Face it, it’s a divided country, and has been long before Election Day 2000 made that extra-obvious. Political campaigns are filled with sweeping statements about what "the American people" want, but there ain’t no such animal. There are lots of different people who want lots of different things, and often vehemently dislike some of the alternatives. As columnist Lew Rockwell notes, folks in Utah voted two-to-one for Bush, yet if Gore wins they’ll be forced to live under a tax and regulatory regime headed by a man they overwhelmingly oppose. Meanwhile, 2,300 miles away, Massachusetts voters backed Gore almost as solidly — and if Bush wins they’ll feel the same way Utahans would if the results were reversed.

What do you do in a situation like this? A big part of the answer lies in the Constitution.

I’m not talking about the Electoral College, though I wholeheartedly support it. I’m talking about the fact that in the system the Founders designed, the president — and the rest of the federal government, for that matter — simply wouldn’t have much of an impact on our lives.

The Founders understood that genuine self-government could only exist close to home. No concern loomed larger to the delegates at the Constitutional Convention than the threat of centralized, consolidated power. For that reason, the Constitution did something much more important than dividing up powers between the legislative, executive and judicial branches of the federal government. It clearly declared that the central government can do only those few things the Constitution specifically authorizes (things like foreign policy and settling disputes over interstate commerce) — and nothing else.

The 9th and (especially) 10th Amendments — significantly, the ones that concluded the Bill of Rights — put an exclamation point on this. The 10th states that all powers not explicitly granted to the federal government or denied to the states belonged either to the states or "the people." If "the people" sounds like a vague phrase, that’s because it was meant to be. The idea was that citizens within the states would work out for themselves what the state government could do, what local governments could do, and (most important) what no level of government could do. The federal government had no say about any of it.

You might have noticed that we don’t live under this system anymore. If we did, Washington couldn’t seize a third of our income, forcibly transfer money from those who’ve earned it to those who haven’t, make us kick in to Ponzi schemes like Social Security, tell high school or elementary students whether they might pray, or penalize private businesspeople if their hiring and promotions don’t meet race, gender and (maybe soon) "sexual orientation" quotas. In short, Washington couldn’t do most of what it does today.

What happened to the Constitution is a long tale for another time. Yet no one ever officially repealed the document. If enough of us were to learn what it actually says and demand that the federal government follow the Founders’ rules, things could get very interesting.

In a constitutional America, Utah could pretty much run things its own way and Massachusetts could run things its own way. People would care less about who was in the White House or Congress than about who was in their governor’s mansion or state legislature. They could choose for themselves whether to lobby for their political preferences in their own states or move to another they liked better.

The possibilities are fascinating, especially for conservatives and Christians, who would likely fare much better under such a system. Since federal courts and bureaucrats would have no jurisdiction over state matters, they couldn’t forbid states from protecting unborn children from abortion. They couldn't ban religious expression. They couldn't declare pornography and nude dancing to be protected "free speech."

Of course some states might pick up the old, odious policies currently enforced by the federal government, and a handful might even go further leftward than federal courts have (so far) allowed. But that’s the chance you take with self-government, and it’s a much better one than we have now. At the least, conservatives would have places to go where politicians couldn’t plunder their paychecks and judges couldn’t strike down their laws. And the very existence of that alternative could expand conservative influence in other places. Liberals would find it challenging to maintain pricey, family-eroding welfare programs when, with most taxes levied at the state level, taxpayers could dramatically reduce their burden simply by moving away.

Indeed, the best aspect of a constitutional system might be that it would destroy liberalism’s sense of inevitability — the notion that there’s no other (legitimate) game in town. Constitutionalism provides the opportunity for states and communities to disprove some hardy but groundless liberal myths: That only government welfare programs are preventing starvation, that censoring pornography inevitably leads to censoring great literature, that outlawing abortion will cause a wave of women dying in "back alley" procedures. Once enough Americans see that states which adopt such policies don’t become sinkholes of poverty or theocratic tyrannies, they may consider adopting similar policies themselves.

And that, I suspect, is just what liberals fear. They may claim to represent the "mainstream" while their opponents are "extremists," but they don’t really believe it. They’re haunted by the thought that if people have the choice of fleeing liberalism, they’ll take it — at least in large enough numbers to make liberalism unsustainable. (What if the only people who paid for the welfare state were the ones who actually believed in it? Terrifying thought!)

But I for one relish the thought of a restored Constitution — not because I expect universal political victory, much less a national cultural renaissance, but simply because I’d like a chance to try self-government again.

One thing’s for sure: If we did things the way the Founders intended, we wouldn’t worry that a few counties in Florida would determine the political fate of a nation. Nice thought, huh? Maybe we should start thinking about how to make it happen — but that’s another column.