A republic: if we can keep it

Abstract

THE AMERICAN POLITICAL system has thrown off some truly anomalous results in the past decade. We have gone from the historic 1994 election (a 50-seat swing in the House of Representatives bringing to power a Republican leadership promising Revolution), to an historic presidential impeachment and acquittal, to an historic 2000 election in which voters divided as evenly as imaginable in their preference for Democrats or Republicans. We are practically awash in the historic these days. Commentary in the weeks after the 2000 presidential election told us to watch events closely, since we would never see their like again in our lifetime. This may be true, but it may also miss the larger point. For those who found themselves disturbed one way or another by the outcome and aftermath of the contest between George W. Bush and Al Gore -- or as the Clinton impeachment drama unfolded, or as the Republican Congress tried to enact its Revolution -- the uniqueness of each event and the unlikelihood of a recurrence may be a false consolation. We may not run into these particular oddities again, but it may be that we are in the midst of something bigger -- a pattern of oddity. One can certainly try to explain away these and lesser instances of strange politics. For example: The fact that a former professional wrestler was elected governor of Minnesota -- and that one Sunday in 1999, the governor decided to make a triumphant return to the ring as referee in the World Wrestling Federation Summerslam -- well, it is certainly strange. But it is also perhaps colorful, in the great American tradition of eccentricity, and not especially noteworthy except in the context of that tradition. Anyway, Jesse Ventura won office with a narrow plurality in a three-way election. How significant is this? Or, for another example, the fact that voters in Missouri cast their ballots in the state's 2000 Senate race for a man who died three weeks earlier -- because the governor promised to appoint the man's widow to the seat -- is macabre, and perhaps uniquely so. But the widow's pension has a long pedigree in American politics, even if it is not exactly a noble one, and it hardly seems fair to single out this instance as especially noteworthy. Americans are sympathetic to the bereaved, after all. The late Mel Carnahan's election may have been no more than a particularly florid expression of that. And if it's a bit odd that the son of the forty-first president sought to become the forty-third in a race that ultimately hinged on the vote count in the state in which the candidate's brother served as governor -- even as the wife of the president of the United States was unprecedentedly winning election as a United States senator -- well, family has always been important in politics, no? But if instead of trying to explain away these possibly isolated instances of oddity, we take the sum of them -- then add to the mix a failed revolution, an impeachment and acquittal, and the closest and most litigated presidential election ever -- we could probably be forgiven for reaching the conclusion that this has been a distinctly volatile period in American politics. And we might want to ask if the country has run into anything like this before, and if so, whether any such previous periods have enough in common with our own to point to something that might help account for these strange days. ONE NEEDN'T SCRATCH at this volatility too deeply before some of its paradoxical qualities become apparent. For example, the American electorate split evenly in the 2000 election -- not only in the presidential vote, but also in that voters elected a House and Senate nearly equally split between the parties. But are voters themselves really so bitterly divided? Certainly, elite partisan and ideological opinion is. Those who associate the advance of their ideological interests with the progress of the Republican Party are at loggerheads with those who associate the advance of their ideological interests with the progress of the Democratic Party. …