(单词翻译:单击)
Liberalism is the view that individuals have rights and beliefs, and that politics involves safeguarding rights and making compromises when beliefs conflict.
自由主义认为，个体拥有权利和信仰，而政治需要在信仰冲突时捍卫权利和做出妥协。
It has existed for only a few centuries and is by some measures the most successful idea in history.
自由主义仅存在了几个世纪，但按照某些标准，自由主义是历史上最成功的观点。
Just look where people want to live: the United States, the European Union, Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom, all liberal places that people will risk their life to reach.
纵观人们想要生活的地方：美国、欧盟、加拿大、澳大利亚和英国，这些都是人们愿意冒着生命危险抵达的自由之地。
But Garsten said liberalism had some of his best students hopping into rafts and paddling in other intellectual directions.
但加斯滕说，自由主义让他的一些最优秀的学生跳上木筏，在其他的知识方向上划桨。
He said they had been “captured” by the belief “that to be morally serious, one faces a choice.”
他表示，这些学生被这样一种信念“俘获”了，即，“要审慎对待道德，就必须面临一个选择”。
The choice, he said, is not between liberalism and illiberalism.
他说，这个选择不是在自由主义和非自由主义之间做出的。
Liberalism had already lost. Its greatest champion, the United States, had run aground after pointless wars, terminal decadence, and bureaucratic takeover by activists and special interests.
自由主义已经败下阵来。自由主义最大的捍卫者美国，在经历了毫无意义的战争、逐步的堕落，以及激进分子和特殊利益集团对官僚机构的接管之后，已经搁浅了这个信念。
Garsten said his best students were choosing between the protofascism of Nietzsche and a neomedieval, quasi-theocratic version of Catholicism opposed to Enlightenment liberalism.
加斯滕称他最优秀的学生正在尼采的原始法西斯主义和新中世纪的、准神权版本的、反对启蒙运动自由主义的天主教义之间做选择。
These students considered liberal democracy an exhausted joke, and they hinted—and sometimes did more than hint—that the past few centuries had been a mistake, and that the mistake should now be corrected.
这些学生认为自由民主是一个枯竭的笑话，他们暗示——有时甚至不止是暗示——过去几个世纪是一个错误，而现在应该纠正这个错误。
Some at the conference countered that these illiberals might have just not done their homework.
这次会议上的一些人反驳说，这些非自由主义者可能只是没有做足功课。
“Your students need to become better readers,” said Diana J. Schaub, a political-science professor at Loyola University Maryland.
“你的学生需要好好读书，”马里兰州洛约拉大学政治学教授戴安娜·肖布说。
But Garsten’s illiberal students were good readers.
但加斯滕的那些非自由主义者的学生阅读量却很丰富。
Their deficiencies lay elsewhere, possibly everywhere but there.
他们的缺陷在其他地方，可能在除了阅读量以外的每个地方。
Many of the participants knew that Garsten was talking about the threat posed by Bronze Age Pervert, though his name was uttered with great reluctance.
许多参会者都知道加斯滕说的是Bronze Age Pervert所带来的威胁，尽管极不情愿说出他的名字。
