The Nineties: A Book

by Chuck Klosterman

Prior to election night, the race between Bush and Gore was a cosplay of how people thought about political culture in general: The candidates are different (but not really), the outcome matters (but not that much), and the winner will be either the affable guy we want to have a beer with or the uptight guy who seems to know what he’s talking about (and it will work either way, probably). At the time, polling suggested 40 percent of Democrats and Republicans had a “favorable and warm” opinion about members of the opposing party. It was easy to think about politics as something that could be argued over without much risk, because the final outcome would always be some version of a compromise. Government was contentious, but also secure; it was unpredictable, but the volatility always drifted toward equilibrium. If it was impossible to know who won the presidential election (which was the case), and if there was no national panic over the dispute (which there was not), and if a recount was possible (which it always is), it seemed senseless that the judicial branch would stop that recount from happening. And if the Supreme Court did stop a recount from happening, it was assumed the court’s explanations would be academic and contradictory and certainly not based on partisanship. Knowing who’s the president is a core component of American democracy. Had the Supreme Court’s reasoning emerged from some kind of shared constitutional interpretation, the vote would have been 9–0 or ...