George W. Bush may well win a tax program that most voters rejected in the 2000 election. His $1.6 trillion in cuts would favor the richest 1 percent. Public opinion polls confirm that most Americans would rather see the money go for social investments.

    Our system is ignoring what most Americans want, because of multiple political failures. The most immediate one is the Democrats' failure to function as a cohesive opposition party. A united Democratic caucus might effectively oppose the Bush program by offering a smaller tax cut targeted to working families. Better yet, it might contrast the Bush tax cuts with popular public outlays. Most Democrats support elements of both approaches--but display just enough disunity to give Bush something close to his original plan, with only modest concessions.  The more serious systemic failure, of course, is that Bush is in the White House at all. As news organizations complete their Florida recounts, we may well find out that Al Gore in fact won Florida handily--and, with it, the presidency.

    What then? If this were a vibrant democracy, there would be relentless protests against the premise that Bush has a mandate to do anything more than be a caretaker. Democrats would confirm only centrists.  Presidential budgets would be dead on arrival, just as Bill Clinton's were in the Gingrich days. There would be no polite courtesy meetings and no feeble bipartisanship based on what the people supposedly expect. In truth, half the people didn't even vote. And the majority who did vote, for Gore or Nader, are far angrier than most Democratic politicians are.

    Bush's seizure of the presidency reflects a huge mechanical failure. At the most visible level, our election machinery fails to record votes accurately. In at least 20 states, the margin of error in ballot counting was greater than the winning candidate's margin of victory.

    But mechanical glitches are just the beginning. There is grievous discrimination of race and class in the way our system encourages or deters voting, and an even more basic problem with how we allow voters to register preferences. Together with the dominance of money, these flaws add up to a grave indictment of America as a functioning democracy.

    This special double issue of The American Prospect, made possible by the generosity of the Carnegie Corporation of New York, considers the condition of democracy in America. Burt Neuborne's overview addresses cures for the multiple defects in our democratic process. Lani Guinier, Miles Rapoport, and John Judis examine the challenge of building a pro-democracy movement, with special emphasis on the role of minorities and coalition politics. And Adam Shatz, in a profile of Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom, shows how the right has frustrated efforts to expand the franchise, often in the name of equality.

    At numerous moments in the history of democracy, the people have literally poured into the streets to prevent elites from reversing the popular will. This occurred most recently in Belgrade, when loyalists to Vojislav Kostunica mobilized to keep Slobodan Milosevic from stealing the Serbian election. In Florida a lot of angry voters were poised to demonstrate, but Gore's campaign headquarters told them to turn it off. So the only notable demonstrators were Republicans there to harass vote counters--and they were congressional aides flown in by Majority Whip Tom DeLay.

In November a bitter joke had it that Yugoslavia was offering to send election monitors to Florida. More aptly, the Serbs could teach us something about pro-democracy demonstrations. The partisan opposition in Congress will begin to rally, I suspect, only when popular opinion demands it.

This article was published in The American Prospect on March 12, 2001.