Foremost among the many things to be said about the November
elections is that they decisively confirmed what we have often
observed in these pages: that the United States is now a nation
in the grip of a cultural revolution. It goes without saying that
liberals have regularly denied this fact; it pains us to observe
that some happy, ostrich conservatives, too, have denied
the significance of the transformations that have taken place
in the social, intellectual, and moral fabric of America over the
last forty years. But the November elections have vividly
reminded us that, sooner or later, a cultural revolution has
real political fallout.

As we write, almost a week after the election,
the results of the presidential contest are still
in abeyance. It is entirely possible that when you read
this the results will still be in abeyance. At the moment, the
entire race is said to turn on a few votes in Palm Beach County,
Florida, a heavily Democratic redoubt. The Gore campaign did not
like the original results there and demanded a recount. They did
not like
the results of the recount, either, and so demanded a
hand count of some 19,000 disputed ballots. It is worth
remembering that in 1960, when Richard Nixon narrowly lost to
John F. Kennedy, and that again in 1976, when Gerald Ford narrowly
lost to Jimmy Carter, the losers refused to demand a recount
for fear of the political chaos it would bring to the country.
It is also worth saying something about the now infamous “butterfly ballot,”
retroactively declared to be confusing by Al Gore’s campaign
chairman William Daley. This ballot was not only approved by Democrats in
Palm Beach County, but is also the same ballot used in Mr. Daley’s
native Cook County, Illinois. (Remember Cook County? It was there
that Mr. Daley’s father, Mayor Richard J. Daley of Chicago, played such a
notorious role in “getting out the vote” for JFK in 1960.) No
matter. Now Palm Beach County officials are demanding a
hand recount of the entire county, some 425,000 ballots.
Inspectors have not only been counting votes, mind you, they have
also been scrutinizing ballots for “voter intent”:
determining that this half-punched ballot should count while that
half-punched ballot should not. (As Stalin remarked,
“it’s not who’s casting the vote,
it’s who’s counting it.”)
Other close states—
there are several—may also be subject to
recounts. No one knows how long such a process would take.

What we do know, however, is that Election 2000 is shaping up to
be one of
the most fateful in the annals of American
history. Not only is it probably the closest race ever, it
has also been among the most bitter. The almost even division of
the electorate reveals a deep and troubling fissure in our
society. Along the fault-line of that fissure stand two
increasingly different conceptions of American society:
of who we are and what we should be. The difference, as the
political commentator David Frum noted in Canada’s National
Post, is “not class. . . . It’s values. One-quarter of American
voters said that the most important thing to consider when voting
for a candidate was whether he was honest. They voted 80 percent
for Bush. One-eighth of the electorate said that the most
important thing was whether he ‘cares.’ They voted 83 percent
for Gore.”

The statistics that Mr. Frum marshals reveal the fundamental
nature of the “values gulf” that divides contemporary America.
Bush beat Gore among married people with children by a margin of
56–41; he beat
Gore among those who attend church weekly by
57–40. Traditionally, middle-class voters have been thought to
vote disproportionately for Democratic candidates. But in this
election, Mr. Frum notes,

voters who described themselves as “middle class”
preferred Bush 49–48. Democrats are the party of the highly
educated: people with postgraduate education preferred Gore to
Bush 52–44. They are the party of working women (58–39) and of
those who do not have children in the home (50–46).

Democrats are the party of the secular: People who “never” attend
church backed Gore 61–32. They are the party of the unarmed. Half
of Americans own guns and half do not. The half who own them
voted for Bush 61–36. The half who do not voted for Gore 58–39.
Above all, they are the party of permissive sex. Seventy percent
of Americans who believe that abortion should be legal under all
circumstances backed Gore, as did 70 percent of self-described gays,
lesbians and bisexuals.

No matter who emerges as president, the outcome of this
election, as Mr. Frum observes, is “as troubling as it is
unprecedented.” For not only does it reveal America to be a
nation divided against itself about moral values, but it also
highlights an equally troubling rift about fundamental political
principles. As we write, it appears that George W. Bush might win
the electoral vote while losing the popular vote to Al Gore by a
slim margin. No sooner did that possibility arise than prominent
liberals across the country—including the new senator-elect from
New York, Hillary Rodham Clinton—called for the elimination of
the Electoral College and the institution of election by pure popular
vote. “We are a very different country than we were two-hundred
years ago,” she said. “I believe strongly that in a democracy, we
should respect the will of the people and to me, that means it’s
time to do away with the Electoral College and move to the
popular election of our president.”

The First Lady is hardly the first person
to call for the
abolition of the Electoral College. Proponents of extreme, as
distinct from representative, democracy have always been against
it. Over the course of our history, there have been no fewer than
seven-hundred proposals in Congress to reform or abolish the
Electoral College. It is our good fortune that this important
guarantor of freedom has so far survived. Proposals to abolish
the Electoral College and turn the election of the president over
to a simple popular vote is a signal instance of what James
Madison warned about in his famous discussion of faction in The
Federalist. Distinguishing between “pure democracy” and a
republic, Madison pointed out that in a pure democracy there is
nothing to check
or counterbalance “the superior force of an
interested and overbearing majority.”

Hence it is that such democracies have ever been spectacles of
turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with
personal security or the rights of property; and have in general
been as short in their lives
as they have been violent in their
deaths. Theoretic politicians, who have patronized this species
of government, have erroneously supposed that by reducing mankind
to a perfect equality in their political rights, they would, at
the same time, be perfectly equalized and assimilated in their
possessions, their opinions, and their passions.

We live in an age rife with the sort of “theoretic
politicians” Madison conjured up. Now more than ever we need to
cherish and protect those mediating institutions that disarm
faction and protect us from
the tyranny of the majority. As
Alexander Hamilton pointed out later in The Federalist,
entrusting the election of the president to a small body of
electors would “afford as little opportunity as possible to
tumult and disorder.” Tumult and disorder, Hamilton continues,
were

not least to be dreaded in the election of a
magistrate, who was to have so important an agency in the
administration of the government as the President of the United
States. But the precautions which have been so happily concerted
in the system under consideration, promise an effectual security
against this mischief. The choice of SEVERAL, to form an
intermediate body of electors, will be much less apt to convulse
the community with any extraordinary or violent movements, than
the choice of ONE who was himself to be the final object of the
public wishes. And as the electors, chosen in each State, are to
assemble and vote in the State in which they are chosen, this
detached and divided situation will expose them much less to
heats and ferments, which might be communicated from them to the
people, than if they were all to be convened at one time, in one
place.

The authors of The Federalist and the other founding fathers
painstakingly contrived a system of government that combined the
advantages of democracy—equality, majority rule—with effective
protections against its deficiencies—faction, “mobocracy,”
political paralysis. They did this through a careful architecture
of effective checks and balances. Over the last several decades we have
seen the power of many of those checks and balances falter. Above
all, perhaps, we have seen the power of the judiciary grow in
relation to the other branches of government. As more and more
elements of our political life are handed over to the courts for
disposition, the will of the people is more and more frustrated
by a cadre of elites bearing writs and backed up by teams of
lawyers. It is an ominous sign, we think, that the presidential
contest in Florida should already have become enmeshed in a web of
law suits. As of this writing, the Gore campaign has filed at
least eight law suits to challenge the results of the election, while
the Bush campaign has asked for an injunction against the
hand recount of ballots in Palm Beach County.

By the time you read this, the next American president may well
have been chosen. Whether it can also be said that he was duly
elected is a matter that, as of this writing, is impossible to
predict. The Long March through the institutions of American
life, which began as a protest movement by radicals in the 1960s,
has now established itself in the mainstream of American life.
The values of that march have insinuated themselves into our
schools, our media, our family life, our churches, our foundations and
business world, and our cultural institutions. It seems
increasingly likely that they have even penetrated the electoral
process. In Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville,
warning against the tyranny of the majority, wrote that
“justice . . . forms the boundary of each people’s right.”
What he meant was that majority rule has its measure in an ideal
of justice that transcends the majority.
Respecting that measure is what rescues us from democratic
despotism. Tocqueville wrote in the 1830s—close to that two-hundred years that
Hillary Clinton so cavalierly dismissed. It remains to be seen
whether we still have ears to hear his admonition and the will to
act with due discretion upon its message.