Nothing to Sneer At

Bath, England

IN THE MISFORTUNE of our best friends, we always find something not displeasing, said La Rochefoucauld. He would have seen that sour truth about human nature borne out again, in his country and mine, over the past month, as we have contemplated the misfortunes of our American friends.

From this side of the Atlantic, the most obnoxious thing about the American election has been not the legal and constitutional difficulties in Florida, but the contemptuous reaction in Europe. The London columnist Auberon Waugh wrote last week that we must not "gloat over America's present problems." Assuming charitably that his advice was not proffered in ironical spirit, it hasn't been heeded. There has been a glut of gloating, a shower of Schadenfreude. As a critical admirer of the United States who has no difficulty in descrying real failings in American politics and society, I have grimaced like the simplest American patriot at the insulting tone of this coverage.

Part of the reaction in Europe stems from sheer anger and incomprehension at the likely result of the election. Too many Europeans are plainly incredulous that someone so far from their own beau ideal of the statesman as George W. Bush might win. One writer in Le Monde -- that epicenter of Parisian intellectual disdain for all things American -- thinks a Bush presidency will signify the "cretinisation" of American politics. Other pundits have expressed dismay that the non-interventionist Colin Powell might soon be directing American foreign policy, or at Condoleezza Rice's suggestion that American troops will be withdrawn from the Balkans. Behind that dismay lurks something else: a dim awareness that Europe has had its defense tab picked up by America for 50 years past, and that this particular free lunch may be coming to an end.

And yet, leaving aside policies and policymakers, just what is so contemptible about American political practices? And who are we to sneer? The United States was the world's first great exercise in popular government, and any detached European observer, let alone the proverbial man from Mars, would have to say that the truly astonishing thing about "democracy in America" since Tocqueville's time has been its success, not its failures.

Even the lurid shenanigans of this year's election have been, as they say, a problem of success. Although I was in America for two weeks in October (and came home with merely a hunch, which required no particular insight or genius, that Bush would win narrowly), I didn't cover polling day from Olympia to Tallahassee.

But when the Los Angeles Times says that it was the cleanest election in American history, I am quite prepared to believe it. In a genuine democracy where the votes are counted by the million, a close-run election will always be problematic. No such difficulties ever arose, after all, in the quaintly and pleonastically named people's democracies, where 99.9 percent reliably voted for the ruling party, with no recounts needed and no quarrels over dimpled chads.

Many Englishmen instinctively believe that American politics are both infantile and corrupt. One should never underestimate lingering English prejudice against the United States, however much we like your dollars. It touches both the old anti-American left and the even older High Tory right. These critics find the very idea of the Electoral College risible. It's true, in my view, that America has sometimes been tardy in mending its constitutional arrangements when they plainly are broke. The Constitution is the greatest political work of man, but not inerrant.

But who, I repeat, are Europeans to sneer at dodgy practices -- or the "unfairness" of a candidate's winning the election without winning a majority of the popular vote? Representative government took centuries to evolve in England, and until quite recently politics here were flagrantly corrupt -- see Hogarth's splendid engravings of a parliamentary election, or read the Eatanswill election chapter in The Pickwick Papers. The House of Commons elected in 1841 was known affectionately as "the bought parliament." Well into the 20th century, there were often interminable recounts at the polls, and attempts, sometimes successful, to unseat MPs on petition.

As to absolute fairness, every country where I have covered elections has a political culture that is unfair in one way or another. In Ireland, an electoral system known as the single transferrable vote makes it difficult for any party to win a parliamentary majority, while smaller parties sell themselves to the highest bidder. In Israel, a pure form of proportional representation means that no one party ever has a majority and forming a stable government is painfully difficult (ask Ehud Barak). Worse still is the perverse effect by which very small parties have a stranglehold on power and dictate terms against the wishes of the majority.

And in Britain? On his first visit here after Tony Blair won a landslide victory in 1997, Bill Clinton said with a cheeky grin that he had come to learn, not lecture. He would love to have a legislative majority of 179, he told us. I bet he would. Any political leader might envy Blair's feat of winning 63 percent of parliamentary seats with 43 percent of the popular vote.

At least Blair took a plurality of votes as well as seats. In the 1951 general election, the Labour party won 13,948,605 votes to the Conservatives' 13,717,538, but thanks to the vagaries of the electoral system, the Tories won a majority of seats (and went on to govern for 13 years). In the first of two elections in 1974, it was the other way around. The Tories got 229,663 more votes than Labour, yet Labour "won" the election and formed a government even without a parliamentary majority.

But the eccentricities of different electoral systems are not my point. What might have been a thoughtful if dry discussion of electoral arrangements, and a recognition that the Americans -- for all the anger steaming out of partisans on all sides -- haven't been handling their election badly, we here have chosen to snigger. Of course, it may be that we are uneasily aware of owing some sort of debt to the Yanks over the course of the 20th century. But then, as a saying older than La Rochefoucauld's has it, no good deed goes unpunished.

Geoffrey Wheatcroft is an English journalist. His last book, The Controversy of Zion, won a National Jewish Book Award.