From Nixon to Trump: The Decline of the Common Good in American Politics
From AlterNet
Link at: alternet.org
The scandal that came to be known as “Watergate” and led to Nixon’s resignation from the presidency was a shock to the American political system. Afterward (analogous to putting locks on the doors after a town’s first robbery), Congress enacted many reforms, but all were eventually watered down or found by the Supreme Court to be unconstitutional.
What was particularly chilling about Nixon’s behavior was his disdain for the common good and total obsession with himself.
On the tapes of his White House meetings, Nixon can be heard to talk incessantly about himself — his needs, his place in history, and his animosities — but he never once mentions the nation’s needs. For Richard M. Nixon, there was no common good. Only Richard Nixon.
Nixon was never held legally accountable.
Even before President Nixon’s resignation, speculation had swirled around a possible deal between Ford and Nixon in which Nixon’s resignation would be conditioned on Ford’s agreement to pardon him. Ford strongly denied that there was any such “deal.”
On September 8, 1974, the new president, Gerald Ford, issued a full pardon to Nixon for any offenses he “has committed or may have committed.”
BUT THE PARDON DID NOT END THE CONTROVERSY. Nixon continued to insist he had not participated in any crimes. In a 1977 television interview with British journalist David Frost, Nixon conceded he had “let the American people down” but refused to admit to any illegality. “I didn’t think of it as a coverup. I didn’t intend a coverup. Let me say, if I intended the coverup, believe me, I would have done it.”
Nixon added, in words that Trump echoed decades later: “If the president does it, that means it is not illegal.”
To many Americans, the fact that Nixon was not held accountable felt like another assault on the common good.
Once norms and laws are broken without consequence, such actions invite further norm breaking and lawbreaking. Nixon’s willingness to do anything to retain power presaged Trump’s willingness to do anything to retain power.
The shameful episode suggests that, if Trump is found guilty of seeking to overturn the results of the 2020 election, it would be a profound mistake for Biden (or any future president) to pardon Trump on grounds that such a step would help the nation heal. It will not. The wound will fester and invite even worse abuses in the future.
THE LINE FROM NIXON TO TRUMP passed through Newt Gingrich. When Gingrich took over the House at the start of 1995, he brought “whatever-it-takes-to-win” politics to Congress.
Washington was transformed from a place where legislators sought common ground into a war zone. Compromise was replaced by brinkmanship, bargaining by obstruction, normal legislative maneuvering by threats to close down government—which occurred at the end of 1995 (a prelude to another shutdown in 2011 over raising the debt ceiling). Two years later, Gingrich and his stop-at-nothing colleagues voted to impeach Bill Clinton.
According to Norman Ornstein and Thomas Mann, two respected and nonpartisan political observers, “The forces Mr. Gingrich unleashed destroyed whatever comity existed across party lines.”
Donald Trump would take bitter conflict and political polarization to a new level.
EVEN BEFORE HE TRIED TO OVERTURN the results of the 2020 election, Trump used Nixonian tactics — lying to the public, seeking to punish his enemies with tax audits and prosecutorial probes, and obstructing justice. He also encouraged bigotry as a political weapon — urging travel bans on Muslims, enforcement raids on Latino communities, photo IDs to vote, a wall along the Mexican border, the purging of voter registration lists, and bans on transgender personnel in the military.
Like Nixon, Trump was interested only in advancing his own personal agenda at the expense of the common good.
Meanwhile, over the last five decades, the Republican Party has lost any relationship to the common good. Increasingly, its goal has been to gain and keep power at whatever cost, even at the expense of the public’s trust in the major institutions of our democracy.
A growing debate within the Democratic Party during these decades (one in which I have repeatedly participated) has been how to compete with an unprincipled Republican Party without similarly undermining the common good — how to fight against politicians who no longer care about democracy with tactics that don’t themselves harm democracy?
That debate continues.
The decline of Americans’ trust in our government over the past five decades has been one of the nation’s most profound losses.
By 1979, only 27 percent of Americans trusted their government. Trust picked up a bit under Reagan (to 44 percent), dropped under George H.W. Bush (to 19 percent), rose sharply with Bill Clinton (to 54 percent), and has steadily dropped since then, never reaching above 20 percent.
It’s too early to know the effects on public trust of Trump’s big lie that the 2020 election was stolen, the attack on the Capitol, and Trump’s denunciations of prosecutors and judges connected with his subsequent indictments.
But without trust, how can our democracy function?