Late Restoration Politics in America
[Published as "Democrat, Republican or-- Ghibelline?"]

by Coleman Kitchin

In 1282 the Sicilians in Palermo rose up against their French overlords. As the uprising spread across the island kingdom, men were pulled from castles and churches and made to pronounce "chickpeas," or "ciciri." It's a Sicilian word the French accent cannot pronounce, and those so identified were massacred.

I often wonder if G.W. Bush's mild country drawl is a fake accent. It has just the intonation I've heard an Ivy League grad take on when trying to sound folksy, or I myself might have used to keep the furiously anti-collegiate storekeepers of my town from drowning me in contempt. I also wonder how much racism is bubbling up from the underlying moral calculus each side is using to justify its own attempts to shade the present election recount its way. A particularly bleak battle point has been a racially tinged charge about proper pronunciation of the word "electoral," this from C-SPAN. Meanwhile the more official of the Republican activists have been busy disrupting meetings in Dade County and banging on the glass as county workers attempt to count over 600,000 votes. The official Republican observers joined the fray and marched around the corridors of the building, pursuing in full-throated roar a hapless Democrat holding a sample ballot. With these folks publicly representing the party, you can imagine the kinds of things being whispered into the phones live on C-SPAN.

In the Florida vote tabulation, a few salient factors stand out: 1. The very lousy Votamatic-type machines cannot count the same stack of ballots the same way twice, as more and more loose, legitimately voted chad fly off. And pillows of chad can build up under the names of popular candidates, preventing a clean punch. 2. Counting on foreign or overseas military postmarks was not a good idea. 3. The courts have been unwilling to set definitive standards.

In the first few days after the election, the posturing of the Democrats and Republicans seemed interchangeable: if the initial tally had gone the other way, each would be using the other's arguments. What was traditional was that the Democrats wanted higher turnout, that is, more counting, and the Republicans less. The legal arguments however were purely non-ideological, especially with the GOP arguing against states' rights. The maneuvers on the ground were even more cynical, and several assumptions remained politely unmentioned. Any good Democrat is outraged that the other side, the "party of the rich," outspends it by vast amounts, with a telegenic Teletubby at the head of the ticket no less. And any loyal Republican is sure that the "party of the people" has armies of uneducated dolts herded into polls staffed by winking party hacks on election day. The party of the rich wants to use its campaign funds to save the republic from mob rule, from bread and circuses, and from affluent liberals too comfortable to be responsible stewards of their own wealth. The party of the people knows that if voting were mandatory, they would win in a landslide. Absolutely none of this has been argued openly in the post-election fracas. The closest we've gotten is the occasional mention by the Democrats that nationally Al Gore won the popular vote. The American reverence for the Constitution and fair play seems to preclude them from more forceful claims, though there is some indication that the Republicans were prepared for more bitter rhetoric had the electoral college tables been turned.

Poet Laureate Stanley Kunitz says that, unlike older nations, our mythic heritage is truncated at the root, arising all at once in the 18th century from heroic couplets and English church hymns. The threatened Republican move to the legislatures, Florida and U.S., is founded on just such an 18th century myopia. (Innovations since then have included the secret ballot.) It's unclear how the U.S. Supreme Court will balance the scales this time, but certainly on a personal level that notorious constitutional history buff (but not C-SPAN fan) William Rehnquist must be relishing a millennial turn that included presiding in robes over a presidential impeachment trial in the Senate, and may include some as yet unknown further screeching of the less well-oiled joints of the faithful old parchment, Articles I through VII.

Yet as all the lawyers, courtiers, bloviaters and divinatory speculators convene on the great national stage of television, we seem to be observing a hoarier old tradition of power politics: a medieval royal succession dispute. Then too an entrenched, even dynastic, elite would pull every technical trick to argue its rights to the throne, while cynically manipulating public opinion (on holier pretexts) and forging overlapping alliances. As the murderous popular uprising in Sicily unfolded, the rest of Italy was riven over the party politics of Guelf and Ghibelline, parties whose differences had been reduced to loyalty to one foreign king over another, tilted by the momentary allegiance of the established church. Our danger is not Gore or Bush winning, but our culture descending into an image-soaked apathy, from which cynical and rich politicians can emerge with no clear political message, no distinct politics, and no distinction. The Sicilians' next rulers were as bad as the previous.