Tuesday Metaphysics Blogging

There's an interesting comments thread at Edge of the American West about the status of counterfactual questions in history. Historians are, by and large, loathe to deal with counterfactual issues, viewing the whole question as un-historical and un-professional. This is an interesting contrast with the world of philosophy, where it's very common to analyze counterfactual claims as inextricably bound up with claims about causation. To say that "Bush carried Florida because flawed ballot design in Palm Beach County caused many Gore supporters to inadvertently mark their ballots for Pat Buchanan" is to say that "if the Palm Beach County ballot had been designed differently, then Gore would have carried Florida."

Bigger questions, like what would have happened if Gore had become president, are, of course, not amenable to straightforward conclusions or definitive answers. But from where I sit, thinking about them is just a different way of thinking about how we've gotten to where we are today.

For instance, Jason Zengerle plausibly posits that had Joe Lieberman become Vice President in 2000, he never would have taken his current turn to the cranky right. That's probably correct. By the same token, Gore seems to have been pushed left by his own misfortunes. Indeed, the whole trajectory of U.S. politics would have taken a rather different turn, with most Democrats (and certainly the Gore-Lieberman administration) hewing to the centrist trend of the second Clinton administration rather than to the now-prevailing populism. I think we can assume that by 2004, the constituency for something like a Ralph Nader left-wing third party would have grown and either Gore would have been a successful president who decisively seized the center of the U.S. political spectrum to establish the Democrats as a dominant force, or else Gore might have been a failure who bled support from both the right (from people looking, for example, for action against Iraq or Iran) and the left (from opponents of the quagmire in Afghanistan and of neoliberal economic policy) paving the way for Jeb Bush to seize the White House.