Each democracy is unhappy in its own way

The Wall Street Journal's Daniel Henninger argues (subs. req'd; alt. free link) that US politics is converging towards the Spanish (and more generally the European) model: in his vision, highly polarised, opposition for the sake of opposition, with a basic level of functionality concealing deep-rooted unresolved issues that shadow the system. Unfortunately this potentially interesting general thesis quickly collapses under the weight of his actual agenda -- the claim that it's always the fault of the left when politics gets like this.

In Spain, allegedly, it's that the Socialists keep revisiting the causes of the civil war. And in the US, it's that the left is still upset about Bush vs Gore 2000, an imbroglio for which he partly blames the 4 Supreme Court justices who wanted a recount in Florida --

The American political system, by historical tradition flexible and accommodative, was unable to turn off the lawyers and forced nine unelected judges to settle it. So they did, splitting 5-4. In retrospect, a more judicious Supreme Court minority would have seen the danger in that vote (as Nixon did in 1960) and made the inevitable result unanimous to avoid recrimination. A pacto. Instead, we got recrimination.

From that day, American politics has been a pitched battle, waged mainly by Democrats against the "illegitimate" Republican presidency ... To lose as the Democrats did in 2000 was, and remains, unendurable (as likely it would have for Republicans if they'd lost 5 to 4).

Thus the left is not mad, he says, because of any fundamental injustice -- only because the Supreme Court minority acted as a promoter of divisiveness by not going along with the majority decision. This would be the majority decision so shakily founded that they could only settle it by giving themselves the luxury of not setting a precedent, a decision that made a complete hash of US election law in which the constitution was clear that the states choose delegates to the electoral college -- except when those delegates might vote against George W. Bush.

In fact we think he's right that the US political system does have critical problems now. But instead of seeking a European analogy, how about an explanation closer to home. It's part of the perverse genius of George W. Bush that has methodically exposed the latent problems with the US Constitution: the aforementioned electoral college which means that the country has no true nationally-elected officials, the excessive powers of the presidency, the complete unhinging of the executive from the legislature, and the increasing legal fetish that attaches to choices of words ("keep and bear arms"?) written over 200 years ago. Apparently drawing attention to these problems makes one part of "the left."