With George W. Bush finally named as President-elect, we can look back
and
see what we have learned from this historic election. Among them, we have
discovered we are much more a republic than a democracy.
There has been much talk about "the will of the people," "one person, one
vote" and "all votes count the same." "Will of the people" is a vague,
metaphysical concept harking back to Rousseau and the French Revolution and
taken to tragic extremes in 20th century fascism, with an elite purporting
to divine the will of the people and then governing accordingly.
In our election this year, half the American people chose not to vote. Do
they count as part of that will, as pollsters suggest? Or does a minority of
those voting who elected one candidate count as the will of the people?
Our Founding Fathers established a system to insure that all votes do not
count the same and that elected officials govern rather than popular
sentiment. Our U.S. Senate and Electoral College are intentionally
undemocratic institutions.
We now know from the endless vote recounting in Florida, probably true also
of the rest of the nation, that vote counting, whether by machine or by
hand, is a very imperfect art which bears little resemblance to "one person,
one vote." Many Americans, moreover, felt they were "disenfranchised" simply
because they were unable to follow perfectly clear voting instructions.
Another vague and amorphous term that some journalists and politicians like
is "legitimacy," as in, since Bush did not win the popular vote and only
narrowly won the electoral vote, he lacks "legitimacy."
Presidential politics is not about "uniting the nation" or "legitimacy." It
is about winning and losing. It is about who has power and who does not.
A president, no matter how slim or even questionable his margin of victory,
still makes foreign policy, is commander in chief of the military, vetoes
bills, runs the executive branch and commands a mighty pulpit.
Having popular support certainly helps in dealing with Congress but is not
essential. Our poll-crazed society rockets up and down in its daily
sentiments and provides very little guidance to government. Strong and
effective leaders shape the will of the people rather than vice versa.
As for a divided government or nation, we have had a White House occupied by
one party and a Congress by another for the last six years with impressive
economic consequences for the nation. We have also had a large bloc of
Americans who bitterly despise the current president, without any adverse
consequences. "Uniting the nation" is another airy notion of minimal
importance.
Congress has fluctuating coalitions on different issues that enable it to
function because the Founding Fathers designed our government to be
inefficient, clunky and confusingÜbut survivable. The American government
doesn't care a fig about "legitimacy" or "the will of the people." This is
especially true of our least democratic institution, the Supreme Court.
A final irony of 2000 is that the party which has depended so heavily on
courts rather than legislaturesÜin civil rights, abortion rights, consumer
rightsÜhas now been mortally stricken by the highest of them.