依赖方面保持在不那么久之前让他们上台的鹰派立场，并使自己在移民问题上的立场转向强硬。在威权挑衅如此巨大之际，自由派人士的自然反应是顶住时代潮流，加倍展现出自己的自由主义，因此要达到上述境界将是战略纪律上的某种壮举。

Every political commentary has to stipulate that Trumpism is not the same as Britain’s impending exit from the EU, which is not the same as Marine Le Pen’s National Front in France, which is not the same as the rest of the continental far-right. But they elicit the same flavour of response from intellectuals and protesters. It is one that celebrates internationalism and human diversity as ends in themselves. For anyone who owes their life or livelihood to the west’s openness to outsiders, it is stirring to behold. But if it comes to define the official alternative to populism, if it crowds out hardheadedness on matters of security and identity, it will fail.

当前每一条政治评论都不得不声明，特朗普主义与英国即将退出欧盟不是一回事，后者与法国马琳•勒庞(Marine Le Pen)的国民阵线(National Front)不是一回事，而马琳·勒庞与欧洲大陆其他极右翼政客不是一回事。但知识分子和抗议者对它们做出同样的回应。这种回应称颂国际主义和人类多元化，将其视为目的。对所有人生或生计受益于西方对外来者开放的人来说，看到这种回应是令人鼓舞的。但如果要用这种回应来定义针对民粹主义的正式替代选择，如果这种回应排挤了在安全和身份认同问题上的务实态度，它就会失败。

Liberalism only wins when it is dunked in molten steel. Before Mr Blair became code for transnational looseness, he stood for vigilance to crime, terror and, more contentiously, rogue states. The coming wave of anti-populist leaders will have to resemble him at his peak much more than Canada’s prime minister and dreamboat of cosmopolitan piety, Justin Trudeau. This is what the marchers and the venting celebrities should consider: not the futility of their efforts, but their inadvertent potential to drag politicians of goodwill into ideas and rhetoric that only sell in the most progressive jurisdictions.

自由主义只有在浸泡在钢水中才会取得胜利。在布莱尔成为跨国混混的代码之前，他代表着对犯罪、恐怖主义以及(这一点更具争议性)流氓国家的警惕。未来的反民粹主义领导人将不得不更像巅峰时期的布莱尔，而不是世界主义虔诚的偶像、加拿大总理贾斯廷•特鲁多(Justin Trudeau)。这是示威者和发泄不满的名人们应该考虑的事情：不是他们的努力是徒劳的，而是他们可能在不经意间用只在最具进步意识的司法管辖地才有市场的思想和言论套住善意的政治人士。

Of course, the ultimate problem with the Bathtub Fallacy is its fallaciousness, not its repellence to voters. It is wrong on its own terms. But logic can wait. Politics matters more. Mr Trump, Ms Le Pen, the British rightwinger Nigel Farage: there are no giants or geniuses here. They are beatable with patience and discipline. It would be worse than ironic if, in their efforts to de-liberalise the west, they made their opponents more liberal than they ever were before, than is sensible, than is electable.

当然，浴缸谬论的终极问题在于荒谬性，而非让选民厌恶。它本身就是错误的。但逻辑可以先搁置一边。政治更重要。特朗普、勒庞以及英国右翼分子奈杰尔•法拉奇(Nigel Farage)都不是伟人或者天才。只要有一点耐心和纪律，是可以打败他们的。如果他们消除西方自由主义的努力让对手在自由主义道路上走得更远，以至于超出明智和可以当选的程度，那就比讽刺意味更糟糕了。

janan.ganesh@ft.com

本文作者邮箱：janan.ganesh@ft.com