People around the world rang in New Year’s Day 2000 with hopes that the new millennium would bring a better world, one with less violence and poverty. For their part, the ruling classes proclaimed that social convulsions and revolutions were a thing of the past and the next period would be one of triumphant capitalism.

The World Socialist Web Site took note of the ever-widening social and economic divisions within capitalism in the United States and internationally. We stressed that global financial instability and intensifying conflicts between rival nation-states presaged a new period of wars and political upheavals.

In the course of the year, this assessment would be borne out, first by the collapse of the dot-com bubble on the stock market, then by the greatest political crisis in more than a century in the United States—the 2000 presidential election. The outcome of the presidential election was in doubt for more than a month after the votes were cast. Finally, the Supreme Court intervened to halt vote-counting in Florida and award the state’s electoral votes, and with it the White House, to George W. Bush.

While maintaining intransigent opposition to both corporate-controlled US parties, the Democrats and Republicans, the WSWS explained that the bitter struggle in Florida was of decisive importance to the working class because of what it revealed about the break with democratic norms by all sections of the US ruling class.

From the beginning of the US presidential election campaign, the WSWS focused attention on the growth of social inequality and the vast gulf between working people and the politicians of both capitalist parties.

Vice President Al Gore, the Democratic nominee, refused to make any appeal to popular hostility to the right-wing conspiracy that had led to the impeachment of Clinton, going so far as to choose Clinton’s most public critic in the Democratic Party, Senator Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut, as his running mate.

While rival factions of the corporate elite lined up behind Gore or his Republican counterpart, Texas Governor George W. Bush, son of the former president, workers were alienated and largely excluded from the process. Only when it became clear he would otherwise lose to Bush, who was posturing as a moderate and “compassionate conservative,” did Gore attempt a last-minute populist appeal, stemming his decline in the polls and giving him a narrow victory in the popular vote. An important analysis of the Gore campaign placed it within the framework of the historical crisis of American liberalism.

The Socialist Equality Party published a three-part statement on the WSWS, October 3-5, which analyzed the political issues confronting the working class. The SEP called on workers to oppose both candidates, as well as the Green Party candidate Ralph Nader, and join the struggle to build an independent working class party based on a socialist program.

This statement analyzed concretely the mounting class contradictions in American society, declaring, “The most striking characteristic of the 2000 US election campaign is the apparent discovery by the Democratic and Republican parties, much to their own surprise, that the vast majority of the American population consists of working people who have gained little if any benefit from the stock market boom of the past decade.”

One month before the eruption of the post-election crisis, the SEP statement drew this prescient conclusion: “A campaign that has already had many twists and turns may have further shocks in store. But whatever the outcome, the great issue is this: neither of the bourgeois candidates or parties has any solution to the deepening social crisis.”

On election night, November 7, it was becoming clear that Gore was leading in the popular vote and was the likely winner in the Electoral College, assuming his lead in Florida held up. The Bush campaign moved decisively, in collaboration with the Republican-controlled state government in Florida, headed by the candidate’s brother, Jeb, and right-wing Fox News, where Bush’s cousin, John Ellis, headed the election desk and initiated the claim that Bush had won Florida.

This began five weeks of unprecedented political turmoil, during which it was unclear who would emerge as the head of state in the most powerful imperialist nation. Based on its previous analysis of the Clinton impeachment crisis and the right-wing election campaigns of both the Democrats and Republicans, the WSWS was prepared to analyze and explain the events as they unfolded.

An editorial board statement posted on November 9, “The 2000 US election results: the constitutional crisis deepens,” set the tone:

The extraordinary events of the past 24 hours have fundamentally and irrevocably altered political life in the United States.For the first time in more than 125 years, a national election has produced a disputed result. Not only is there a split between the popular and electoral vote, but the stench of ballot fraud is wafting from the Florida voting precincts upon which Governor George W. Bush’s victory depends.



From the beginning, the WSWS paid very close attention to the suspicious nature of the results in the state of Florida. WSWS reporters went to Florida and published on-the-spot reports and interviews with working people as the crisis unfolded. It became clear that the Republicans had engaged in a campaign of voter intimidation and fraud, including the setting up of checkpoints and roadblocks in predominantly black areas on Election Day. During the crucial Florida recount, they attempted to upset the vote counting through physical violence.

One extraordinary event followed another. While recounts continued in several counties, Florida’s Republican secretary of state, Katherine Harris, moved to certify Bush the winner of the election, only to be blocked by the Florida State Supreme Court, which found, quite correctly, that this action violated the most basic right in a democracy—the right to vote and have every vote counted.

The Republican-controlled state legislature discussed overturning the popular vote entirely and awarding the state’s electoral votes to Bush by legislative fiat, encouraged by suggestions by right-wing justices on the US Supreme Court that “there is no right of suffrage” for the American people in a presidential election and that states might act as they saw fit.

The outcome was ultimately to be decided in the notorious Supreme Court decision in Bush v. Gore, in which a 5-4 majority ordered an end to the Florida recount and then declared that its ruling could not be used as a precedent for any future action. The court had concocted a legal theory for the sole purpose of achieving its desired result of installing Bush in the White House.

Only a few days before the Supreme Court ruling, WSWS International Editorial Board Chairman David North gave an address to a meeting in Sydney, Australia reviewing the far-reaching significance of what was taking place in the United States:

What the decision of this court will reveal is how far the American ruling class is prepared to go in breaking with traditional bourgeois-democratic and constitutional norms. Is it prepared to sanction ballot fraud and the suppression of votes and install in the White House a candidate who has attained that office through blatantly illegal and anti-democratic methods? A substantial section of the bourgeoisie, and perhaps even a majority of the US Supreme Court, is prepared to do just that. There has been a dramatic erosion of support within the ruling elites for the traditional forms of bourgeois democracy in the United States.



After the court’s ruling, a WSWS Editorial Board statement, “The Supreme Court overrides US voters: a ruling that will live in infamy,” explained that the decision to allow Florida to certify the results of the election without including recounted results represented a “fundamental and irrevocable break with democracy and the traditional forms of bourgeois legality.”

With the discrediting of the high court, every institution of the bourgeois state has fallen into disrepute… The crisis of the 2000 election marks a new point of departure in American life, and, indeed, in world affairs. Social relations and political conditions will never return to what they were before November 7.

We condemned the capitulation of Gore and the Democrats, along with the liberal establishment as a whole, to the Supreme Court’s intervention. In, “A distinction to be noted—George W. Bush: president-elect or president-select,” Barry Grey wrote: