Still the Best ... Mark Steyn on the Constitution

STILL THE BEST
from The Sunday Telegraph, December 17th 2000

Throughout these past gruelling six weeks, the only thing more irritating than the Broward County Canvassing Board has been the reaction to it from Britain and Europe. Those dumb Yanks: they want to run the world, and they can't even run a rusting Votamatic in West Palm Beach!

But just because America has finally settled on a president-elect is no reason for foreigners to stop jeering. Questioning George W Bush's legitimacy because Al Gore won the popular vote, the French prime minister, Lionel Jospin, said he hoped that Americans would "draw the lessons in time for the next election".

What lessons would those be, M Jospin? Scrap the Electoral College? Move to direct presidential election? Tear up the Constitution and rewrite it every generation, as the French do? Where are you up to now? Fifth Republic? Sixth Republic? Geez, get me a Gore lawyer: I need a manual recount of French constitutions.

At The Guardian, they're taking things even worse. Pinochet in '73 got better press than Dubya: "In, But Illegitimate", said the leader. "Democracy Was Poisoned To Give Bush The Presidency", declared Hugo Young; while Jonathan Freedland asked: "Can A System Which Allows The Winner To Lose Go Unreformed?"

A couple of years back, Freedland wrote a book called Bring Home The Revolution, arguing that our great tragedy is that "the British Revolution" took place in the colonies and not in London, and that Britain had much to learn from the American system.

I thoroughly agreed with the thesis, kicked myself for not coming up with such an inspired idea myself and have spent many hours pointing out its merits to fellow conservatives. "This Freedland book," Boris Johnson, the editor of The Spectator, said to me, "haven't read it, but I expect it's total bollocks, isn't it?" Not at all, I said. Full of good stuff.

Yet, on Friday, there was Freedland trashing the very system that he spent hundreds of pages rhapsodising. "That 224-year old document has been strained to breaking point," he wrote. "A text written for an age of horse carriages and quill pens had to cope with the demands of satellite TV and 24-hour news cycles. It was revealed to be creaking at the edges."

Actually, the creaking document is only 213 years old. But, even so, no other G7 country runs its democracy according to a document from the quill pen era. On the Continent, you're hard pressed to find anything pre-Magic Marker. The US Constitution is not only older than the French, German, Italian, Belgian, Spanish and Greek constitutions, it's older than all of them put together.

Americans' misguided attachment to this yellowing parchment may explain why, for the past century, they’ve lagged so far behind in technological innovation, economic performance, cultural influence, etc. Maybe if America's governors all went on a retreat somewhere - Nice, say - and held private sessions behind closed doors and then informed their respective electorates what they'd decided to inflict on them, things would work out a lot better.

Most of the Western world is divided into faux monarchies such as Britain, where the Crown's vast powers are wielded by the Prime Minister, or faux republics such as France, where the president is an absolute monarch in all but name. It's not surprising then that, confronted by a genuine republic, Europeans should be baffled. But the Euro-Left's rage at Bush's victory is puzzling: The Guardian is demanding reform of the Electoral College because, nationally, Gore won the popular vote, but this result was "distorted" by the federal system of voting by state. This is the same crowd who spent the years of the Thatcher Terror telling us that the Scots did not regard the Tories as a legitimate government because, while they may have have won the UK's popular vote, they lost in Scotland.

Here's a useful exercise: get a copy of America's Federalist Papers and compare it with an opus called Canada's Founding Debates (honestly, it's a real book). Two groups of dead white guys in frock coats on the North American continent, but what a difference: the Canucks were dutiful, well-meaning British public servants of little originality or foresight, and Canada lives with the consequences today; the Americans were, by any measure, exceptional.

There has never been a moment in the past six weeks when the constitutional road map has not been clearly laid out, from the state-certified results to the Electoral College to Congress to the swimsuit round. Tomorrow, when the college meets, there may be yet another surprise: perhaps some Bush elector will weaken and vote for Gore, even though no major-candidate elector has switched to his principal opponent since a Jefferson man defected to John Adams in 1796. But that's the point: the rules that worked in 1796 work today. The framework that the Founding Fathers devised to unite a baker's dozen of small homogeneous colonies proved strong enough to expand across a continent and halfway round the globe to Hawaii.

According to The Guardian, America is "scarred and angry" and "even more alienated and cynical" and its Congress is "as acrimoniously split as the electorate and the courts". It didn't seem that way at the mall the other day, but then it's hard for folks to look scarred, angry, alienated and cynical when they're sipping shakes and whistling “Winter Wonderland”. What the Guardian means by "acrimoniously split" is that the Republicans and Democrats both bagged 48-49 per cent apiece, the Senate and the House reflect those numbers pretty accurately, and the new president will have to take that political reality into account, as do New Hampshire's Democratic governor and Republican legislature.

On the other hand, in Britain, if you squeak more than 40 per cent of the vote, you pile up an enormous majority and you're free to do what you want - abolish one house of the legislature, set up toytown parliaments in three-quarters of the realm, sign away your nation's sovereignty in a Gauloise-smoke-filled room on the Cote d'Azur.

Whose institutions would you say were more vulnerable? The US Constitution withstood Al Gore's assault far better than Britain's has withstood Tony Blair's. As for the centralised superstate being cooked up by the EU, if that hangs together as long as a swinging chad on a Dade County punch card, I'll be very surprised.

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