Knowing what we know about how the GOP and its backers operate, I don’t think that Al Gore winning in 2000 would have ultimately averted the situation we find ourselves in.
The timeline between 2001 and 2021, would have unfolded differently but the forces that got us here were already in place by the year 2000 and they would have continued to grind down civil rights and democracy.
The three big things that would be different in a scenario where Gore wins the 2000 election would be as follows:
1.) no war in Iraq in 2003. The Iraq war was definitely contingent on a second Bush presidency. That said, we’d still have the same military industrial complex, a sizable chunk of the Democratic Party obsessed with being “strong” on the world stage, and a national press corp that would try to goad the President and Congress into war.
I’d imagine that a Gore presidency would lean heavily on sanctions through out the middle east, in Central Asia, and in Russia. I could imagine Russia giving sophisticated weapon systems to Iran and/or Syria and eventually a US warship in the Mediterranean or the Persian Gulf gets sunk or even just fired upon and the US would end up an even bigger quagmire in Iran or Syria.
2.) the financial crisis of 2008 would have been less severe and would have taken place later but it was inevitable. Not only is instability built into capitalism but the American system of pumping up real estate assets in lieu of social democracy combined with the repeal of G-S in 1999 and the bailouts of risky investments made by well-connected financial concerns, in the 1990’s, mean that a massive crash, driven by a real estate bubble was going to happen.
3.) At some point, the GOP would get a trifecta. Now, without voter suppression and with McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform being the law of the land, the GOP would know it would be unlikely to have a trifecta for long. So they’d make the most of it and repeal Campaign finance law legislatively, rather than judicially. They’d do the same to the voting rights act, especially pre-clearance.
Now, Mitch McConnell would need to deal with a liberal Supreme Court but we all know that faced with a 7-2 liberal court, he’d expand the court and we’d have 20-7 conservative court. We all know he’d do it.
Concentrated capital wielded by a political party with no compunctions about trampling legal norms, civil rights, and the health and happiness of its people, will inevitably win and impose minority rule. That base of concentrated capital must either be broken, or it will break all of us.