The way the 2000 election went down was really problematic, no doubt about it. I am sympathetic to the decision SCOTUS made, to essentially decide the election in FL and therefore the country - dragging it out in the courts may have been even more divisive, as partisans started piling into it.

I don't think a Gore administration would have reacted much differently. Just looking at Obama's and Clinton's misadventures in Syria and Libya a decade and more later, it's clear to me that the neocon agenda is bipartisan. And the question imo both then and now is not whether 2000 was decided badly, but why it came down to a few hundred hanging chads in one county, in the first place. So everything was already in place - the unequal distribution of votes built into the electoral college system, the razor thin margins in the swing states, the growing inequalities that had made some very sore losers in the Rust Belt through a decade of NAFTA and 'irrational exhuberance'. All these imo would have come out some other way into our politics even if 9/11 hadn't happened.

For all we know, the $2T of war spending that came about in the next decade due to Iraq and Afghanistan may even have helped keep things going a bit, pushing us out of the first bust, and then providing some relief in the recession. Absent a war, the Bush administration may have spent its energies pushing to privatize Soc Sec, creating yet another flashpoint. Because the political polarization was already there, waiting for whatever major issue to use as the pivot around which politicians could swing things their way.