Al Gore and Joe Lieberman know they won Florida. Can they prove this? Of course not. So how can they know this? They just know. They know, because more people wanted to vote for them, even if somehow they didn’t. And how do they know this? Because of some ballots that were double-punched and other ballots that weren’t punched at all. Did these ballots tell them what their voters wanted? Of course not. Then how do they know what these people intended? They know. And because they do, they are free to do whatever is required to fulfill these “intentions.” Republicans meanwhile are apoplectic at these bouts of mind reading, at the moving deadlines which somehow aren’t deadlines, at the elusive non-standards, at the dimples that do, or don’t, count.
Is the apoplexy irrational? Is this all just a scorched-earth power struggle in Florida, with both sides arguing whatever is convenient and looks likely to produce victory? No. It turns out that our two parties are deeply divided about first principles, oddly enough. Al Gore and George W. Bush have ended up fighting to vindicate the deepest beliefs of their respective parties. Democrats believe in intentions and feelings — and to hell with the facts and the evidence. Republicans believe in the rules.
This critical difference runs wide and deep. And it pops up in all sorts of issues that divide the two parties. The Democrats are the party of the dimpled chad, from which one tries to intuit an unknown voter’s intention. And they are also the party that has given us the theory of hate crimes, in which prosecutions turn not on the usual rules of evidence but on what the criminal meant by his crime. The interpretation of “intent” is the crucial thing, and Democrats are not lacking in confidence that such interpretations are fairly simple. A party-line vote on a ballot that seems to show no vote for president? The voter must have felt weak; and, oh yes, that looks like a dent in the chad. A cross-racial crime? One must assume it is racist; there is no such thing as color-blind savagery. In the hate-crime context, one is punished not just for what one does, but for what one is thinking while doing it. In the context of voting, the evidence of the ballot matters less than the canvasser’s guess as to what was intended. Subjective intent trumps objective reality.
Democrats are the party of malleable standards, in the interests of what they think of as just. Republicans are the party of bright lines and hard and fast rules, in the interests of what they think of as just. Democrats are the party that ratcheted down the physical-fitness standards of the armed forces, so that the women would look just as qualified, and then pretended that nothing had changed. They are the party that ratcheted down academic standards in the name of fairness, instead of doing the harder work of helping students meet the original standards. They are the party that is trying to codify what is ethereal, seeking legal remedies for things that cannot be measured.
The parties’ opposing ideas of how justice is to be achieved show up in their purest form with the issue of race. Democrats want courts and well-intended politicians to intervene to engineer outcomes they think are fair, through quotas and preferences and set-asides. Republicans want to create a set of rules that apply equally to everyone, and let the chips fall where they may. Republicans believe in specific remedies for proven examples of prejudice, but think prejudice can no longer simply be assumed. When Republicans see unequal results, they do not automatically conclude that these are due to injustice. Democrats reason than an outcome they disapprove of must be an injustice that calls for a remedy, judicial or otherwise.
Conservatives know that life is unfair, that some people start life under terrible burdens, and that a country that prides itself on equal opportunity should take special steps to correct this. They think a decent society in the name of fairness will do all sorts of things to help the disadvantaged — from scholarships to outreach and mentoring programs — but that the law must be neutral. They want to help people meet rigorous standards, but insist that the standards be rigorous. They do not believe laws should be calibrated to account for individual instances of unfairness, as there is no legal system conceivable that can begin to account for all the myriad forms of unfairness life metes out. Yet the liberals do keep on trying. In 1997, the Clinton Justice Department created guidelines to preserve racial set-asides in government contracts. Government agencies were tasked with determining “the level of minority contracting that would exist in a given industry absent the effects of discrimination.” Who is capable of such feats of imagination? Precisely the same kind of official who is able to stare at the crease on a Florida ballot and understand, absent the effects of the Votomatic machine, what the voter had in mind.
Democrats claim to know they lost Florida because the “uncounted” ballots in several precincts deprived them of thousands of votes. The Bush people, however, have claims of their own. They “know” that the TV networks’ premature prediction of a Gore victory in Florida, which gave the sense of a Gore landslide, depressed Republican turnout in the Panhandle, where the polls were still open. They “know” that it cost them untold hundreds of thousands of votes in the critical midwestern battlegrounds, some of them lost by a very small margin, and in the West, where it was then 5 o’clock.
But, of course, they don’t really know any of these things. None of it is provable. The networks’ early call of Florida for Gore, which was later rescinded, probably depressed the Bush vote in Florida and hurt him elsewhere. But the later call for Bush of Florida, and of the whole country, which was also rescinded, gave Bush the aura of legitimacy which he has still not relinquished and cast Gore as the whiny sore loser. Both calls were unfair, but they made a rough balance, which is the sort of result conservatives are prepared to live with. The final vote on Election Day, after all, was made up of millions of small contingencies and glitches that weighed back and forth on each side of the ledger — bad ballots, lost ballots, lazy voters, dopey voters, mistakes, and misfortune. There is no way to remove error from human endeavor. Life is chaotic, which is why we need rules to channel it, to give order to happenstance, and keep things from reeling out of control.
This is why we have and need rules for elections, which are standard and neutral and fixed ahead of time. Elections happen on one day, not 12, and not 90. Polls are open during specified hours, and if you are late, it’s unfortunate. You get to vote once, not over and over. All votes are counted by one standard, not some once and some four times, with selected votes being subject to interpretation. All voters are equal, and all ballots are equal, or else there is chaos. When rules are chaotic — when deadlines are stretched and at last become meaningless, when votes are read differently, when standards have vanished — then chaos is everywhere. Chaos is everywhere in Florida now, and Republicans have an aversion to this that is not simply partisan.
The Republicans who trooped down to observe the recounting and bang drums for George W. are of course partisan, and of course they are boosting their candidate. But beyond this, they are boosting system and order and law. This is what accounts for their exceptional unity, and the intensity that they bring to this case. The mundane political divisions among them are the same as ever: They are pro-life and pro-choice and profoundly ambivalent; they pushed impeachment, or were uneasy about it; they are libertarians, or proponents of national greatness; they like Teddy Roosevelt or they like Calvin Coolidge; but in the end they are pro-law and pro-rules and pro-order. Social conservatives like John Engler and Frank Keating, social moderates like Kay Bailey Hutchison, social liberals like George Pataki and Christie Todd Whitman are all bug-eyed with horror at the creative accounting, the on-the-fly changing of standards, the malleable nature of fact. This is the litmus test that truly unites them. They are the party of law and objective reality, against the party of intent and feeling.
What the Democrats may not have sensed until recently is that chaos cannot be just partly released. Once they try to bend laws, they cannot have just a few bent for their benefit without having others bent back against them. They can’t have their lawyers drag things out and obstruct things without having others try to obstruct their desires. They can’t first play for time, and then demand that things be done in a hurry. And they can’t pick at one dangling thread of an error without having the whole larger fabric unravel, casting everything, even their own special claims and assertions, into confusion and doubt. Caught now in the uncontrolled mess they created, the Democrats might ponder what could happen should the Gore ethic be vindicated. Do they really want elections that are infinitely reviewable, subject to challenge on every slight glitch, every hurt feeling, every bright sense of outrage? Do they think life can be fair without law?
Noemie Emery, a frequent contributor, wrote last week’s cover story, “Our Aaron Burr.
