Back to the civil rights barricades

Thus our current passion play. The issues are legal and technical, but the passions welling up are familiar, fierce, fundamental. We may be tired of the '60s, but they're not tired of us, because the collision of principles that took place then is still producing aftershocks.

For the left, the stakes are evident, or should be: Let the people decide. This slogan of Students for a Democratic Society was an abstraction, but in the background was knowledge -- knowledge of the terror and oppression that befell huge swaths of America when people were kept from deciding their political fate. What could be more fundamental for a democracy than the right to vote and to see one's vote count?

Defending idiotic electoral arrangements, smirking at subliterate Florida voters (the Weekly Standard's Matt Labash called the agitation about the Palm Beach ballot "the dance of the low-sloping foreheads"), the partisans of the right now reveal themselves to be the lovers of oligarchy we always feared they were. Like the John Birchers of yore, they are essentially insisting that this is a republic, not a democracy. Against this hauteur, the left clamors for the right to vote and the right for votes to be counted. Many pent-up passions collide now.

Long overdue. We had become rather casual about civic boilerplate, with roughly half the voting-age population apparently indifferent to the exercise of the franchise. But the issue of the franchise -- that it be universally available and authentically tallied -- is bedrock. Not so long ago, the country trembled because the civil rights movement properly recognized that the right to vote is a foundation of democratic self-government. This is not ancient history. Within the lifetime of the next president of the United States, people took their lives into their hands for trying to vote. In Florida alone, on Christmas night of 1951, Harry Moore, the head of the state NAACP, and his wife, leaders of a voter registration campaign in Jacksonville, were murdered, their house blown up by a bomb. These murders, along with others throughout the old Confederacy, were never solved.

Since Election Day, the NAACP has conducted lengthy hearings in Miami, mainly out of view of the press, collecting much testimony to the effect that African- and Haitian-Americans had their right to vote systematically infringed. Now the Justice Department is belatedly investigating. Newspaper after newspaper -- on Sunday, it was the Washington Post -- has shown ways in which the ballot problems that plagued Florida hurt minorities and the poor far more than the white and affluent. It's clear why the Bush campaign has resisted all efforts to count Florida votes more effectively: A computer model used by the Miami Herald shows that if the many well-documented ballot problems hadn't plagued the state on Election Day, Gore would have won by 23,000 votes.

And where Democrats defend the hitherto disenfranchised, Republicans stand up only for overseas soldiers, some of whose ballots without postmarks weren't counted. Invoking the military, the GOP makes it seem as if antiwar demonstrators were once again burning the American flag, all over Florida. Familiar battle lines are being drawn.

Although the 24/7 chat shows obscure it, we have returned to a core and classic political divide between right and left: the question of who decides. But politicians on both sides have largely booted it. For decades, political incumbents threw up obstacles in the way of reforming archaic voter registration laws and procedures. (What, me worry? I'm in office.) Much lip service was paid to the sanctity of the right to vote, while ignoring the declining number of voters who chose to exercise it. Institutions were indifferent. A motor-voter law passed -- finally signed by President Clinton after two vetoes by Bush père -- but enforcement lagged, most of all at the state and local level much beloved by GOP rhetoricians. This could be the election that confirms what many nonvoters say when asked why they don't vote: "My vote doesn't count." If it turns out the apathetic are right, and dutiful voters are wrong, look out, democracy.

If it takes seriously the battle cry of democracy, the left, in other words, has a chance to overcome the pettiness of recent years, the identity-group infighting, the Nader nihilism, and go to the heart of the matter, giving Rush Limbaugh and George Will something truly to worry about. The hand count is the perfect metaphor. The GOP is in the politically tough position of defending the rights of machines, not people, to count ballots; of arguing that the convenience of bureaucrats matters more than the rights of the people when setting election deadlines. But despite their entitlement, choosing our leaders is not their prerogative, no more than it was in 1776, or the 1960s.

Isn't it clear that the patriots are those who refuse to consign power to either machines or mobs of various descriptions -- the ones who smile through congressional lobbies, or the ones storming the Miami-Dade County Building? Isn't it clear that democracy is no idle piety -- that as a nation we are either committed to it or not?

Perhaps we tremble a bit now because we sense what is deeply at stake.

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