Nixon, Watergate, and the Political
Peter Schultz
So, as most understand by now, Nixon’s demise as result of Watergate was due in part to the opposition of rightist Republicans and Democrats who were united by “intense and deep opposition to the Nixon-Kissinger foreign policies.” The issue discussed here is why his opposition proved more powerful than Nixon-Kissinger? Or, more generally, why are ideologues more powerful than “pragmatists?” And what does this tell us about political life?
Politics is intrinsically both conspiratorial and moralistic. And the best conspiracies and conspirators are those that disguise or dress their conspiracies in moral garb or clothing. Politics may be described as moralistically conspiratorial or conspiratorially moralistic.
Nixon’s Watergate problem was intensified by his embrace of conspiracy via the cover up. He treated the burglary as a PR or political problem and chose to deal with it conspiratorially. But he didn’t dress up his conspiracy as moralistic, whereas his political enemies did dress up their conspiratorial actions as moralistic. They, like Nixon, engaged in conspiracy, as illustrated by “Deep Throat.” But they were the accusers, while Nixon was the accused.
Nixon tried to deny his guilt instead of uncovering the guilty. Which is a neat trick: that is, the guilty seeking the guilty in order to cover up their own guilt. And it is trick that Alexander Haig, for example, seemed to comprehend. Nixon conspired to stay in office, while others conspired to get him out of office. Why were the latter more powerful? Because they dressed up their conspiracy as moralistic and the moralistic conspirators are always more powerful than pragmatic conspirators. Ideologues are always more powerful than pragmatists. “Let’s be practical” never trumps “Let’s be moralistic.” And many or even most think this a good thing.
Here, the ghost of Machiavelli appears with his admonition that humans, if they want to be successful, need to “learn to be able not to be good.” That is, they should learn to be and practice being practical, even when the practical is immoral or savage. Of course, if they can disguise their pragmatism as justice or liberalness or humanity, all the better.
Also, it is possible to emend Blaise Pascal’s take on Plato and Aristotle as thinking politics is like trying to bring order into a madhouse. For them perhaps, politics is more like a house of mirrors or even a fun house filled with dead ends, mazes, surprises, constant and even comical change.
Carl Oglesby, in his book Yankee and Cowboy Wars, captured this very well. The “Yankee-Cowboy interpretation,” although firmly embracing the conspiratorial character of politics, rejects “the omnipotent-cabal interpretation” of conspiracy and “posits a divided social-historical American order, conflict-wracked and dialectical rather than serene and hierarchical [where] results constantly elude every faction’s intentions because all conspire against each and each against all.”
And the grandest conspiracy of all is making this “conflict-wracked and dialectical world” look moral, so instead of seeing that “all conspire against each and each against all,” people think reality consists of good guys v. bad guys or that the world is or could be “serene and hierarchical.” In other words, the political is not so much a madhouse as it is a magic show or, as noted above, a house of mirrors.
This conspiracy is underwritten or left undisturbed by “the standard statistic-ridden, political-sociological models employed in conventional federal-academic discourse.” Such “models [ultimately] give us a lone madman here and a lone madman there,” thereby reducing “violet assaults on [presidents to] the purest contingency, [to] acts of God, [to] random events lying outside the events constitutive of ‘politics’ proper, … [and] of no greater interest … than the normal airplane accident or the normal heart attack.”
We focus on lone madmen, like Oswald, like RFK’s killer, like MLK’s killer, or like Donald Trump because of our skewed understanding of the political, of our failure to see “real reality,” viz., the conspiratorial moralism of the political. In this way, we don’t have to think about the political implications of, say, JFK’s assassination, of Nixon’s demise, or of Trump’s rise because acts of madmen have no political implications. They are merely random, chance, aberrational events. And, of course, as a result we can go on believing; that is, we can go believing that “there is nothing wrong [when] the wrong may be of Satanic magnitude.”
