I don't think it too much an exaggeration to describe this past week as one of the wilder rides of our lifetimes. On Tuesday night I observed a seesaw battle between Bush and Gore, with one leading in the Electoral College, then the other, then back again. Florida, at first, had been acceded to Gore. Then, abruptly, at shortly after 9:30, it was pulled back into the dwindling group of undecided states. As the evening progressed, Bush and Gore continued to run neck and neck. I watched until 1 a.m. (by then I was nodding off repeatedly). Four states including Florida were still undecided, but Bush was ahead in the vote count there. If he won Florida, he would win the election; the state's 25 electoral votes would pull him over the line by one electoral vote.
Then the fun really started. Apparently, at around 2:20 a.m., Florida was given to Bush by Fox. (One lesson of this election is that the methods yielding these results are not an exact science!) A number of newspapers sent their first editions press shortly afterwards with screaming headlines declaring Bush the winner. I received one on my doorstep Wednesday morning. But sometime around 4 a.m., Florida was again designated undecided. And remained so. The newspapers all had to print new editions declaring the election on hold until the Florida vote could be recounted amidst allegations ranging from a confusing ballot to voter fraud. Eight lawsuits have so far been filed, and the Gore liberals are already threatening litigation if Bush is given Florida's 25 electoral votes. In my last article I predicted a crisis – the fourth major crisis in our history fitting a 70-plus year pattern going back to the Constitutional Convention of 1787. Is this its beginning? It is too soon to tell. Such pronouncements can only be made safely in hindsight. But the question is certainly an interesting one.
At the time of this writing (Friday morning) there is still no decision, and it clear that this thing is going to continue at least into next week. Life will go on as usual, of course. The battles waged by politicians do not much affect our workaday lives as much as they wish it did. But certain features of Election 2000 strike me as worthy of comment.
First, there was one thing we could all agree on. It was going to be close – so close, in fact, that third-party candidates could actually affect the outcome. In that last article which turned out to be (judging from my email) rather controversial, I was working under this assumption, which turned out to be right on target. But I get ahead of myself. Another thing we could all agree on was that despite the closeness of this race, we could all go to the polls – those that did – without worrying about being intimidated by lawless thugs or shot at from passing cars. There are a lot of places in the world where attempts at holding American-style elections have failed because their lawless elements could not be controlled.
Moreover, we now have a situation in which the official outcome is undecided on the third day after! While there have been some rather heated exchanges (including one between Gore and Bush following the former's refusal to concede the election), there has been no mayhem. No violence. No random shootings. No grabs at power by one candidate's backers or the other.
Can anyone imagine an outcome like this taking place anywhere outside the Western world without a rapid descent into chaos?
To what do we attribute these amazing results? I attribute them to what is left of our tradition of liberty, Constitutional government and the rule of law. Since arguably there isn't a whole lot left of this tradition after the past 50 years of attacks, this is a testimony to its tremendous resilience. It's very simple: traditions of liberty work. Traditions of slavery, statism and state-sponsored thuggery do not. Traditions of liberty help preserve the peace, even in a situation like this that is threatening to precipitate a crisis. Their absence ensures eventual mayhem and dictatorship at the hands of the first gang of thugs to seize the reins of power.
This tradition of liberty, its origins in the natural rights tradition as espoused by philosophers such as John Locke, is what we need to highlight. Not this or that candidate, or this or that political party (though some, obviously, are more mindful of our roots than others). We also need to highlight the deeper roots: a fundamentally moral citizenry whose common morality is rooted in Christianity. A number of philosophers of liberty have tried to find a different moral basis for the free society; in this writer's judgment, while their results are interesting and challenging, they don't succeed – typically because they get human nature wrong. The tradition of liberty as it was originally developed here was founded on a mistrust of human nature – particularly its tendencies toward egocentrism and shortsightedness, and the desire for power on the part of a possessed few. This is why we have a division of powers in the federal government, why certain powers were delegated to the branches of the federal government and others explicitly withheld from them, why the Framers instituted divided sovereignty; and why, finally, we ended up with a Bill of Rights, with certain unnamed rights "reserved to the states, or to the people."
The people who would destroy this tradition are the real kooks. This is the case whether they sit in tenured chairs in prestigious universities and harp about the oppressive nature of "Eurocentrism," or whether they sit, safely ensconced in the United Nations and scheme to set up a global empire.
Some have claimed that because Gore got slightly more popular votes (if it turns out that he did, once the dirt has settled) he should win the election, and that it should not be decided by the Electoral College. Typically, leftist professors from prestigious universities are now condemning the Electoral College as an anachronism, which strikes me right there as a good reason to support it. A better answer is surprisingly simple, and – hopefully! – familiar: the Framers did not create a direct democracy but a Constitutional republic. They did not trust the masses to set policy that would protect liberty. They realized that so-called majority rule is dangerous! Political philosophers of various stripes – who disagree vehemently on other matters – are in agreement on this basic point: majority rule tends to degenerate into mob rule and from there to anarchy and then totalitarianism. This was realized as far back as Plato, who criticized what we now call direct democracy in The Republic. Liberty and direct democracy should not be confused with one another.
So where do we go from here? We wait. And we observe. To rephrase a cliché, what the candidates do will speak louder than anything they say does. The Gore people are behaving predictably: arrogant and demanding, and unwilling to accept results that do not conform to what they believe they are entitled to. The protesters are out in force, over skewed ballot results that may reflect nothing more than an inability to read and think. Even a few racial opportunists have crawled out from under their rocks, alleging discrimination on what grounds I haven't a clue. The Bush people have threatened to call for recounts in other states where the vote was extremely close, such as Wisconsin and Iowa. We are looking at a situation that could escalate, and then drag on. If this drags on through the rest of November and into December, with the December 18 meeting of the Electoral College which actually elects the next president looming closer with no resolution in sight, then we have a problem. Some are going so far as to call for a new election. Our system was not designed to accommodate such an eventuality. We are entering uncharted waters here in any event. That's the stuff crises are made of.
Last week, I recommended biting the bullet and voting for Bush. Some who wrote to me noticed how reluctant my endorsement was, and their agreement was equally and understandably hesitant. They hoped I was wrong, but didn't think so. I hoped I was wrong, that one of the third parties would surprise me. There is a sense that this both was, and was not, an election where third parties made a difference. It was, in the sense that Nader clearly did receive votes that would have gone to Gore. If Bush is declared the victor, Nader may well have cost Gore the election. It's in the numbers. Nader's Green Party, ironically, is the complete antithesis of the tradition of liberty. Nader's efforts to be a "man of the people" as opposed to being puppets of the superelites (charges that can justifiably be leveled against Gore and Bush) have him leading a socialist movement whose programs, by involving central government, would empower the superelites all the more. This is a major reason why the calls for a new election that are coming from some quarters are so absolutely nuts. Sooner or later, Nader will figure all this out. When he does, he will endorse Gore, since Gore, too, is a socialist at heart. If that happens, Gore wins. I wrote what I wrote because I cannot imagine anything worse. (With the possible exception of Bill Clinton using this opportunity to seize a third term!)
It wasn't, in the sense that those parties most concerned about diminishing individual freedoms, political correctness, increasing immorality, unlimited immigration and its effects, etc., barely even registered in the exit polls. Assuming we can trust the figures at hand, Pat Buchanan received less than one percent of the popular vote; Harry Browne, less than that. Both came out ahead of "physicist" John Hagelin's TM high-fliers, for whatever that is worth. And this returns us to the basic theme of my article last week, which some rejected as a sell-out, telling me in no uncertain terms they were voting for Browne (in some cases it was Buchanan) – or, in one case, calling me a "coward." My purpose was not to tell anyone how to vote; I explicitly said, Exercise your own best judgment. My purpose was to highlight the trouble we are in because of the low educational level and overall complacency of the American masses, many of whom really believe, for example, that this is the greatest economy in the history of all Western civilization and that the Clinton Regime deserves credit for "prosperity" and "surpluses" that don't exist.
To illustrate this low educational level still more concretely, a reporter on Prime Time Live Thursday night asked a student down in the Florida county where controversy erupted what the Electoral College was. He answered with something like, "Isn't that some school where a lot of politicians go?"
Small wonder such people can't figure out one of today's ballots! Maybe our crisis is that we actually let such people vote!
Those of us who believe in individual liberties, morality, Constitutional government and the rule of law – all of which are now largely the province of third parties (and a few Republicans who haven't figured out that the Republican establishment stopped taking them seriously years ago) need to redouble our educational efforts. This includes supporting private educational efforts, cyber-education start-ups, and homeschooling ventures as much as we can. There isn't much else we can do. These people are the future of freedom, if it is to have a future in these United States.
We might begin by noting what I noted at the outset, which is that we have held an election, its outcome is uncertain days after the polls have officially closed, and the country has not degenerated into chaos. This exhibits the resilience of our tradition of liberty and Constitutional government. Its resilience is not unlimited, however. Our present predicament, and the response to it particularly by the Gore camp, is just part of the fruit of the last 50 years of abandonment, along with a perverse understanding of liberty as unlimited freedom to do anything one wants or to have anything one wants.
But then again, we cannot beat people over the head. It is clear to me that many people just plain couldn't care less.
Hmmm. Maybe a major crisis – something to remind the masses that there are things more important than football, celebrities, or their stock portfolios – might be good for us at this particular historical moment. It might even be useful to imagine ways in which those of us who want to live under Constitutional government can get free of our two worst enemies – those who want power over us and those who don't care one way or the other – by rejecting the Washington Empire and establishing our own governments, here in the South and elsewhere. But that's another column.
November 11, 2000
Steven Yates has a Ph.D in Philosophy and is the author of Civil Wrongs: What Went Wrong With Affirmative Action (San Francisco: ICS Press, 1994). A frequent contributor to LewRockwell.com and The Edgefield Journal, he lives and freelance writes in Columbia, South Carolina. He is at work on two manuscripts tentatively entitled The Paradox of Liberty and View from the Gallery.
