Joe Biden had spent a year in the hope that America could go back to normal. But last Thursday, the first anniversary of the deadly insurrection at the US Capitol, the president finally recognised the full scale of the current threat to American democracy. “At this moment, we must decide,” Biden said in Statuary Hall, where rioters had swarmed a year earlier. “What kind of nation are we going to be? Are we going to be a nation that accepts political violence as a norm?”
乔·拜登花了一年的时间，希望美国能恢复正常。但上周四，在美国国会大厦致命暴动一周年之际，总统终于认识到当前美国民主面临的全面威胁。“此时此刻，我们必须做出决定。”拜登在雕像大厅说。一年前暴徒曾蜂拥至这里。“我们将成为一个什么样的国家？我们要成为一个接受政治暴力为常态的国家吗？”
It is a question that many inside America and beyond are now asking. In a deeply divided society, where even a national tragedy such as 6 January only pushed people further apart, there is fear that that day was the just the beginning of a wave of unrest, conflict and domestic terrorism. A slew of recent opinion polls show a significant minority of Americans at ease with the idea of violence against the government. Even talk of a second American civil war has gone from fringe fantasy to media mainstream.
这是美国内外许多人现在都在问的问题。在一个严重四分五裂的社会里，即使是1月6日这样的国家悲剧也只会让人们更加疏远，人们担心，那一天只是动荡、冲突和国内恐怖主义浪潮的开始。最近的一系列民意调查显示，相当可观的少数美国人安于对政府采取暴力的想法。甚至关于第二次美国内战的讨论也从边缘幻想变成了媒体的主流。
“Is a Civil War ahead?” was the blunt headline of a New Yorker magazine article this week. “Are We Really Facing a Second Civil War?” posed the headline of a column in Friday’s New York Times. Three retired US generals wrote a recent Washington Post column warning that another coup attempt “could lead to civil war”. The mere fact that such notions are entering the public domain shows the once unthinkable has become thinkable, even though some would argue it remains firmly improbable.
“即将爆发内战吗?”这是本周《纽约客》杂志一篇文章的直截了当的标题。“我们真的面临第二次内战吗？”登上了周五《纽约时报》一篇专栏的头条。三名退休的美国将军最近在《华盛顿邮报》 (Washington Post)的一篇专栏文章中警告称，另一次政变企图“可能导致内战”。这些观念正在进入公共领域，这一事实本身就表明，曾经不可想象的事情已经变得可以想象，尽管有些人会认为这仍然是绝对不可能的。
