As this is being written, it appears the nation is headed towards another photo-finish election. Perhaps the electorate will break solidly in one direction or another in the final 36 hours, but the mere prospect of Florida X 50 should cause us to think carefully about what’s going on in our political system.

Perhaps the most common complaint from both sides of the political aisle this year is how nasty our politics has become. As I’ve said before, that’s a bit of an illusion. Politics has always been pretty nasty, because it’s a zero-sum game: your gain is my loss. In an economic market, by contrast, your gain – a profit – is also my gain – the purchase of a product I find useful and/or pleasing.

But there may indeed be factors that are eating away at the veneer of civility that voters claim they like to see in their politicians. In a series of thoughtful articles in the National Journal in recent weeks, attorney and political analyst Stuart Taylor Jr., a middle-of-the-road columnist, puts his finger on several possibilities: an increasingly shrill press, the tendency of the political redistribution process to create safe congressional seats for incumbents, and Roe v. Wade.

That, of course, was the 1973 decision by a sharply divided Supreme Court that voided all 50 states’ abortion laws. And did so, moreover, on the basis of extremely shaky legal reasoning that discovered, in the “shadows and penumbras” of the Constitution, a right that had gone undetected by the courts for nearly 175 years. As Taylor notes, even the nation’s leading feminist lawyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, now a member of the Supreme Court herself, wrote in 1985 that the decision “ventured too far.”

Whatever you think of abortion, the effect of Roe v. Wade was to signal that the Supreme Court had become a rogue branch of government. It felt itself empowered to settle even the most basic questions of American life without reference to the other branches of government, the states, or even its own settled understandings of the Constitution. Almost overnight, an essentially lawless world – a world in which nine unelected men and women say what the law ought to be – was created.

This sharply raised the stakes in national elections. When we pick a president or a Senator now, after all, we are not just picking somebody who will serve for four or six years. We are picking people who will pick people who will rule for a generation to come.

No wonder there is a sense of desperation and nastiness to our politics. This is amplified by a press that itself is reverting to the European style of serving as organs of a political party, or at least a certain political philosophy. If you’re liberal, watch Dan Rather and read the New York Times; if you’re conservative, watch Brit Hume and read the Wall Street Journal editorial page. The Times’s own ombudsman, Daniel Okrent, earlier this year penned a column in which he acknowledged that the Times news coverage had become badly biased – particularly on social issues such as abortion.

The high court added to the polarization, argues Stuart Taylor, with its interventions in state politics – most spectacularly in the Florida decision in 2000, but most insidiously with a series of voting-rights rulings that focused too heavily on one-man, one-vote principles at the expense of traditional political boundaries.

The intent was to reduce gerrymandering, but the practical effect was to invite a decennial redistricting conspiracy among Democrats and Republicans to create safe seats for themselves. Politics now is all about getting out the base by appealing to the extremes rather than reaching out to the moderate swing voter.

What to do? Mr. Taylor confesses he can think of no quick fixes. But surely one fix is to insist on judges who understand that their job is not to produce Utopian solutions for every problem. That idea will be promptly denounced by the Utopians as evidence of extremist intent. But if the courts won’t accept that life isn’t always fair or perfect, and that messy compromise is often the best we can do, the descent into political nastiness – and worse – is likely to continue.

Mr. Bray is a Detroit News columnist.