2000 AND TWO.(anniversary of 2000 election, and its ramifications on democracy)

Seven weeks ago, the first anniversary of the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks was commemorated with appropriately solemn ceremony. November 7th marks another anniversary, the second, of another American injury.

In terms of national and international upheaval, geopolitical importance, and, above all, human suffering, there is, of course, no comparison between the events of September 11, 2001, and those accompanying the Presidential election of 2000. No evil conspiracy planned the latter; no one died on account of it; no children's dreams are haunted by it. Yet there is no doubt that American democracy suffered a grievous wound. September 11th presented a challenge to America's leaders, and by and large, especially in the early months, they rose to it. The challenge posed by November 7th, however, has never been met.

The most obvious aspect of that challenge is that for the first time since the nineteenth century the United States is governed by a President who, as a candidate, was rejected at the polls. "The Longest Night: Polemics and Perspectives on Election 2000" (California), a just published collection of essays by some two dozen distinguished scholars of law and history, includes several contributions from foreign observers. One of them, Shlomo Avineri, of Jerusalem's Hebrew University, notes sharply, "Certainly there is no other democratic society in which an executive president can be elected if he receives fewer popular votes than his major contender." But, as he points out, this possibility persists for good historical reasons, notably the patchwork way in which modern democratic norms were gradually and informally grafted onto the Constitution's eighteenth-century contrivances. In Avineri's words, "The democratization of the American system happened incrementally, not through revolution or rupture; new wine was poured into old vessels." He adds, "This nonviolent incrementalism is clearly praiseworthy; yet in Florida in 2000 it exacted its price."

It sure did. The victory of a popular-vote loser in the Electoral College, the leakiest old vessel of all, would have created a ticklish dilemma even if it had happened cleanly. It did not happen cleanly. Florida was an unremitting travesty, right down to the awarding of the state and the Presidency to George W. Bush by the five most conservative Justices of the Supreme Court, in a decision so shoddily reasoned and so at odds with their normal jurisprudential inclinations that the only plausible explanation for it is that they were simply imposing their political preference. How one feels about this depends at least partly on one's own political preference. But not even the most complacent Bush supporters could deny that their man was taking office under unusual circumstances.

The new President's response to all this was to ignore it. He made no attempt to broaden his government or to mitigate its program of putting money in the pockets of the rich, rolling back environmental ...