JUNE 7, 2024 – It’s instructive, I think, to view the Duly Defeated’s stranglehold on the Party of Lincoln—and Nixon—through the historic prism of the Watergate Era. This perspective can reassure hand-ringers worried that the Duly Defeated might well become the Duly Elected.
During the first impeachment hearings of Biden’s immediate predecessor—remember that far back?—a young person asked me how the then current allegations of shenanigans by Obama’s immediate successor compared to Nixon’s obstruction of justice in the Watergate scandal. I had to think for a moment: “Watergate” was of a previous lifetime. In fact, a half century ago today, impeachment hearings by the House Judiciary Committee were in full swing. Before summer was over, Nixon would be out—the only sitting United States President to resign. As a political news junkie, I’d been glued to Watergate news for the better part of the previous 12 months. But spin the globe 18,250 times and what had once been singularly riveting fades from attention. So it was with Watergate.
And so it is with both of the Teflon Don’s impeachment proceedings, and soon it will be with the Mar-a-Lago documents case and the Georgia election fraud/RICO suit, both of which now appear to have disappeared from the pre-election docket, which is tantamount to disappearing altogether. That leaves the January 6 litigation, which will hang in suspense until the Supreme Court slow-walks the pending appeals to the same fate as the other two cases. Granted, there’s the guilty verdict in the Hush Money Trial, but mark my word: that will be old news by the 50th anniversary of Nixon’s resignation—August 9.
What’s that, you say? The civil fraud case won by the New York Attorney General and the judgment against the former president for nearly half a billion bucks? Forgot all about it.
The only thing that holds—in the moment, anyway—is the ongoing display of bad character: disregard for factual accuracy; habitual crass bullying of opponents; regular express put-downs of the very country he aspires to lead again; a complete lack of empathy; the demand for strict fealty; overt and repetitious disrespect for the rule of law; and so on. But much of the same was said of Nixon—and his enablers and apologists.
Even when Nixon’s overall approval rating had plunged to 25%, 45% of Republicans remained loyal to him. Neither his subordinates going to prison nor mounting irrefutable evidence against the president himself could dissuade the true believers.
If history doesn’t exactly repeat itself, patterns of human behavior do. One motif, alluded to above, is that we have short memories. Another is that human society is in a perpetual cycle of good and bad, a kind of yin and yang from which there can never be a clean and lasting break.
Bad people come and go—and come back; good people, likewise. Often the bad people prevail, and the lights go out—at least for good people. At other times, good people stage a comeback and the lights come back on. The world needs good people to counter the bad, and I suppose we need the bad to inspire the good.
We humans live in a continual loop of good, bad, good again, bad again. It is in the nature of things; one might say in perfect synch with the great cosmic cycles of expansion and contraction; hydrogen and helium clouds gathering mass, becoming stars, burning themselves out, inflating into red giants, imploding into black holes, exploding into quasars and so on and so forth. If I’ve just revealed my appalling ignorance of astrophysics, perhaps I’ve cited two workable truths: 1. Nothing in the cosmos is static; and 2. Everything in the cosmos is cyclical. The catch is that the applicable timeline is . . . way long.
And yet as between President Biden and the Duly Defeated—the yin and the yang of the current presidential campaign—the timeline of each of the two men is actuarily short. What remains in question is whether the life-expectancy of the Republic is far longer than that of each of the two geezers. I’m confident that by a long measure the nation will outlive the latter. Watergate put us to the test more than two generations ago, and we passed. Surely, we must, can and will do so again.
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© 2024 by Eric Nilsson
