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Andrew Rice has written an engaging book about a wild year in recent American history. But don’t be misled by the title, which creates a big hole that Rice never fills. “The Year That Broke America” is certainly a defensible title for a book about 2000, but shouldn’t an author who makes such a declaration also explain and defend it? What does Rice mean by breaking America? And how did the events of 2000 do that? He never interrupts his brisk narrative to explain.

This is not a quarrel with Rice’s implied conclusion. Two of the events he describes really did break America: the disputed 2000 presidential election and the 9/11 al-Qaeda attacks. Rice colorfully relates how al-Qaeda operatives attended Florida flying schools in 2000 to learn how to pilot passenger jets. The actual attack, as we all know, came nine months after 2000 ended.

Rice leaves to readers the task of connecting his anecdotal stories to the breaking of America. As close as this book gets to this challenging subject is a single, long sentence in what publishers call the flap copy — a blurb on the book jacket written to appeal to browsers in bookstores. This sentence does recount, curtly, some enduring consequences of the events of 2000 (and 2001). But no sentences in the book itself directly address what broke, how and why.

The “immigration crisis” of Rice’s windy subtitle — “An Immigration Crisis, a Terrorist Conspiracy, the Summer of Survivor, a Ridiculous Fake Billionaire, a Fight for Florida, and the 537 Votes that Changed Everything” — is the case of Elián González, the 5-year-old Cuban boy who survived the sinking of a boat carrying him, his mother and 12 others from Cuba to, they hoped, Florida. Rice gives us a long account of how Janet Reno, the attorney general in 2000 and a Floridian herself, struggled with the González case, eventually returning the boy to his father in Cuba. This was not a country-breaking event.

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The “terrorist conspiracy” in the subtitle is al-Qaeda’s diabolically clever plan to attack America, which depended for its success on young Arabs from Germany learning to fly passenger jets. This they did, as Rice recounts, at flying schools in Florida. The 9/11 attacks, and the American wars they set off, surely did help to break the country.

CBS’s creation of “Survivor” and the many similar reality shows that followed, on the other hand, continued the long-term depredation of our popular culture but hardly did permanent new damage to the United States.

And the “ridiculous fake billionaire,” the guy with the bizarre yellow hair and permanent suntan that came out of a makeup kit, similarly did little harm — at least in 2000. Rice recounts Donald Trump’s largely forgotten run that year for the presidential nomination of H. Ross Perot’s Reform Party. Trump’s campaign flopped. But after he embraced the racist, xenophobic platform of the man who beat him in 2000, Pat Buchanan, Trump did win the White House 16 years later and did a lot of damage.

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It was the 9/11 attacks and the dubious outcome of the presidential election in Florida that make 2000 and 2001 years of importance. The chaos of the election, compounded by an unprecedented, radical decision by the Supreme Court that took the resolution of the messy Florida vote count out of the hands of state officials, undermined the legitimacy of our political system. It hasn’t yet recovered.

That disputed election put George W. Bush, the clear loser of the national popular vote, in the White House. His presidency turned out to be enormously consequential, though its legitimacy will forever be debatable. Bush’s two administrations made America a torturer and a warmonger. His wars destabilized a big part of the world; we still don’t know all their consequences. His administration’s indifference to climate change, perhaps the most important public policy issue of our time, dug America and the world deeper into a hole from which we have not emerged.

And by putting two conservative jurists on the Supreme Court, John Roberts and Samuel Alito, Bush laid the groundwork for what has become the most conservative court in nearly a century, one likely to make profound changes in American society, though five of its nine justices were appointed by presidents who got fewer votes than their opponents. All of this could happen because Bush supposedly beat Democrat Al Gore by 537 votes in Florida in November 2000.

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But that tabulation was wrong, as Rice reminds us. It reflected the fact that, according to an investigation by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, at least 7,000 Black voters’ ballots were disqualified arbitrarily in a year when Black Floridians voted overwhelmingly for Gore.

Bush’s margin of victory also depended on the incompetence of Theresa LePore, supervisor of elections in Florida’s Palm Beach County, who designed a perversely incomprehensible ballot that apparently caused thousands of Jewish voters in Palm Beach to cast their votes for the Reform Party candidate, Buchanan, often accused of antisemitism. It depended on the fact that a recount in Miami-Dade County — which would have, if completed, shown Gore ahead of Bush when the Supreme Court intervened in the case — was suspended after a protest by Bush supporters outside the premises where the recount was conducted. As Rice writes, a riot of Miami Cubans and well-dressed Bush supporters largely from Washington scared the clerks doing the count, so they abandoned it and went home.

And there were many more irregularities that Rice records in his compelling narrative of the long count in Florida that followed the closest contest in the state’s history. The most dramatic was the intervention by the U.S. Supreme Court in a lawsuit brought by Gore’s campaign to get more votes counted in Democratic counties. The Florida Supreme Court was sympathetic to Gore’s argument, but when Bush appealed it to the U.S. Supreme Court, the Republican justices who made up its majority issued a controversial decision that made Bush the president.

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Even the justices who reached this decision seemed embarrassed by the way they did it. Their final opinion included extraordinary language announcing that nothing in their decision should be used as a precedent. This led numerous legal scholars to denounce the ruling as one of the worst in American history.

Who actually won a majority of the votes cast in Florida in 2000 will never be known, but the circumstantial and actual evidence strongly suggests that most Floridians who voted that year went to the polls planning to vote for Gore. The botched count and the Supreme Court’s intervention changed the attitudes of many Americans who had never previously questioned the fairness of U.S. elections. The confidence lost in 2000 has never been restored.

What if Gore had won the election? Such tantalizing questions can never be answered in specific terms, but it feels safe to say that a President Al Gore would have created a different 21st-century America than the one we got.

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It’s unlikely, for example, that his reaction to the 9/11 attacks would have been to launch two ambitious wars in far-off places. Nor is it easy to imagine Gore authorizing waterboarding and other harsh, illegal treatment for al-Qaeda suspects in American custody, or the creation of an extrajudicial prison for the suspects at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Perhaps the most fundamental difference between Bush and Gore (assuming that he, like Bush, would have won reelection in 2004, as most incumbents do) would have been his choices for the Supreme Court. Bush had two appointments in his second term. Roberts and Alito were both more conservative than all but one of their new colleagues, Antonin Scalia. Three more staunch conservatives appointed by Trump have created the most conservative Supreme Court in a century. It is likely to change America in important respects in the years ahead, beginning with an imminent decision that will probably make abortion much harder to obtain in many states.

Gore, a staunch liberal, would have appointed very different justices and created a very different Supreme Court. One of the leading candidates for a Gore court, Walter Dellinger of North Carolina, died last month. Dellinger, a Duke law professor who served in senior Justice Department positions in the Clinton administration, was a favorite of Gore’s and his influential brother-in-law, Frank Hunger.

Dellinger was a beloved and admired figure among liberal legal scholars and politicians for decades. He helped organize the victorious lobbying campaign against the Supreme Court nomination of Robert Bork in 1987. He argued two dozen cases before the court, where he was much admired.

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What if Gore, not Bush, had picked the justices in the early 21st century? We might not have the most conservative court in 100 years but the most liberal court in all American history. Such thoughts come to mind reading “The Year That Broke America.”

Robert G. Kaiser is a former managing editor of The Washington Post.

The Year That Broke America

An Immigration Crisis, a Terrorist Conspiracy, the Summer of Survivor, a Ridiculous Fake Billionaire, a Fight for Florida, and the 537 Votes That Changed Everything

By Andrew Rice

Harper. 534 pp. $28.99

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