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美联储主席格林斯潘回忆录——动荡年代：勇闯新世界-90:LATIN AMERICA  AND POPULISM-4

众愚政治，又称暴民政治（英语：ochlocracy；mobocracy；希腊语：ὀχλοκρατία；拉丁语：ochlocratia），

是指由暴民或群众主导（或通过对合法当局的威吓和愚弄而形成）的政治体制。

此词具贬义，用以来批评“多数主义”（Majoritarianism），词义类近拉丁语“mobile vulgus”（意为“善变的人群”）；

而光荣革命时期出现的“暴民”（英语：mob）一词，亦语源于该拉丁语词汇。

众愚政治在意义和用法上与现代的非正式术语“动员统治”同义，后者在18世纪作为口语新词出现。 需要留意的是“众愚政治”与批评传统民主的“多数人暴政”类似但并不相同，前者中的群众并不一定要是“多数人”。

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I would say the same about Huey Long of Louisiana, whose "share the wealth" rhetoric in the 1930s won him a governorship and a seat in the U.S. Senate. 

His eye was on the White House when he was assassinated in 1935. 

Populism, however, is clearly not in the genes. 

His son Russell, whom I knew quite well as the longtime chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, was a staunch supporter of capitalism and business tax breaks. 

There have, of course, been numerous episodes of populist policy, but not governments, throughout American history, 

from the free-silver movement of the late nineteenth century to much New Deal legislation. 

The most recent was Richard Nixon's ill-fated wage-price freeze of August 1971. But President Nixon's and earlier populist policy episodes were aberrations in the 

economic progress of the United States. 

Populist policies and governments in Latin America have been endemic and hence much more consequential. 

Economic populism is presumed to be an extension of democracy to economics. 

It is not. 

Small-d democrats support a form of government in which the majority rules on all public issues, but never in contravention of the basic rights of individuals. 

In such societies, the rights of minorities are protected from the majority. 

We have chosen to grant to the majority the right to determine all public policy issues that do not infringe on individual rights.* 

Democracy is a messy process, and it certainly is not always the most efficient form of government. 

Yet I agree with Winston Churchill's quip: 

"Democracy is the worst form of government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time." 

For better or worse, we have no choice but to assume that people acting freely will ultimately make the right decisions on how to govern themselves. 

If the majority makes the wrong decisions, there will be adverse consequences—even, in the end, civil chaos. 

Populism tied to individual rights is what most people call liberal democracy. 

"Economic populism" as used by most economists, however, refers implicitly to a democracy in which the "individual rights" qualifier is largely missing. 

*We may require supermajorities to implement certain laws. For example, in the United States, only a supermajority may override a presidential veto—but it was majorities in the assemblies of the thirteen original states that ratified the Constitution, choosing to be governed in that manner. 

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Unqualified democracy where 51 percent of the people can legally do away with the rights of the remaining 49 percent, leads to tyranny* 

The term then becomes pejorative when applied to the likes of Peron, who to most historians is largely responsible for Argentina's long economic decline after World War II. 

Argentina is still laboring under that legacy. 

The battle for capitalism is never won. 

Latin America demonstrates this perhaps more clearly than any other region. 

Income concentration and a landed gentry with roots in sixteenth-century Spanish and Portuguese conquests still foster deep and festering resentments. 

Capitalism in Latin America is still a struggle at best. 

*Many of our Founding Fathers feared that American majority rule without the first ten amendments to the Constitution of the United States of America—our Bill of Rights—would be tyranny. 

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(未完待续, To be contd)
 

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