But Nixon was no victim. While other presidents have engaged in dirty tricks against their opponents, Nixon is the only one to have had his own private criminal gang engaged in burglaries like the break-in of Democratic headquarters at the Watergate Hotel. On a tape recording from a June 17, 1971, meeting with his aides Henry Kissinger and Bob Haldeman, Nixon can be heard talking about having the Brookings Institution broken into by his goons, to retrieve files that he hoped to use to his advantage. Nixon: “I mean, I want it implemented on a thievery basis. Goddamn it, get in and get those files. Blow the safe and get it.”

But Nixon’s prison-worthy crimes and his personal flaws don’t discredit “Nixonism” — defined as a governing philosophy, relevant in our day as in his, with three main features:  national-interest realism in foreign policy; economic nationalism in trade and immigration policy; and at least an effort on the part of government to be even-handed between capital and labor.  

From a Nixonian perspective, peace can only be achieved by a favorable balance of power — not by the United Nations or other international institutions, and not by a utopian “global democratic revolution” that replaces all authoritarian regimes. Free trade and protectionism are equally valid national strategies, to be adopted or rejected in the service of strategic industrial sectors and a high-wage workforce. And rather than side with employers against workers, government should act as an honest broker between business and organized labor, in the interest of labor peace and a national home market enlarged by high take-home pay, rather than by high levels of government redistribution. 

Tragically, the rival public philosophy of Reaganism — combining a crusading Wilsonian foreign policy, dogmatic support for economic globalization and mass immigration, and unremitting hostility to labor unions — dominated the Republican Party between the Reagan years and the election of Trump in 2016, to the detriment of both the party and the nation.

Start with Nixon’s realism abroad. In foreign policy, the differences between Nixonism and Reaganism are unbridgeable. Although Nixon worked from the desk of Woodrow Wilson and hung Wilson’s portrait in the Cabinet room next to Lincoln and Eisenhower, Nixon’s view of foreign policy as an arena of great-power struggles and compromises had more in common with that of American realists like Alexander Hamilton, Theodore Roosevelt, and Henry Cabot Lodge and European statesmen like Bismarck, Disraeli, and De Gaulle.

In a 1972 radio address, Nixon told the American people that US foreign policy must promote a “structure of peace” among great powers that rests “on the hard concrete of common interests and mutual agreements, and not on the shifting sands of naive sentimentality.”

Nixon’s predecessors had overcommitted Washington in Vietnam and elsewhere. One response was the policy of “Vietnamization,” generalized as “the Nixon Doctrine” of 1969, which declared that the United States would no longer assume full responsibility for the defense of allies through ground troops. 

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Another Nixonian response to American overextension was his outreach to China as part of a strategy of dividing Moscow from Beijing and thus splitting the communist sphere. The tactic failed to end the war in Indochina while saving South Vietnam, but Sino-American diplomacy paid off in the “second Cold War” of the 1980s, when Beijing was a de facto ally of Uncle Sam against Moscow. Nixon can’t be blamed for the deindustrialization of the United States by China’s aggressive mercantilism, which was supported by unpatriotic American corporations that presidents from Clinton to Obama tolerated after Nixon’s death in 1994.

While Reagan’s defense build-up and proxy wars with Moscow in Afghanistan and Central America contributed to the pressure on the Soviet Union, the implosion of the USSR had other causes: long-term economic decay, rising nationalism among the bloc’s constituent peoples, and Gorbachev’s refusal to crack down against dissent. Reagan’s true foreign-policy legacy wasn’t winning the Cold War; it was grafting the utopian fervor of Woodrow Wilson and other 20th-century Democratic progressives and liberal internationalists onto the formerly realist GOP.

Wilson was literally Ronald Reagan’s middle name, thanks to his father, an ardent New Deal Democrat. And Reagan, a Democrat until 1962, remained all of his life an ardent Wilsonian idealist in his approach to foreign policy. Wilson, in a speech to Congress in January 1917, before the US entry into World War I, identified the goals of American foreign policy as national self-determination, global economic liberalization, and an end to the balance of power: “These are American principles, American policies. We could stand for no others…. They are the principles of mankind and must prevail.”

True to Wilsonian ideology, in his autobiography, An American Life, Reagan asserted: “It was our policy that this great democracy of ours had a special obligation to bring freedom to other peoples.” Jeane Kirkpatrick, who served Reagan as ambassador to the United Nations, observed: “The president and many of his principal advisers see themselves as purveyors and defenders of the classical liberal tradition in politics, economics, and society.”

Rejecting the reality of conflicts of interest among states of all kinds, Reagan declared: “People do not make wars; governments do. A people free to choose will always choose peace.” Likewise, Reagan said in his 1986 State of the Union address: “We know that peace follows in freedom’s path, and conflicts erupt when the will of the people is denied.” If this “democratic peace theory” is true, then the only way to achieve a peaceful world is to promote the replacement of every authoritarian regime on earth with a liberal multiparty democracy — by example if possible, by subversion, invasion, and occupation if necessary. Wars of regime change by democratic countries are “liberation,” but not “aggression” (it helps if the would-be “liberated” country, like Iraq, Venezuela, and Iran, has major deposits of oil and gas).

Reagan’s neoconservative allies successfully lobbied for the creation in 1983 of the National Endowment for Democracy, a government-funded organization that has engaged in both overt and covert operations to destabilize or overthrow governments that Washington opposes.  Contrast this with Nixon’s statement: “We would not welcome the intervention of other countries in our domestic affairs, and we cannot expect them to be cooperative when we seek to intervene directly in theirs.”

George W. Bush was as reckless in launching the Iraq War as Reagan was cautious in limiting his administration to small-scale interventions in Lebanon and Grenada. But a prudent Wilsonian ideologue is still a Wilsonian ideologue. There is a direct line from Reagan’s messianic rhetoric to the proclamation of George W. Bush in his Second Inaugural Address: “So it is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.” Bush’s speech merely restated Reagan’s utopian conception of US foreign policy, evident in the Gipper’s 1985 pronunciamento: “We declared the principal objective of American foreign policy to be not just the prevention of war, but the extension of freedom. And we stressed our commitment to the growth of democratic government and democratic institutions around the world.”

Trade is another source of contention between the rival governing philosophies of Nixonism and Reaganism. Nixon was a bold and unapologetic American economic nationalist. In one of several “Nixon shocks,” Nixon in 1971 dealt with a balance-of-payments problem by suspending the convertibility of the dollar to gold, blowing up the Bretton Woods system that had structured world trade and finance since the late 1940s. 

The other Nixon shocks of 1971 included combating inflation with temporary wage and price controls and imposing temporary surcharges on imports to redress the trade deficit. While these were ineffective, market fundamentalists have been wrong to blame them for the high inflation of the later 1970s, which resulted from the increase in oil prices associated with the Yom Kippur War and the 1979 Iranian revolution.

Just as he found a like-minded geopolitical realist in Henry Kissinger, Nixon found an economic nationalist ally in his Treasury secretary, John Connally, who told a group of economists: “The foreigners are out to screw us. It is our job to screw them first. Thank you for your help.”    

Fervent support for free trade was another traditionally Democratic value that Reagan helped to graft onto the historically protectionist, pro-manufacturing Republican Party. While Nixon the realist was willing to sacrifice the world economy to US national economic interests, for Reagan, as for other Wilsonians, the promotion of global free trade was inseparable from the promotion of world peace. In 1988, Reagan said: “I recognize … the inescapable conclusion that all of history has taught: the freer the flow of world trade, the stronger the tides of human progress and peace among nations.”

The few cases in which Reagan as president reluctantly and temporarily used tariffs and quotas to protect industries like cars, steel, and motorcycles were deviations from his free-market dogmatism. Again and again, Reagan unpatriotically smeared the American victims of foreign unfair trade practices by mercantilist regimes like Japan and South Korea. In a 1987 radio talk, Reagan blamed American trade deficits on the alleged inferiority of American products: “The way up and out of the trade deficit is not protectionism, not bringing down the competition, but instead the answer lies in improving our products and increasing our exports.”

In a 1987 speech in Cleveland, Reagan asserted that America’s trade deficit was a sign of strength. In 1985, Reagan asserted that the financialization of the US economy was an adequate substitute for the loss of manufacturing when he complained that trade deficit statistics did not count the “billions of dollars of foreign capital” that had been “invested in our government bonds … because we are the best and safest investment in the world today.”

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The harm done by Reagan and Reaganism to American manufacturing was not limited to rhetoric. In 1971, the Nixon administration protected the American textile industry by imposing quotas under the Trading with the Enemy Act. In contrast, Reagan vetoed the Textile Apparel and Footwear Trade Act of 1988, claiming, “This bill represents protectionism at its worst. The supposed benefits of the bill would be temporary at best. Protectionism does not save jobs. Only improved competitiveness can truly protect jobs, yet there is nothing in this bill that would encourage domestic industries to become more competitive.”  

As he had so often done before, Reagan blamed Americans instead of foreign mercantilists for the struggles of American industry in global markets, ignoring the fact that American manufacturers couldn’t compete with foreign cheap labor or foreign government subsidies.  Today, the United States has one of the world’s largest markets for textiles, but 98% of textiles sold in the country are manufactured abroad. 

Americans were shocked to learn during the pandemic that the United States is dependent upon foreign countries, including Communist China, for protective textiles and apparel. Thanks, Mr. Reagan!

In 1970, Nixon sought to defend American shipbuilding from foreign rivalry with the Merchant Marine Act of 1970, which provided a variety of subsidies for the American construction of ships engaged in foreign trade. A little more than a decade later, Reagan eliminated these subsidies for the strategic civilian shipbuilding industry on the advice of his aide Martin Anderson, a free-market extremist who, along with his wife, had been a personal disciple of Ayn Rand — the radical-libertarian guru. In 1977, before Reagan, America had 77 sea-going commercial ships on order. In 2023, thanks to Reagan and his successors who shared his indifference to the survival of America’s merchant marine, the United States had only 5, compared to China’s 1,749.

Finally, Nixonism and Reaganism differ on the subject of the government’s relationship with labor. Because the majority of the people in a modern nation are wage earners, not capitalists or managers, no nationalist politics can be authentic unless it defends the interests of the national working class. And the lack of bargaining power of ordinary workers with most employers requires that employer-labor-market power must be countervailed, either through collective bargaining or direct government regulation.

With most other Republicans, the young Nixon in 1947 voted for the anti-union Taft-Hartley Act that allowed state “right-to-work” laws. But as a presidential candidate in 1960, he declared: “As far as the right-to-work law, itself, is concerned, I oppose any such law nationally.” 

As president, Nixon opposed labor leaders aligned with the Democrats, including Leonard Woodcock of the United Auto Workers, who made it onto Nixon’s secret “enemies list.” But he courted George Meany, the head of the AFL-CIO, and he sought the support of the Teamsters Union, declaring in 1971: “It is all too often taken for granted that the daily efforts of Teamster union members are a cornerstone of the American economic structure.” In his second term, as part of his outreach to unionized workers, Nixon appointed Peter J. Brennan, of the Building and Construction Trades Council of New York, as secretary of labor. 

In contrast, of Reagan’s three secretaries of labor, two — Raymond J. Donovan and Ann McLaughlin — were former corporate executives and the third, William E. Brock, was a career politician from Tennessee. Although he had been head of an AFL-CIO-affiliated union, the Screen Actors Guild, Reagan as president broke with the tradition of earlier Republican leaders like Nixon and Eisenhower and Coolidge who attempted to at least appear even-handed toward management and labor. 

In addition to breaking a strike in 1981 by firing 11,000 federal air-traffic controllers, Reagan stacked the National Labor Relations Board with anti-union, management-aligned appointees whose decisions restricted worker rights and expanded employer power.

To lead the NLRB, Reagan appointed Donald Dotson, who claimed that unions were responsible for “destruction of individual freedom.”

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Reagan, the former “traveling ambassador” of General Electric in the 1950s, did the bidding of his corporate and capitalist backers in promoting right-to-work laws, hampering federal enforcement of worker rights, and seeking to weaken child-labor laws. Reagan also sought to supply American businesses with wage-suppressing mass immigration. In 1984, Reagan declared: “I believe in the idea of amnesty for those who have put down roots and lived here, even though, sometime back, they may have entered illegally.” 

Reagan repeated the employer-lobby propaganda line that illegal immigrants do jobs that Americans refuse to do at any wage. In a radio address in 1977, Reagan mocked “the illegal alien fuss”: “Are great numbers of our unemployed really victims of the illegal alien invasion, or are those illegal tourists actually doing work our own people won’t do?”

The major immigration law that Reagan signed, the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, was a gift to cheap-labor employers at the cost of American workers. The law provided an amnesty for nearly 3 million illegal immigrants. To deter future illegal immigration, the law created penalties for employers who hire illegal immigrant workers — but thanks to business lobbying, under Reagan and his successors of both parties in the White House, including Trump, employer penalties have almost never been imposed. 

Meanwhile, to ensure that employers deprived of illegal immigrant labor did not necessarily need to hire American citizens and legal immigrants at higher wages, IRCA also increased the number of “guest workers” — a euphemism for foreign serfs with fewer rights than American workers who are indentured to their employers or labor contractors.

Not content with forcing US workers to compete with greater numbers of unfree, poorly paid “guest workers” on American soil, Reagan sought to merge America’s labor market with those of low-wage nations. During his 1980 presidential campaign, Reagan proposed a free-trade agreement between the United States and Mexico that influenced the later North American Free Trade Agreement, under which entire US industries were gutted as employers sought cheaper labor south of the border.  

In his 1988 State of the Union address, Reagan told Congress: “Our goal must be a day when the free flow of trade, from the tip of Tierra del Fuego to the Arctic Circle, unites the people of the Western Hemisphere in a bond of mutually beneficial exchange.”

Reagan’s wish was indistinguishable from that of Hillary Clinton, who in 2016 told Latin-American bankers that her “dream is a hemispheric common market, with open trade and open borders.…”

The Reaganite synthesis of market fundamentalism, mass immigration, crusading democratic globalism, and anti-worker labor policy weakened the United States and contributed to the backlash that brought Trump to power twice. In fairness, the dwindling and aging number of Reagan’s Old Right defenders are correct about one thing: he was “inspirational” and “sunny” and “optimistic.”

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Donald Trump borrowed his slogan “Make America Great Again” from Reagan. But in many ways, he belongs in the Nixonian tradition.

Trump’s aggressive promotion of what he considers the national interest, at the expense of allies and without moralistic rhetoric, is distinctly Nixonian. The first Trump administration’s National Security strategy in 2017 contained the line: “An America First National Security Strategy … is a strategy of principled realism that is guided by outcomes, not ideology.” 

“Out with utopian idealism, in with hard-nosed realism,” declared Trump’s Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth in December 2025, in a speech at the Reagan Library (the Nixon Library might have been a more appropriate venue).

The exception to Trump’s realism is the disastrous Israeli-American war against Iran, which Trump might have avoided had he followed a precept of Kissinger in the Nixon years: “Our interests shall shape our commitments, rather than the other way around.”

In trade, too, Trump is a Nixonian nationalist, replicating the Nixon Shocks of the 1970s with frequent use of tariffs and other shocking departures of his own from the former free-trade globalist consensus.

Long before Trump in 2016 declared that “I love the poorly educated,” Nixon told some of his advisers in 1971 that “when we need support on tough problems, the uneducated are the ones that are with us.” In contrast: “When you have to call on the nation to be strong — on such things as drugs, crime, defense, our basic national position — the educated people and the leader class no longer have any character, and you can’t count on them.” For this reason, Nixon rejected anti-union conservatism and told his staff that it was “vital that we continue to recognize and work with [workers] and that we not attack unions which represent the organized structure of the working man.”

But Nixon’s outreach to organized labor was sincere and consistent, unlike Trump’s, which combines symbolism — like having Teamsters President Sean O’Brien address the 2024 Republican National Convention — with standard Right-wing anti-union policies. And instead of making the case that immigration restriction, by creating tight labor markets, can force employers to raise wages, Trump has appealed to nativist racism, describing most Mexican immigrants as criminals, and accusing Haitians of eating pets, while favoring white South Africans in refugee policy. Instead of insisting on a universal E-Verify mandate on employers, Trump has ordered ICE to forgo raids on farms dependent on cheap labor and expanded programs for unfree foreign guest workers.

Trumpism, then, is an incoherent mixture of Nixonism in defense and trade policy and anti-worker and anti-safety-net policies in the Reagan-Bush tradition. Even worse, Trump in his two terms as president has emulated some of the worst aspects of Richard Nixon, from claiming effectively unlimited powers for the executive branch to weaponizing the Department of Justice and other agencies against personal and partisan enemies.

Overall, Trump has accelerated the rejection by Republicans of the transplanted Democratic globalism of Reagan and the neocons and the party’s return to its historic nationalist tradition.  Just as Nixonism is more defensible than Nixon, a thoughtful version of Trumpism without Trump after 2028 would be better than a disastrous revival of Reaganism.

They’re right about that. Trump’s assertion of the president’s power to pause funding — the right of impoundment — reverses the standard practice of the past two generations. Team Trump aims to restore the traditional exercise of presidential authority to impound congressional spending, a power which was restricted by the Impoundment Control Act of 1974. In doing so, the Trumpians aim to put an end to what political analyst Kevin Phillips called the “Watergate warp” that weakened American presidents, Republican and Democratic, pulling them down from the Caesarist heights summited by pre-Watergate chief executives.

The principle behind impoundments is simple. Congress has the authority to set the ceiling on spending, the thinking runs, but not the floor. If the goal of a program is achieved without spending the full amount authorized by the legislative branch, the president can decide not to spend the difference. So argued FDR, a frequent user of impoundments. Forcing the president to spend every last dime, he said, “would take from the chief executive every incentive for good management and the practice of commonsense economy”.

If the legal battles over Trump’s executive order freezing some spending lead to a Supreme Court decision clarifying the constitutionality of impoundments — and holding the 1974 act unconstitutional — it would be a huge win for the administration, and they are gearing up for it. But legal battles are downstream of political ones. In Trump’s first term, the president was frequently stymied by coordinated media, legal, and security-apparatus efforts to generate public outcry. After some bluster, Trump usually withdrew to a more conventional position. But he is pulling no punches this time around, and noticeably, he doesn’t need to. The American people appear much less susceptible to supposed threats to “our democracy” than they were in 2017, and Trump’s approval ratings have climbed since he re-entered the Oval Office.

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The flashpoint over impoundments reveals a deeper shift in the American political imagination. The key to understanding what’s happening lies the mythical role played by the person to whom the five former Treasury secretaries compared Trump: Richard Nixon, whose downfall took away the vast presidential powers amassed by FDR.

Presidents before FDR had used impoundments. But from FDR to Nixon, impoundments were a major part of a bipartisan consensus. Americans wanted a strong president. In May 1932, FDR asserted that “the country needs and, unless I mistake its temper, the country demands bold, persistent experimentation”. In his first Inaugural Address, FDR threatened to rule by decree if Congress failed to back him: “I shall not evade the clear course of duty that will then confront me.”

FDR capitalized on the Great Depression to launch an era in which Americans expected the president to act decisively and master all the resources of the federal government to resolve problems. This expectation remained strong throughout World War II and into the early Sixties. Trust in government, and the president, remained high through the New Deal order. But by the late Sixties, as the war in Vietnam worsened and the excesses of social liberalism disturbed the public, confidence in the executive began to wane.

It was this discontent that catapulted Nixon to the presidency. Campaigning on law and order and against the failed Democratic record, Nixon won the 1968 election as a moderate conservative. He set out to run the federal government along the lines that the FDR had set down with the New Deal. Nixon was the last president to try and govern in Roosevelt’s Caesarist model. It would prove his undoing.

While he supported the New Deal, LBJ’s Great Society, and civil rights for black Americans, Nixon thought that the decades-long trend had been for federal bureaucrats to carve off fiefdoms for themselves, in which they were accountable to no one. His aim was to reassert presidential control over the federal bureaucracy. In his first term, he would focus on the foreign-policy bureaucracy; in his second term, he planned to focus on the domestic bureaucracy. As he put it in his memoirs, his objective was to “break the Eastern stranglehold on the executive branch and the federal government”.

There was a partisan element to Nixon’s actions, revealed by his reference to an “Eastern stranglehold”. To wit, bureaucracies were largely run by East Coast liberals ideologically opposed to him. Yet the real divide wasn’t between liberals and conservatives, but over the role of the bureaucracy in a post-FDR America.

Within the government, Nixon’s most powerful opponents weren’t liberals, but conservatives in the military and security services. From FBI boss J. Edgar Hoover to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, these actors sought to defend their institutional prerogatives and autonomy from presidential oversight. To keep the Vietnam War going on their terms, the Joint Chiefs used media leaks to destabilize Nixon’s withdrawal plans and even spied on the president.

Hoover claimed that “political attempts to hamper and interfere with the federal and other police and prosecuting agents are the real menace”. He countered Nixon’s efforts at intelligence reforms that would have required the FBI to cooperate with other agencies under White House supervision. “Hoover has to be told who is president”, Nixon wrote to his chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman, to little apparent effect.

Nixon’s project wasn’t revolutionary. Like his predecessors, he made extensive use of impoundments. Like his predecessors, his solution to administrative problems was to try to centralize power in the White House, bypassing unreliable bureaucrats. Like his predecessors, he appointed outsiders who could bring a fresh perspective and, when necessary, clean house. And like his predecessors, Nixon also authorized quasi-political surveillance.

His practices were ambiguous. On the one hand, it looked like the elected president, the figure who in the American system most closely embodies popular sovereignty, was wresting control of the government from unelected bureaucrats — Caesarism in the positive sense, a popular, regal presidency akin to that of Charles de Gaulle in France. On the other hand, it looked like the troubling apex of the “imperial presidency” that FDR had created — Caesarism in the negative sense, an emperor in waiting.

When Hoover died in 1972, Nixon passed over the FBI’s top lieutenants and appointed government attorney L. Patrick Gray as his replacement. This infuriated FBI Associate Director Mark Felt. A Hoover loyalist, Felt thought that Nixon’s actions were compromising the institutional autonomy of the FBI that Hoover had set up. So when Washington Post journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein began examining the Watergate burglary, Felt saw an opportunity to undermine the new acting director of the FBI and embarrass the administration that had passed him over for the top job. As historian Beverly Gage has written, “Felt cooperated with Woodward not to preserve the American Constitution or to limit the imperial presidency, as the standard Watergate myths would suggest, but to protect the legacy of J. Edgar Hoover”.

Nixon’s attempt to reassert presidential power set off a political conflict against a partisan Congress and, more important, bureaucrats jealous of their own institutional expertise. Public opinion turned against Nixon, aided by media outlets united in their hostility; back then, there were only three national television stations, which all agreed to coordinate their programming so that at least one was always broadcasting the Senate hearings on Watergate.

Nixon became a scapegoat, taking the fall for decades of executive-branch and intelligence-agency abuses. As a matter of public opinion, his downfall was possibly inevitable. The American public was exhausted with the Vietnam War, with the dirty tricks of their politicians and spies, and with runaway inflation, especially at the gas pump. Somebody had to pay, and Nixon, who had been at the top of American politics since the 1950s, fit the bill.

When the Erwin Committee issued its report on Nixon’s wrongdoing in June 1974, it said less about Watergate than about a culture of executive abuse of power. “From the early days of the present administration”, the introduction went, “the power of the president was viewed by some in the White House as almost without limit”. Presidential power had become outré. One month after the report’s release, a critically weakened Nixon signed the Impoundment Control Act. It didn’t save him. In August 1974, he resigned to avoid impeachment. His successor, Gerald Ford, pardoned him, hoping that this would bring an end to America’s “long national nightmare”.

By the early Eighties, the passions of Watergate subsided; many thought the country had moved on. Kevin Phillips, the political consultant-turned-writer and analyst, wasn’t so sure. Hence, his coinage of “the Watergate warp” to describe how Nixon’s disgrace might continue to reshape American politics.

The first way it did so was to help conservatives. Liberals hoped that Watergate would poison the GOP brand for a generation. Yet the scandal couldn’t be wielded along partisan lines. Across the board, the warp reinforced Americans’ suspicion of their government. The American electorate tilted toward the ideology that manifested that suspicion, giving conservative Republicans control of the White House until 1992, and control of Congress shortly after that.

But the Watergate warp didn’t bring about conservative small government. It merely led to a weaker president. This was the second way it distorted American politics. The Seventies saw the explosion of the powers of the administrative state. The New Deal’s “economic regulation” of the banking and commercial sectors transformed into “social regulation” affecting most of American life. Anxious to dodge the “imperial” accusation, presidents acquiesced to legislation that took decision-making out of the White House and handed it over to administrative agencies.

Watergate the break-in was a petty political burglary; Watergate the myth was an act of robbery. It stole power from the president and distributed it to faceless and unaccountable bureaucrats. The Watergate warp was the destruction of Rooseveltian presidential power by a mean and hungry legal and media elite. And therein lay its third, most tedious disfiguration. Watergate became the founding myth for journalists, judges, and lawyers who dreamed of orchestrating investigative reports and special prosecutions that would topple presidents. It turned political and media elites into aspiring regicides, each fancying himself a Cassius taking down Caesar.

The result has been that every few years, Americans are subjected to scandals narrated along Watergate lines: Iran-Contra, Whitewater, the Valerie Plame affair, and “Russian collusion” all followed a familiar path of public inquiry, a push for a special prosecutor, and then incessant questions about what the president knew and when he knew it. Their supporters, Left and Right, saw themselves vindicating the rule of law; to their critics, they looked like lawfare designed to undo the democratic will.

Over the past decade, we’ve seen signs that the Watergate warp is fading. For starters, the lawfare strategy hasn’t been all that successful since Nixon. The closest that America has come to a repeat of the Watergate saga was with #Russiagate during Trump’s first term. Special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe was supposed to follow the Watergate script. Indeed, in 2018, it inspired a court petition to unseal grand-jury documents — normally sealed forever — from the Watergate Special Prosecution Task Force. The hope was that this might provide some readily applicable lessons. The judge granted the request, but it didn’t help. The Mueller probe missed its target, concluding that there had been no collusion between Team Trump and the Kremlin during the 2016 campaign.

L’affaire collusion also failed to reshape public opinion. Scapegoating is a collective endeavor, and unlike in Watergate, Mueller couldn’t even convince half the country. Trump’s opponents tried again with the Jan. 6 Commission; like the Mueller investigation, it was a well-organized operation, a made-for-TV drama. Each such effort failed for precisely that reason. They were designed to replicate the homogeneous media environment of the Seventies, which no longer exists. To work, scapegoating demands that the collective doesn’t perceive a victim. As soon as they see one, the mechanism falls apart. Trump I’s failed scapegoating led to Trump II’s victory over Kamala Harris.

In retrospect, it is revealing how much of the Biden presidency and Harris campaign were devoted to warning that Trump was a dictator-in-waiting because he wanted to fire the bureaucrats. This strategy was only marginally effective: the only demographic that the Democrats gained ground with between 2020 and 2024 was voters over age 65. But younger voters admire Trump for precisely the reason that the Watergate generation fears him: his dynamism, his determination to achieve results.

Then, too, the Left’s glorification of the bureaucracy has often been revealed to be a fig leaf covering an inept federal workforce. Paeans to the unimpeachable authority of the civil service are amusing at the best of times, but become less funny when their failures are obvious to millions. Progressives quietly acknowledge the need to circumvent lethargic agencies; after all, the precedent for Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency stems from Obama’s struggles with bureaucratic incompetence. In 2014, because of the failures around the rollout of ObamaCare and the website healthcare.gov, Obama set up the US Digital Service, with 300 staffers drawn mainly from Silicon Valley. Its head was a political appointee, not a civil servant.

What progressives admit in private, Trump bellowed across the land. In 2024, the desire to fix a dysfunctional state apparatus overcame older Americans’ anxieties about the imperial presidency. Victorious, Trump rechristened the US Digital Service as DOGE, giving him an entity that could operate throughout the whole federal government with personnel selected free of normal civil-service channels.

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Nixon is having his revenge. The Supreme Court’s ruling last year asserting broad presidential immunity is a kind of posthumous vindication of Nixon’s presidential defense; had the ruling been issued in 1973, it would have shipwrecked the Watergate special prosecution. The high court read the law — and the national mood — correctly. Voters don’t want lawfare to harass former presidents, nor to paralyze presidents in office. They do want an effective and decisive executive. The model of personal power that presidents from FDR to Nixon embodied is back in style.

This changes the terms of American politics. Back in the Seventies, Nixon realized that the fundamental political conflict facing America was not that between liberals and conservatives, but between those who wanted the bureaucracies to exercise institutional autonomy and those who wanted them subordinated to the elected officials. That remains true today. Trump’s most controversial Cabinet picks (RFK, Tulsi Gabbard, Kash Patel, and Pete Hegseth) had liberal critics, but particularly vehement conservative ones. This was because they swore to take back control of entrenched scientific, intelligence, or military bureaucracies. Just like liberals, conservatives have their favorite bureaucracies.

This was why movement conservatism was never at peace with Nixon, and why it will likely never be at peace with Trump. The electoral appetite is for restoring competence and efficiency in government, as well as purging the state apparatus of ideological absurdities. It doesn’t exist to realize movement conservatism’s visions of a small, shrunken government.

Finally, if the resurgence of American Caesarism is “red” and Nixonian at the moment, another “blue” Caesar is certainly possible in a country that remains so narrowly divided. Caesarism isn’t the product of a stable constitutional system; it is always a volatile phenomenon, its trajectory is difficult to predict or control. The Roman emperors were great not because of their steady hand, but because they went further than anyone else in good or evil.

So far, Trump’s impact lies with demolition, not creation. Whatever the future holds, he has brought an end to a lingering national myth. The elite obsession with Nixon, as it appears in op-eds and lawfare, has never been less effective. For decades, the Watergate script was endlessly rerun and rebooted. But Trump has pulled the plug.

Except Richard Nixon. Recent years have seen the 37th president’s social media profile transform from the familiar Tricky Dick to far more rarified heights. TikTok Nixon is a man of honor, an idealist, a preternaturally gifted statesman armed with acerbic insights into the power of the American media and eerily accurate predictions about the present-day state of Israel, Russia and China — at turns sentimental, even gossipy, but always the doughty defender of the common man.

Not that this is merely a story of some online tickers going steadily upward. On the contrary, Nixon’s social media revival matters in the grubby politics of the here and now. In an age of polarization, and one in which the young are increasingly disenchanted with democracy itself, the growing lionization of the only commander-in-chief to resign in disgrace is a red flag for the republic’s future.

At first glance, Nixon’s online persona is remarkably gentle. There’s a good reason for this: most clips are spliced from soft-soap post-Watergate interviews, when Dick was relaxedly hawking foreign policy tomes that, according to biographer Evan Thomas, were “moderately interesting and sold moderately well”. This is Nixon at rest, keen on sharing homespun wisdom about a life spent in service between his verdicts on Mao and the Shah. “What makes life mean something is purpose — a goal, the battle, the struggle,” he says in one such clip. “Even if you don’t win it.”

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Spend time in Nixonworld, though, and you’ll quickly spot clips far more brazen in their admiration for Tricky Dick. See, for instance, the excerpts from Mad Men in which Don Draper is suddenly captivated by Nixon’s 1969 inauguration address, or when he waxes lyrical about the Republican’s hardscrabble journey to the vice presidency just six years out of the navy — all before that familiar burr interrupts our regular viewing with a series of smash cuts.

Such lionization makes sense if you know where most of these clips come from: the Richard Nixon Foundation, the co-owner of the former president’s library in Yorba Linda, California, and an organization for which the sentence “it was just a burglary” is considered a fair summation of his legacy. The past year has seen the institution not only become an increasingly Trumpy meeting place for the GOP’s great and good, but also such an effective proponent of Nixon across social media that it’s booted many of the spicier White House tapes off the top tier of YouTube search results — and increased its subscriber base by 236%.

For the Nixon connoisseur, this is the historiographical equivalent of seeing the ex-president’s bullfrog jowls gurning through a beachside bodybuilder cut-out. Elements of the overall image are recognizable: Nixon’s mastery of foreign affairs, for example, or his deep-seated suspicion of the media. Yet absent from the picture is the racism, the homophobia — and, let’s not forget, the crimes.

Who watches this stuff? Despite the Boomer flavor of many of the foundation’s in-person events — you, too, can celebrate “the women and girls in your life” with a Title IX fun run — the audience most receptive to the new, hunky Nixon appear to be young, conservative-leaning voters occupying an increasingly polarized media landscape. Raised on a steady media diet of diverse perspectives, fractured across multiple social media platforms (usually TikTok), members of Gen Z are more cynical and anxious than their parents. They also find mainstream news brands increasingly untrustworthy, with only 56% of 18-29-year-olds having a “lot” or “some” trust in national news organizations. That’s down from 62% in 2016, a decline that’s even more pronounced among Millennials.

That mistrust is sharper still among young Republicans, an increasing number of whom wholeheartedly trust the news they consume from social media. Among this cohort is the intellectually impressionable manosphere, for whom Nixon has become a cause célèbre, an appeal that makes sense if you consider the former president’s image of himself as a complex loner misunderstood and maligned by the liberal establishment. “I didn’t know, until Tucker explained it on the show, about Nixon,” podcaster Joe Rogan said last June, referring to a conspiracy theory suggesting that Bob Woodward and the CIA framed the then-president for Watergate. “Nixon, who’s the most popular president in history — that was a government-orchestrated coup!”

As Carlson’s characterization of Nixon implies, it’s easy to see him as a Seventies stand-in for Donald Trump offline too, with both men the undeserving victims of a snobbish liberal establishment determined to preserve its monopoly on power at the expense of the hardworking American public. Republicans are also enthusiastic in echoing Nixon’s dictum that “when the president does it, that means it is not illegal” whenever they feel duty-bound to defend the former businessman (turns out, it mostly isn’t.) One good example is Ted Cruz, who has argued that democracy should be decided “at the ballot box” — even as Republicans tried to overturn the 2020 election.

It’s a superficially appealing comparison. Much has been written comparing presidents 47 and 37, mostly about their animosity toward the press, women, ethnic minorities and the rule of law. Similarities in their personalities is also a popular topic. “There is a volcanic center to both men: the ranting, the anger, the paranoid concerns; the hatred,” is how historian Timothy Naftali put it in 2018, speculating that Trump could yet engage in dodgy “Nixonian” behavior. 

They certainly liked each other. “I think that you are one of this country’s great men,” Trump wrote to Nixon in 1982, a few days after the pair had been spotted together at a dining club in New York City. In a series of exchanges, and over the course of one beautiful night in Houston, the two discussed everything from the New Jersey Admirals to the importance of using crowds as “props” during rallies. Pat Nixon even hoped The Donald himself might run for political office in future. “As you can imagine, she is an expert on politics,” wrote her doting husband, “and she predicts that whenever you decide to run for office you will be a winner!”

Trump had that letter framed, later promising he’d hang it in the Oval Office. It’s unclear if he ever did — or indeed whether it served less as a source of inspiration than a warning of what not to do in the White House. At the height of the impeachment speculation, during his first term in 2019, Trump asserted that he wouldn’t suffer the same fate as his long-dead predecessor because he’d never be cowardly enough to resign. Similarly, the 47th president bemoaned Nixon’s reluctance to let wayward staff marinate in their own insubordination before firing them. In fact, a plausible argument can be made for Trump seeing Andrew Jackson, not Tricky Dick, as his primary presidential inspiration. After all, it’s Old Hickory’s portrait, not Nixon’s letter, that takes pride of place in most Oval Office photo ops.

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But if Trump himself has left Nixon behind, his acolytes clearly haven’t. “When it comes to foreign policy,” intoned Vivek Ramaswamy during his abortive run for the GOP nomination in 2023, “the president I most admire is Richard Nixon.” The Californian’s canny insights into the Russian psyche have routinely been cited as inspiration by conservative activists for ending the war in Ukraine, a possibility left unexplored by the Biden administration. “My answer to this whole proposal of […] whether or not the Russians can be trusted is very simply: only if we make agreements which are in their interests to keep,” Nixon told one interviewer. It’s a lesson Trumpworld figures have been more than happy to absorb. “If we aren’t careful,” said ex-Trump advisor Steve Bannon, “it will turn into Trump’s Vietnam. That’s what happened to Richard Nixon. He ended up owning the war and it went down as his war, not Lyndon Johnson’s.”

Ultimately, though, these comparisons can only be taken so far. Trump’s tariffs, and his meetings with Pyongyang’s pound-shop Mao, compare poorly to the scale of the Nixon administration’s achievements in rebuilding US credibility while pretending not to lose in Indochina. That’s because the global outlook of the two men is fundamentally different. Where Trump leads his country abroad as if he were still a rapacious Eighties landlord, Nixon knew that US power rested on leveraging its fragile position as primus inter pares. 

There are, of course, other obvious differences. Where Nixon was personally brave, enlisting in 1941 despite his Quaker faith, Trump said avoiding catching STIs during the Nineties was his own “personal Vietnam” — even as he received a dubious bone spur diagnosis to avoid being drafted into the real thing. Where Trump has made the term “braggadocious” part of his personal brand, meanwhile, Nixon was so socially awkward that he couldn’t look his doctor in the eye and felt duty-bound to apologize to his researcher for chuckling at The Dick van Dyke Show.

All the same, one very obvious similarity between the two men lies in their hatred of what Nixon called the “liberal establishment” — with the former president cited as a source of inspiration among conservative thinkers. Leading the charge has been self-styled Right-wing Leninist Christopher Rufo, who, when he’s not drafting lesson plans for teachers in Florida, argues for Nixon’s elevation as the spiritual father of the modern Republican Party. The ex-president “set the stakes for the American public and established themes that still dominate American politics today,” Rufo wrote in 2023.

According to Rufo, Nixon’s plans to overhaul the bureaucracy; reestablish law and order by smashing Left-wing radical groups; and create a conservative “counter-elite” to supplant liberal reporters form an ideal blueprint for rebuilding America. The result, the activist argues, would be a truly “pluralist republic” that prizes “excellence over diversity, equality over equity, dignity over inclusion, order over chaos”.

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It’s a vision of America that the GOP has been grasping at since 1968 — but one that the conservative movement is closer than ever to achieving. Nixon’s crusade began in the mid-Sixties, in an America that was, though wracked by protests, violent crime and racial segregation, still enamored by a liberal consensus that kept Tricky Dick’s coattails short in 1972. He may have smashed George McGovern in a landslide, yet both Republicans and the public at large quickly turned against him once the full scope of the Watergate scandal came out. Now, though, the GOP dominates all three branches of the US government, egged on by a Right-wing media machine pushing it to erode the ability of its opponents to nominate judges, prevent gerrymandering, exercise the right to vote, or even guarantee a safe transition of power.

Poor Richard. While Nixon was never slow to see opponents in every corner, and certainly wanted to politically sideline as many as possible, these actions were never consciously undertaken to undermine democracy. Were he alive today and somehow operating in our political landscape, maybe things would be different. As Geraldo Rivera ruefully told Trump-supporting presenter Sean Hannity in 2019: “Nixon never would have been forced to resign if you existed in your current state back in 1972, ’73, ’74.”

Surely, though, the emergence of a new Nixon as a conservative Jeremiah is bad enough for the health of the republic. While the White House incumbent is not powerful or motivated enough to kick away the safeguards preventing him from assuming the purple, the 47% of Americans who consider a second civil war is inevitable probably think a figure like that may soon emerge. By then, voters won’t have a Nixon type to kick around anymore, but instead someone far more dangerous.

When the International Brotherhood of Teamsters announced recently that their union was withholding endorsement of either of the presidential candidates, pundits and political operatives alike saw it as further proof of the very thing O’Brien was talking about: an ongoing realignment of working-class voters, away from their traditional Democratic allies and toward the Trump coalition. Indeed, the stated reason for the union’s decision was the apparent desire on the part of a large segment of the rank-and-file membership to go with the Republican candidate. The GOP is said to be transforming into a “workers’ party”, just as college-educated professionals cluster around Kamala Harris.

A culturally conservative base of labourers would, after all, make for a more natural constituency for an American Right that opposed both economic globalisation and social progressivism. Yet there are issues with this years-old narrative; particularly that the Republican Party has been painfully slow in breaking out of its ingrained predisposition for the interests of capital over labour. Their embrace of protectionism and opposition to high immigration may indirectly benefit workers on the ground, but when it comes to issues that directly touch upon working-class interests, such as pensions, labour representation, and the right-to-organise, Democrats in recent years have offered substantively more than Republicans. It’s also worth noting that regional branches of the union across the West Coast broke with national leadership to endorse Harris.

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Rather than a reflection of an existing political reality, O’Brien’s speech was in effect a plea for the Right to take workers seriously at a time when the Left is accused of taking them for granted. The Teamsters’ non-endorsement could be interpreted with similar subversive intent: the downpayment on a political investment toward the prospect of a pro-worker Republican Party. However, in stark contrast, just weeks before, Trump practically patted Elon Musk on the back after the Tesla mogul bragged about firing striking workers, underscoring the former president’s own dubious record on workers’ rights both in office and as a businessman.

If “working-class party” is to be more than a slogan on the Right, it has to be matched by actual policies that materially benefit workers. But how can a party that’s been accustomed for so long to towing capital’s line be converted into a vessel for workers’ interests? For this, we may turn back to a time when labour maintained enough bipartisan engagement to extract concessions from both parties.

The Teamsters’ decision to stay neutral in 2024 is actually far more in keeping with its politically flexible tradition than expected. There was even a time when they were known as the country’s most Republican union. 

Thanks, in no small part, to the animosity between then-Teamsters boss Jimmy Hoffa and the Kennedys. The Brotherhood endorsed Richard Nixon in 1960 and then again in 1972, when they were joined by Meany’s AFL-CIO in dissing the Democrats. During this period divisions over the Vietnam War, as exemplified in the Hardhat Riot of 1970, drove a wedge between workers and the increasingly radicalised Left. The latter’s countercultural values and disregard for national symbols like the flag offended the workers, who in turn defected Nixon’s “Silent Majority”.

This formula under which the GOP appealed to patriotic and traditionalist themes as a means to win over labour appears to be working once again under Trump, but alignment on cultural issues was never enough to seal a realignment. Republicans knew they had to deliver on economic gains for workers as well.

Nixon’s administration, for instance, enacted a slate of pro-labour reforms more far-reaching than at any time since the New Deal, often confounding his liberal critics in the process. These included the entrenchment of workplace protections in the Occupational Health and Safety Administration (OSHA), strengthening the financial position of millions of workers in retirement through the Employee Retirement Income Security Act, and raising the minimum wage. A case can be made that Nixon had been one of the most pro-labour presidents in the 20th century.

This is in stark contrast with Trump’s time in office in which his Labor Department opposed minimum wage hikes and union representation rights; appointed an aggressively pro-business National Labor Relations Board, advanced “right-to-work” in the case Janus v. AFSCME Council 31, repealed the “persuader rule”, which obligated firms to report anti-union advocacy, as well as the much more elementary “overtime rule” which would have allowed workers to be paid more for extra work. On O’Brien’s most urgent policy priority, the Butch Lewis Emergency Pension Relief Act, a bill that would rescue the pensions of over 2 million workers, including 400,000 Teamsters, Republicans have been solidly opposed: it had been passed by the Democratic House in 2019 but rejected by the GOP-controlled Senate. Trump’s more recent pledges to ease the tax burden on workers come as small consolation in light of this record. 

And yet, despite Republicans’ lingering hostility to labour, a small cadre of genuinely populist legislators has emerged in the Senate composed of figures like Marco Rubio, Josh Hawley, and vice-presidential nominee JD Vance. The group has been supported by new heterodox policy shops dedicated to fashioning a comprehensive conservative pro-worker agenda, a modern equivalent of Nixon’s programme, which a future Republican administration could theoretically take up. But for this to happen, Republicans must acknowledge the inherent tensions that exist between their burgeoning working-class support and that segment of their base, who continue to hold outsize influence, namely the wealthy local elites in the small-business class, known as the “gentry”, who dominate the party at state and local levels.

Unlike the Democratic-leaning professional and corporate sector, the working class and small-business class generally converge in their shared cultural conservatism and patriotic ethos, yet common symbolic proclivities are not enough to wield a coalition together when there are very real differences in their respective economic aims. The gentry prefer low wages and “flexible” labour markets so as to better attract investment; but for quite understandable reasons, unions want the opposite: higher wages, benefits, and levels of protection for workers.

There is no better illustration of this divide than the epic confrontation that took place between O’Brien and Oklahoma Senator Markwayne Mullin, a non-college educated plumbing company owner and multi-millionaire. After seeming to challenge each other to a fight on the floor of a Senate hearing — something Jimmy Hoffa could have done — the two had to be stopped by Bernie Sanders of all people. The gentry and the proletariat are, evidently, not natural allies, locked as they are in a zero-sum competition. 

The Republican Party must, therefore, rediscover an older mode of political engagement from before the present era of ideological polarisation, one that Nixon and the New Dealers alike would have recognised: brokerage politics. This harking back to a gentler era sees politics not as a battlefield between moral values or ideological visions, but as a bargaining table on which rival material interests can be reconciled through intricate compromise and deal-making.

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To employ this ideal, a future Republican industrial policy could channel financial resources to struggling red-state and hinterland regions to the benefit of the small-business gentry. This micro-elite could then be entrusted to deploy that capital toward productive ends while having a condition of receiving such assistance could be that the same businesses must employ or negotiate with unionised labour. This effective emphasis on pro-labour “conditionality” is one that Democrats are already employing in their own industrial policy schemes. In this scenario, the gentry would be compelled to deal with labour’s demands and perhaps give up their labour market preferences in exchange for guaranteed business investment; while unions in these parts of the country would accept the continued economic leadership and sway of the gentry in exchange for tangible concessions. In other words, a zero-sum contest becomes a negotiated settlement.

The post-Reagan Right is accustomed to viewing such questions of economic distribution through ideological lenses, as a conflict of virtuous free-market principles against the perversions of socialism and collectivism. But brokerage politics would dispense with such moralism and simply assume a natural divergence of goals while working toward reasonable syntheses.

Rather than being a party exclusively of capital or labour, the GOP could instead play the role of “honest broker” between the two as it had in the days of Nixon, and going as far back as McKinley and Lincoln. It was a time when workers and businessmen alike had reason to vote for a Republican Party, who reconciled their best interests against the backdrop of an industrialising economy. Such an approach would amount to a sober, realistic path to incorporating their material interests into the Right’s agenda, closer to the transactional instincts of the union bosses of old. Under these conditions, neither Republicans nor Democrats would be able to take labour for granted again.

Having gratifyingly removed a leader who had become dangerous and unstable, the media, like a grizzly bear that kills its first human and will only eat human flesh from then on, shifted its purpose from investigate, report and expose, to search and destroy. In the process, it has normalised disaster thinking about American life, from the most ordinary experiences — love and work — to the highest echelons of human activity. If America is on the verge of political calamity, it is because for the past five decades, the media has kept the country on the edge of its seat expecting no less.

Unable to come up with another Watergate, the media tried to force every story it could into the Watergate template. Someone big had to be exposed as doing something really bad, with the result that they had to be made to fall exceptionally hard. There was some precious, honest, public-spirited journalistic work as a result. But the media, as befit its proud new image as heroic saviour of democracy, gradually robbed democracy of its vital essence: the freedom to live life privately, secretly, incalculably. (When Socrates said that “the unexamined life is not worth living”, he did not have in mind 24/7 cable news.)

It was, of course, Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, in particular, whose doggedness exposed the connections between the Republican burglars of the Democratic National Headquarters and figures close to the paranoid, self-destructing Nixon. Their bestselling memoir, All the President’s Men, along with its blockbuster movie, made the men’s names synonymous with Watergate and media heroism. Never mind that had it not been for countless law enforcement figures, politicians and the Supreme Court, which ordered Nixon to give up the notorious tapes that incriminated him, Nixon might well have never been impeached. Woodward and Bernstein caught but the tip of the iceberg, yet it proved enough to keep the self-celebrating media’s champagne cold for two generations.

Like parents who refuse to allow their adult children to grow up, the liberal media has spent 50 years in a stage of arrested development. It continues to pretend that the country is a wayward child of the Sixties and Seventies, in need of the corrective hand of death-defying journalism. Indeed, the “woke” turn in the liberal media, now in the process of artfully incorporating criticisms of its pious effusions into its pious effusions, was really just an attempt to find a dramatically clear-cut moral issue, like Watergate, to get all heroic about, again. This desperation has been all the more intense since the media itself was discredited by its advocacy of the invasion of Iraq: having exposed the politicians as scoundrels, the credulous, war-mongering media got themselves indicted as same by the bloggers. Now, alternate universes of news on social media proclaim little Watergates every day.

In 2016, it was breath-taking to watch the media hurl itself at Trump in the hope of recapturing its pursuit of Nixon. It was hardly a coincidence that the movie The Post, about The Washington Post’s publication of the Pentagon Papers, came out just over a year after Trump was elected.

Yet the Nixon era seemed like innocence itself, as the epithet “Tricky Dick” mutated into “Hitler”, “Tiberius” and “Peron” as monikers for Trump. We longed for the bad old days, when the humble legwork of reporters like W and B, and sober, investigative columns by the likes of Jack Anderson, had not yet given way to the sniping, middle-school groupthink that too often passed for reporting after Trump’s ascent. In the Watergate era, the media exposed Nixon as a petty criminal. Now, in its longing to recapture its glorious past, the media has pummelled the petty criminal from Queens into a kind of Christ. Where Proust had his madeleine, nostalgic American journalism has its Trump.

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Trump gave the “failing media”, as he calls it, a second life. But it was Nixon who elevated the media into a role that it had long hungered for: democracy’s indispensable eyes and ears. The invitation rang out among the protestors at the Chicago convention in 1968. “The whole world is watching” was an ironic slogan from a New Left that sought to deflate self-centred American arrogance. But the whole world cannot watch unless it has a medium to watch on. Enter TV news, and a new era of media domination.

Nixon himself, in his famous “Checkers” speech of 1952 — where he successfully debunked accusations of misusing campaign funds — made an end run around the dominant print media of the time by delivering his speech on television, just as Trump when he entered politics made an end run around TV and print journalism by resorting to Twitter. John F. Kennedy later used his photogenic charm to vanquish Nixon in the first televised debate in 1960, and TV news later helped serve as handmaiden to Nixon’s demise.

But the new media reality of constant vigilance and the pursuit of truth and justice had been established. Before Nixon, the news was just the news. There had been newspaper crusades; there was Edward R. Murrow’s truly heroic pursuit of Senator Joseph McCarthy. But the American press had never taken down a president. That was big game.

After Watergate, the press acquired a gravitational force usually possessed by sheerly political forms of power. It possessed a level of authority and reality all its own. Joe Shuster and Jerry Siegel, the creators of the Superman comic strip, had known what they were doing when they made Superman’s alter ego a newspaperman named Clark Kent. They knew that the newspaper editors they were hoping to convince to publish their comic strip harboured their own alter egos as the Supermen who would protect the republic from harm.

Today, the media obsession with Nixon, sensationally lucrative and ego-gratifying, has mutated into a trillion-eyed media obsession with everything. The effect has been to turn democracy against itself. Here is Edward Shils in his classic work, The Torment of Secrecy, explaining why, “without the willingness to disregard much of what our fellow citizens do… there could be no freedom”:

“Democracy could not function if politics and the state of the social order were always on everyone’s mind. If most men, most of the time, regarded themselves as their brother-citizens’ keepers, freedom, which flourished in the indifference of privacy, would be abolished, and representative institutions would be inundated by the swirl of plebiscitary emotions — by aggressiveness, acclamation and alarm.”

Well, nowadays, most people, modelling themselves on the aggressive, acclimating and alarm-ringing media that Watergate created, regard themselves as just that. With Watergate, the American media established a style of never disregarding what our fellow citizens do, no matter how trivial or irrelevant. Of course, this has been taken up with fury by social media, where reducing the secrets of politics to everyday stuff is on everyone’s mind every minute, day and night. And once you declare secrecy an intolerable torment — the secrecy of the “deep state”, of hidden thoughts, of words and actions buried in the past — then any seeming exposure of truth has the liberating force of not being a secret. Exposing a secret has now become the sole criterion of truth. Even if it is a lie. Especially if it contradicts an official fact, which is by definition, something born in the realm of official secrets. Populism is thriving now not least because at the heart of populism is an abhorrence of secrets, which for some time has been at the heart of culture.

Unlike Trump, Ivy-educated, born to wealth, bathed in wealth, schooled and quickened in the sybaritic dens of sophisticated New York, Nixon was a born populist. Trump falsely believed that the 2020 election was stolen from him because he felt entitled to remain president; Nixon believed the Kennedys stole the election from him in 1960 because he felt humiliated by coastal elites all his life.

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His pursuit of Alger Hiss for betraying American secrets to the Russians probably had as much to do with Hiss’s elite WASP background as with his treachery. Nixon’s eyes gleamed with satisfaction during his Checkers speech when he, accurately, accused Democrat presidential candidate, and mandarin of mandarins, Adlai Stevenson of misusing campaign funds. The root of Nixon’s populism was his feeling of smallness, of being an impostor always grabbing for more.

Yet this product of a world-historical inferiority complex established the Environmental Protection Agency, passed the Occupational Health and Safety Act, signed the Equal Rights Act into law, temporarily imposed wage and price controls, expanded the Food Stamp programme, and tried, unsuccessfully, to pass the Family Assistance Plan, which was an attempt at a guaranteed basic income that even Biden never pretended to espouse. He decreased troop levels in Vietnam, drastically reduced American casualties and extricated the country in 1974 from a war that had been created by liberal idealist opportunists, a war that had started with “military advisors’ in 1961. Even as he illegally expanded the war into Cambodia and Laos; even as he authorised Kissinger, long American high society’s favourite war criminal, to commit or enable atrocities in Cambodia, Chile, Bangladesh, Cyprus and East Timor; even as he tried to destroy his critics — he called them “enemies” — at home.

Nixon is routinely referred to as an enigma, a mystery, a cipher, a fungible opportunist. This is accurate, probably, but it is a tedious and tired narrative line that illuminates very little.

Fundamentally, Nixon was a watershed figure who led America away from any sort of shared reality into the obscure recesses of the American mind. That is to say, you couldn’t make sense of America during Nixon’s reign unless you turned away from the chaos in America and towards what made Nixon tick. That was when mind began to trump matter; when who a leader really was started to matter more than the context they acted in. That is another shift in the direction of populism. Populists prize personality, the more intriguing the better, in their leaders above all else.

After Nixon Aenigmaticus, the political question of our time is not: What does this person believe? No one, after all, believes anyone’s profession of belief anymore, least of all a politician’s. No, after Nixon, the question of our time, when it comes to democratic leaders, is not what, or who. It is when, and how, will a particular “who” begin to unravel. And, depending on your goals, or mere desires, what you can do to hasten it along. We are all our brother-citizens’ keepers now. We are all, that is to say, Woodward and Bernstein. Thanks to the self-anointed hero-journalists of yore, we are condemned to ceaseless, remorseless vigilance — all in the name of democracy.

Instead of assigning blame or praise, I will limit myself to personal recollections. Soon after arriving in the US in 1972, to pursue accelerated doctoral studies at Johns Hopkins University (already 27 and married with a child, I had no time to lose), an older London acquaintance, the eminent contemporary historian Walter Laqueur introduced me to his close friend from Berlin, Helmut Sonnenfeldt — then the senior figure on the National Security Council headed by Kissinger. When Kissinger became Nixon’s second Secretary of State in September 1973, Sonnenfeldt became Kissinger’s Counsellor, a role analogous to the “consigliere” of fictional Mafia families (I never heard the term in Sicily, where I grew up). While the job of the Secretary of State is to shield the US from foreign antagonists, the Counsellor’s job is to shield the Secretary of State from his bureaucratic enemies in other departments of government — and, most of all, from his own State department officials.

That Laqueur shared Sonnenfeldt and Kissinger’s uncontrollable passion for the German Bundesliga‘s football teams was an additional bond between the three German Jews, which I failed to share as Laqueur’s sidekick, although I too was a German speaker. While Kissinger didn’t like to hold entire conversations in German, he enjoyed using less translatable German expressions such as Hochstapler, loosely defined as a confidence trickster, and Betrüger, an impostor and deceiver.

That he liked to use those specific words was striking because Kissinger himself was a compulsive liar — a characteristic which does not detract from his huge achievement of “castling” the USSR by turning China from a strategic enemy to strategic ally. Indeed, lying was so much part of Kissinger’s personality that he took no action against Sonnenfeldt when, in a moment of madness, the latter blurted out that Kissinger would lie when he had to, and would keep on lying just to remain in practice for the next occasion when he would have to lie again.

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One victim of Kissinger’s lying — all for a good cause, as was most often the case — was James R. Schlesinger, the Rand Corporation strategist who was Nixon’s Secretary of Defense in October 1973, and for whom I soon started working as a day-rate strategist. At the time, a much smaller and weaker Israel was fighting for its life against Egypt and Syria, after being surprised by their simultaneous offensives on 6 October. The badly outnumbered Israelis needed supplies urgently, and Schlesinger promptly ordered the US Air Force’s airlift command to start assembling aircraft and needed the supplies.

But Nixon, fearing an Arab oil embargo, would not give the green light. Instead of arguing Israel’s case with Nixon, as a nice Jewish boy should have done, Kissinger wanted to be a very nice Jewish boy — by holding up the airlift for just a few days, so that Egypt could enjoy its initial surprise attack before Israel’s inevitable counter-offensive. That would, he hoped, improve the chances of the Egyptians agreeing to a “peace of the brave”, instead of more of the bitterness caused by Israel’s crushing 1967 victory.

Kissinger’s calculation proved to be accurate, and the peace he engineered by delaying America’s supplies lasted for half a century. But in those red-hot days of October 1973, it was a huge embarrassment for Kissinger to hold up the airlift, so he circulated the rumour that Schlesinger was to blame. As it turned out, when Nixon finally ordered the airlift after Golda Meir’s entreaties, fully stocked C-5 aircraft took off almost from Dover Air Force base — thus proving that Schlesinger, far from dragging his feet, had ensured that both aircraft and supplies would be ready to go as soon as White House approval arrived. By then, however, Kissinger’s lie had become Washington’s truth.

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This had serious consequences, making Schlesinger so unpopular that a small intrigue was enough to persuade President Ford to fire him in 1975. When Laqueur and I wrote an article revealing the truth about who did what in October 1973, Kissinger was not seriously irritated — he just called us “partners in crime”.

But the Kissinger-Schlesinger quarrel was also about something altogether larger than the 1973 airlift: détente with the Soviet Union, which was Kissinger’s most important policy creation and which Schlesinger fiercely opposed. He was still in office when it culminated in the Vladivostok Summit Meeting between Secretary General Brezhnev and President Ford in November 1974, in which the two sides finally agreed finally agreed to exact numerical restrictions on each side’s nuclear weapons, and — even more importantly — also agreed to manage all future conflicts jointly, even if that would offend their respective allies.

The Vladivostok summit was Kissinger’s apotheosis. It sealed his détente policy with the Soviet Union — and, in the meetings, it was very obvious that Brezhnev relied on Kissinger to guide him more than he relied on his own foreign minister, Gromyko, by then in his 18th year in office and a dried-up prune. It was just as obvious that Ford was out of his limited depth, and that Kissinger was telling him what to do and say every step of the way. Considering that Kissinger was concurrently going in and out of Beijing with as much or as little ceremony as he wanted, in his final days in office he seemed to be more than just the US Secretary of State, but the world’s statesman.

But Vladivostok was also his downfall. Even before Jimmy Carter, the next President, repudiated all his policies by prioritising human rights over détente with Moscow or amity with Beijing, his own President Ford had to promise that he would not re-appoint Kissinger if re-elected: the backlash against his conviviality with the world’s most powerful dictators was just too strong.

After that, Kissinger mostly kept in touch by sending me (and many others) every article he wrote. The most recent was from just a week ago: a letter on the dangers and promise of artificial intelligence co-authored with Graham Allison. By contrast, when we did occasionally meet, mostly at Manhattan dinner parties, he avoided any serious conversation. He would invariably turn into the other Kissinger, the gossip-loving society figure, who never talked of his money-making Kissinger Associates or anything else of substance.

That he died at the age of 100 is more extraordinary than many realise: I was in frequent contact with him soon after his quadruple bypass surgery in February 1982. Back then, his surgeon confidently gave him another 10 years.

The date dividing B.T. (Before Trump) and A.T. (After Trump) was June 16, 2015. On that day, America’s 45th president descended Trump Tower’s golden escalator to announce that he was running for the Republican nomination. Within hours, the traditional patterns of US politics were shattering and crystallising into new formations. Whether Trump is sent to jail by vengeful Democratic prosecutors, re-elected to the White House, or fades away playing golf in Florida, today, in the Year 8 A.T., America’s Left, Right and centre have all been redefined in relation to him.

To understand this transformation, one must first understand that Trumpism did not appear out of nowhere in 2015. The migration of the educated and affluent to the Democrats, as well as the white working class and more recently a minority of the non-white working class to the Republicans, dates back to the Sixties. Politically, it first manifested itself in the 1972 presidential election, in which white working-class Democratic voters switched and helped Richard Nixon win a landslide victory over George McGovern.

But this shift was far from fixed. Instead of building on Nixon’s Main Street populism and centrism, Ronald Reagan bequeathed the Republican Party to K Street neoconservatives who sought to build a post-Cold War American global empire ruled by Wall Street free marketeers. This was not what “Nixon Democrats” or “Reagan Democrats” were looking for. Alienated by an increasingly upscale and socially liberal Democratic party, many white working-class voters in the Northern industrial states, which would later vote for Trump, rallied behind the Texan billionaire Ross Perot in 1992, when, by denouncing the offshoring of US manufacturing jobs, he won 19% of the popular vote — more than any third-party candidate since former president Theodore Roosevelt had run as the Progressive Party candidate in 1912.

After winning fewer votes in his 1996 run, Perot withdrew from politics. His personal vehicle, the Reform Party, was contested by would-be successors, with its Right wing led by the “paleoconservative” populists Patrick Buchanan and former KKK leader David Duke, and its relative Left wing dominated by the TV wrestler Jesse Ventura and one Donald J. Trump. Trump withdrew from the Reform Party presidential race and Patrick Buchanan became its nominee in 2000. Ventura went on to become a one-term governor of Minnesota, while Trump became a — so far — one-term president of the United States.

In the following years, a strain of Nixonism-Perotism continued to exist in the Republican party, but it was represented by economically populist, socially conservative figures such as Rick Santorum and Mike Huckabee. They were easily caricatured in the media and blacklisted by Republican donors. Trump, however, was able to win the nomination in spite of donor-class opposition because, like Perot, he could fund his own campaign (although at later stages he came to rely on other big donors as well).

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What this shows is that, between Nixon and Trump, there existed a constituency of Republicans, independents, and some Democrats who could be rallied behind pro-manufacturing economic nationalism, a preference for national-interest realpolitik over costly crusades abroad, and a moderate social traditionalism — even if it lost most of its battles to shape the Republican Party to the globalist neocons and libertarians.

Of course, had Trump not run, and had he not been a self-funded billionaire candidate, the populist candidates in 2015 would have been defeated by the big-money candidates. But while neocon-libertarian control of the Republican Party under Jeb Bush and others might have lasted into the 2020s or 2030s, at some point it was doomed to collapse under the weight of its incompatibility with domestic and global realities. Whatever else might be said about Trump, by toppling the Bush and Clinton dynasties and the establishments they embodied, he accelerated that moment. And in its wake, the Republican Party has been split into four factions: Only-Trumpists, Never-Trumpists, Pseudo-Trumpists, and Post-Trumpists.

The Only-Trumpists

Any hope that Trump might promote the Nixon-Perot alternative to Reaganism-Bushism was dashed soon after his unexpected electoral college win. Trump fired Steve Bannon, who had helped him win by tapping into populist themes. For the rest of his presidency, he relied on his son-in-law Jared Kushner, a completely conventional establishmentarian.

Lacking any ideological fuel, Trump was the weakest president in his relations with Congress since another anti-Washington outsider in the White House, Jimmy Carter. The congressional Republican leadership, for instance, which controlled both the House and the Senate between 2017 and 2019, humiliated him by refusing to allocate any funding for the central promise of his campaign, a “wall” along the US-Mexican border. Instead, the president was forced to meekly sign into law a massive tax cut for the rich pushed through Congress by Paul Ryan and others, which turned out to be the only major legislative achievement of his presidency. He may have sought a détente with North Korea and did not start any new foreign wars, but he did not end US involvement in any of the Forever Wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Libya.

In 2020, for the first time since the party was founded to oppose the extension of slavery in the 1850s, the GOP did not have a policy platform. The old Republic offering of global military intervention, free-market fundamentalism and economic appeasement of China was gone. But Trump failed to fill it with any new programme. Instead, he himself filled the void, something which remains the case to this day. Last month, on his personal social media platform, Truth Social, Trump released a 2024 platform calling for up to 10 new American cities on federal land, flying cars, and Tony Blair-style baby bonds — proposals that had nothing to do with anything he had run on in 2016 or anything he had achieved in office. Trump’s policy agenda has descended into improvisation. The sole continuity is Trump himself.

Meanwhile, the true number of Only-Trumpists remains unclear. High levels of support for him in polls about preferences for the Republican nominee in 2024 are probably misleading and, at this preliminary stage, reflect lack of public knowledge about rivals such as Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. A more representative sample may be the mob that stormed the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, which contained a mixture of conspiracy theorists, radical reactionaries, misguided patriots, mischief-makers, and a shaman wearing buffalo horns — a far cry from the army of armed white nationalists who, many Democrats warn, are awaiting the signal from their orange leader to rise up, seize control of most states and the federal government, and end American democracy. Donald J. Trump — disorganised, incompetent, and unable to keep his mouth shut — is the last person in the US who could lead a successful conspiracy.

The Never-Trumpists

Compared to when neoconservatives defined Republican foreign policy and free-marketeers and supporters of mass cheap-labour immigration controlled Republican economic policy, the Never-Trumpists are a shadow of what they once were. In less than a decade, they went from paramountcy to pariah status in the Grand Old Party. Paul Ryan, once seen as the future of the party, was driven out of Congress in 2018, while many prominent former Republican neoconservatives such as William Kristol have formally switched their allegiance to the Democratic party (beware, Democrats!).

Once Trump is gone from the scene, the Never-Trumpists and Only-Trumpists will vanish. In their absence, the battle for the GOP will be played out as a struggle between the two remaining groups: the Post-Trumpists and Pseudo-Trumpists.

Pseudo-Trumpists 

The largest faction among today’s Republican policymakers might be described as pseudo-Trumpists. These are former Reagan-Bush Republicans, some of them former Never-Trumpists. They are unwilling to abandon the Republican Party, and afraid to abandon Trump’s still significant followers.

Their solution is to focus on criticism of “woke” topics, such as transgender ideology and critical race theory, in the hope that this will allow them to win office without discarding their prior commitments to free trade and foreign wars of choice. In effect, this is just a revival of the old culture-war politics of the Bushes, particularly George W. Bush — who ran on hot-button social issues such as gay marriage and then governed as a libertarian in economics and a neoconservative in foreign policy.

Today, as governors, Glenn Youngkin in Virginia and Ron DeSantis in Florida have both been able to win by running against Left-leaning local school boards, while keeping their views of foreign policy and national economic policy vague. But is that enough? When DeSantis recently criticised the extent of America’s commitment to Ukraine, much of the Republican establishment criticised him for his heresies and he walked back his comments, suggesting that, under a thin orange coating of Trumpwash, a lot of Republicans remain Bushites.

Post-Trumpists

Of all of the factions in contemporary American politics, the Post-Trumpists are the most promising. They are also the most interesting, given they can be found in both parties.

A small number of Republicans in Congress, including Senators Josh Hawley, Marco Rubio and J.D. Vance, are committed to building a Republican Party and a conservative movement that reflects the transformation of the party in the last few decades: from one dominated by business elites and affluent professionals to one with an increasingly multiracial working-class base. While remaining staunch social conservatives, Hawley and Rubio have battled for higher tax credits for children and families. Rubio, in particular, has also defended striking workers and the idea of organised labour in the abstract, while Vance has called for making childbirth free for all Americans.

Most of the brainpower on the centre-Right is found among the editors and contributors to Julius Krein and Gladden Pappin’s American Affairs, Oren Cass’s American Compass think tank, and Compact, a heterodox journal uniting mavericks of Right and Left, edited by Sohrab Ahmari and Matthew Schmitz. The latter has links to Britain’s post-liberal movement and to Catholic critics of liberalism such as Patrick Deneen. They are post-Trumpist insofar as they see their reform project as one that is independent of Trump, whatever their views of the man himself.

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Another strain of Post-Trumpism can be found in the Democratic party. Since Trump’s election, the Democrats redefined themselves as reflexively anti-Trumpist. Indeed, in many areas, the presidency of Joe Biden has been theatrically anti-Trumpist — from more or less abandoning enforcement of US immigration laws to supporting “gender-affirming care” for youth.

In trade and foreign policy, however, Biden has been Post-Trumpist, building on Trump’s policies and themes and trying to appeal to his working-class supporters in industrial states. Biden had the nerve to cut America’s losses in Afghanistan, which Trump failed to do. And Biden has waged a trade war against China as vigorously as Trump, but with more sophistication. Now, with an eye to re-election in 2024, Biden is even tentatively taking a tougher line on illegal immigration. Margaret Thatcher once said that her greatest achievement was Tony Blair. Perhaps Donald Trump’s will turn out to be Joe Biden.

There are certainly causes for optimism. More than any other faction, Post-Trumpists have been willing to work across party lines on particular issues. Hawley collaborated with Bernie Sanders to push for higher spending on childcare, while Vance teamed up with fellow Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown, a Democrat, to advocate more regulation after the recent toxic train accident in Ohio. Both cases hint at the best thing that could happen to the US: the triumph of Post-Trumpism in both the Republican and the Democratic Parties, and the abandonment of Reaganism and Clintonism.

And the worst thing? A political civil war between Democratic anti-Trumpists, perpetually trying to whip up mass hysteria over the imaginary prospect of a Trump Reich, and Pseudo-Trumpist Republicans — Bush-style militarists and libertarians, crouching inside not a Trojan Horse, but a Trojan Trump.

It’s easy to argue that Trump is merely ginning up interest for a Republican rerun by threatening to leave, along with the quarter of would-be Republican voters who a recent Bulwark poll found would follow him. But that same poll also found that a considerable majority of Republicans want new leadership. Trump, for all his bluster, knows it. Perhaps he’s decided that if he can’t be a Republican president, no one can. If enough defectors remain committed to him, he will surely cost the Republicans the next presidential election.

History offers a fairly direct parallel. A similar Republican split occurred in 1912, when former president Theodore Roosevelt — unhappy with what he perceived as the unduly pro-business policies of his handpicked successor William Howard Taft — returned to challenge him. After losing the nomination to Taft at the Republican convention, despite outperforming him in the then-minority of state primaries in which registered Republicans participated, Roosevelt launched his own Progressive Party. Despite Taft’s considerable incumbency advantage, Roosevelt outpolled him in the general election, launching a characteristically vigorous campaign that saw him not only survive an assassination attempt but finish the speech he was giving with the assassin’s bullet lodged in his chest. Roosevelt siphoned enough support from Taft that Democrat Woodrow Wilson triumphed in an electoral-vote landslide, while winning a mere 42% of the popular vote.

The United States is uniquely vulnerable to this sort of third-party disruption, due to the first-past-the-post voting system that awards all of a state’s electoral votes to the highest-polling candidate, regardless of how close the popular vote is in those states. In 1912, Roosevelt and Taft received a combined 51% of the popular vote — yet carried only eight states between them. Owing to this all-or-nothing system, America offers perhaps the finest representation of French theorist Jean Baudrillard’s formula of bipartite alternation: “The one-party totalitarian regime is an unstable form — it defuses the political scene, it no longer assures the feed-back of public opinion…[but] alternation is the end of the end of representation.” In any particular presidential election, a third party — even a well-supported one such as Theodore Roosevelt’s Progressive Party — has little chance of achieving any kind of representation. However, in the longer term, a third party can be truly disruptive. 

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Here, then, is the crux of the threat presented by Trump, roughly akin to the “nuclear option” in America’s political duopoly: he could wreck the Republican Party in this election and perhaps even destroy it for good, while creating a new second party to take its place. It would be a fate that hadn’t befallen an American political party since the Republican Party emerged in 1854 out of the ashes of the Whig Party, the latter badly fractured by insoluble arguments over slavery. Before that, it hadn’t happened since the Federalist Party — America’s first true political party — had essentially imploded during the War of 1812. It lost its legislative majorities forever to the Democratic-Republican Party, the precursor of today’s Democratic Party.  

But for the most part, American third-party insurgencies have merely cost one or the other party the general election. American Independent Party candidate George Wallace wrestled five states in the Deep South from Democratic control in 1968. Reform Party nominee Ross Perot syphoned millions of economic-nationalist voters from the Republican Party in 1992 and 1996. These were damaging moments, occurring at times of acute national crisis — Wallace polled well with Southern voters seeking to preserve aspects of racial apartheid systems, while Perot appealed to anti-interventionist, anti-free trade Republicans.

Still, though these insurgent campaigns might have led to galling defeats, neither fundamentally reshaped American politics in the way the disappearance of the Federalists or Whigs had. In fact, Republicans, through the shrewd electoral strategising of Richard Nixon, found a way to claim those dispossessed Southern voters in 1972. And since the Nineties, ostensible isolationists and anti-interventionists in both parties — including, perhaps most successfully, Donald Trump in 2016 — have found ways to exploit what had briefly been Perot’s support base. Given their sprawling constituencies, it’s easier for both parties to integrate these aggrieved voters into their ranks — to “sheepdog” these wayward sons and daughters into the established parties using co-opted outsiders to bridge the gap. 

Nevertheless, though unlikely, the kind of “clean break” Trump could trigger does have the potential to fracture the Republican Party forever. And that is because, ever since Richard Nixon permanently enlarged the party by annexing the “Solid South” long critical to Democratic electoral success, the GOP has had a fundamental flaw. It originated in the 19th century as a Northern-centred, pro-business party opposed to both slavery and, eventually, labour unions; post-Nixon, the Republican Party has been permanently struggling with the challenge of uniting small businesspeople, evangelicals, foreign-policy hawks, isolationists, anti-tax libertarians, anti-government libertarians, localists, and economic nationalists. Various leaders, from Ronald Reagan to Trump himself, have fashioned uneasy alliances among these groups — but each settlement has seemed shakier than the previous. Trump, in particular, saw precisely how difficult this challenge could be: he entered Washington with a team of advisors that adhered more closely to the “America-First” principles of his campaign and left with a cabinet full of corporate Republicans, some of whom hurriedly denounced him shortly after he left office.

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At the end of Trump’s presidency, the Republicans were indeed a “house divided”. And if the examples of the Federalists and Whigs offer anything of value for political observers today, it’s that divided parties might cease to be divided simply by ceasing to be at all. In the case of the Whigs, the newly-formed Republican Party addressed the main issues that had split them — free labour and opposition to slavery in the American territories — so there was simply no reason to keep such a large, fractious coalition alive. A more streamlined alternative had presented itself.  Now, the “big-tent” Republican Party may be faced with a challenge analogous to the Whig Party’s in the years immediately preceding the American Civil War. Is the future of the Right to be an interventionist, low-tax party still able to work with Wall Street and Nato? Or do the voters on this side want “America-First”, “MAGA”, and all of Trump’s unifying slogans?

While it is certainly possible to do all of these things — as the Whigs managed to maintain a balance from 1833 to 1856 — it may not be sustainable to do so. Republican politicians and voters who favour free trade and free movement of cheap labour may find themselves, like the Southern “Cotton Whigs” of the American antebellum period, unable to coexist with a MAGA base insistent on tighter border controls, tariffs, and heavier investment in internal industry. If so, Trump — by virtue of being the right person in the right place at the right time — may be able to bring about a permanent separation, likely forcing many Republicans in favour of free trade and free movement into the Democratic fold, just as “Cotton Whigs” joined the ranks of the Democrats.

All of this, however, will depend on the creation of a party that can step out of the shadow of its charismatic founder. Theodore Roosevelt’s Progressive Party, which outpolled the Republican Party 27% to 23% in 1912, offers an instructive example here. Roosevelt’s party shared certain overall policy goals with those American reformers dubbed lower-case “progressives”, such as a desire to more efficiently regulate large corporations and establish certain social welfare programmes. But its electoral fortunes waned significantly following that strong 1912 showing, disappearing by 1920. Its nickname, the “Bull Moose Party” — so acquired because Theodore Roosevelt had left the 1912 Republican convention claiming he felt “strong as a bull moose” — was apt, because its electoral performance depended to a considerable extent on the personal magnetism of one of the 20th century’s first great “cult of personality” figures, a personality who died in 1919 at the age of 61. 

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A Trump-led party would be at risk of going the way of Roosevelt’s “Bull Moose” party, simply because he, like Roosevelt, is a sort of electoral ne plus ultra. Who would want to follow either act? Trump has, perhaps, a number of possible successors waiting in the wings, ranging from duelling Congresswomen Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert to his own sons, but this is akin to comparing a votive candle to the bright orange sun around which so much media commentary has turned.

Not only that, but the Trump of 2024 is not the insurgent social media star of 2016. He is still quite dove-ish on foreign policy but has lost considerable far-Right goodwill through his association with the era of lockdowns, which he at times supported, and mRNA vaccines, the development of which he considers a major achievement of his regime. The majority of those who identify as Republicans are looking for post-Trump alternatives. Though the former president holds double-digit leads over chief rival Florida governor Ron DeSantis in most polls, that lead vanishes if the single-digit support for various other mainstream candidates, a large hypothetical field ranging from former vice president Mike Pence to former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley, is aggregated and assigned to DeSantis. In other words, in the race of “Trump and every other Republican”, the contest is neck and neck and likely only to tighten as the name recognition of other candidates continues to grow.   

Given Trump’s status as an influencer himself, it would be instructive to watch which candidates the rising “based” or far-Right influencers choose to align themselves with. So far, rising stars such as “Libs of TikTok” account operator Chaya Raichik have managed to stay mum when it comes to choosing between Trump and Ron DeSantis. But it is these people whose considerable soft power could meme not just a movement but an entire party into existence. If Trump cannot win their support, his efforts to construct a party that will overthrow the Republicans and outlast him is likely to be no more successful than his effort to dethrone Twitter with a rival social media platform.

At last, Nixon said, the war was over. At a cost of 58,000 American lives and some $140 billion, not to mention more than two million Vietnamese lives, the curtain was falling. The last US troops would be brought home. South Vietnam had won the right to determine its own future, while the Communist North had pledged to “build a peace of reconciliation”. Despite the high price, Nixon insisted Americans could be proud of “one of the most selfless enterprises in the history of nations”. He had not started the war, but it had dominated his presidency, earning him the undying enmity of those who thought the United States should just get out. But the struggle had been worth it to secure “the right kind of peace, so that those who died and those who suffered would not have died and suffered in vain”. He called it “peace with honour”.

Fifty years on, Nixon’s proclamation of peace with honour has a bitterly ironic ring. As we now know, much of what he said that night was misleading, disingenuous or simply untrue. South Vietnam was in no state to defend itself, and collapsed just two years later. The North Vietnamese had no intention of laying down their weapons, and resumed the offensive within weeks. And Nixon and Kissinger never seriously thought they had secured a lasting peace. They knew the Communists would carry on fighting, and fully intended to intervene with massive aerial power when they did. But then came Watergate. With Nixon crippled, Congress forbade further intervention and slashed funding to the government in Saigon. On 30 April 1975, North Vietnamese tanks crashed through the gates of the presidential palace, and it really was all over.

Half a century later, have the scars of Vietnam really healed? It remains not only America’s longest war but one of its most divisive, comparable only with the Civil War in its incendiary cultural and political impact. The fundamental narrative trajectory of the late Sixties — the turn from shiny space-age Technicolor optimism to strident, embittered, anti-technological gloom — would have been incomprehensible without the daily images of suffering and slaughter on the early evening news. It was Vietnam that destroyed trust in government, in institutions, in order and authority. In 1964, before Lyndon Johnson sent in combat troops after the Gulf of Tonkin incident, fully three-quarters of Americans trusted the federal government. By 1976, a year after the fall of Saigon, not even one in four did so.

It was in the crucible of Vietnam, too, that you can spot many of the tensions that now define American politics. Perhaps the most potent example came in May 1970, after Nixon invaded nominally neutral Cambodia to eliminate the North Vietnamese Army’s jungle sanctuaries. First, on 4 May, four students were shot and killed by the National Guard during a demonstration at Kent State University, Ohio. Then, on 8 May, hundreds more students picketed outside the New York Stock Exchange, only to be attacked by several hundred building workers waving American flags.

The “hard hat riot”, as it became known, was the perfect embodiment of patriotic populist outrage at what Nixon’s vice president, leading bribery enthusiast Spiro Agnew, called “the nattering nabobs of negativism…an effete corps of impudent snobs who characterise themselves as intellectuals”. Today it seems almost predictable, just another episode in the long-running culture wars. But at the time it seemed genuinely shocking. And with his brilliantly ruthless eye for a tactical advantage, Nixon saw its potential. When he invited the construction workers’ leaders to the White House two weeks later, he knew exactly what was doing. “The hard hat will stand as a symbol, along with our great flag,” he said, “for freedom and patriotism and our beloved country”.

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Even now, many Americans prefer to forget how the war ended. Yet even in that story, there are any number of hints of what was to come. Take what happened to the South Vietnamese — more than a million in total — who fled to the United States in the aftermath of defeat. At first, many were housed in air bases and army barracks. But polls showed that most of their new neighbours resented them and wanted them gone. In the inaptly named town of Niceville, Florida, where more than a thousand Vietnamese refugees were quarantined at Eglin Air Force Base, eight out of ten people said they wanted them out. “Gooks Go Home” read placards in Arkansas. “They can’t speak English,” said one Los Angeles carpenter, “and they will be on welfare before they get off the airplane. And who pays for that? We do.”

Perhaps it’s easy to understand why so many people resented the new arrivals. Times were hard, the American economy was in recession, and unlike previous waves of refugees, the South Vietnamese were symbols of defeat, reminders of a uniquely humiliating, agonising chapter in the nation’s recent history. Even on the Left, there was remarkably little sympathy for them.

Unbelievable as it may seem today, the bloody collapse of South Vietnam — which saw thousands of former American allies executed or imprisoned for years in Communist concentration camps — provoked an outpouring of joy among elements of the old peace movement. On 11 May 1975, not two weeks after Saigon’s fall, some 50,000 people gathered to celebrate in Central Park, for what one reporter called “a joyous all-day carnival of songs and speeches in the perfect sunshine”. Two Democratic congresswomen, Elizabeth Holtzman of Brooklyn and Bella Abzug of Manhattan, delivered rousing speeches, and there were songs from Pete Seeger, Joan Baez, Paul Simon and other veterans of the good old days. “There’s a lot of lumps in a lot of throats,” one onlooker told reporters. “It’s unbelievable. Today is the first day I really realise the war is over.” You would scarcely have believed that the Americans had lost. Or perhaps you would.

For most Americans, however, the overwhelming emotions were humiliation, sadness, and guilt. “I thought that we did a really miserable job for those people,” said Thomas Polgar, the CIA chief in Saigon, “and they would have been much better off if we had never gone there in the first place.” Indeed, some decided not only that American intervention in Vietnam had been a mistake, but that all interventions abroad must be illegitimate or misguided. American isolationism has a long history, but never has it enjoyed a bigger boost than it did in the early Seventies.

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Around the world, too, America’s image had taken a horrendous battering. Asked for their reactions to the defeat in Vietnam, the British historian Jack Plumb mourned “the diminution of America to human size”, the Dutch critic Rob Kroes thought the United States was “losing its magnetism”, and the French sociologist Michel Crozier declared that America was no longer “a touchstone for other societies”. And for perhaps the first time, even instinctively pro-American commentators began to wonder — as they still do today — whether the nations of Europe should prepare for life without the shield of their most powerful ally. “For 20 years we have enjoyed a golden age of security under the American umbrella,” said the Daily Mail. “Now we must start learning to take care of ourselves.” That was almost half a century ago. What’s changed?

The irony, of course, is that the war really had been all for nothing. Henry Kissinger always insisted that the struggle had been essential to stop the advance of Communism in south-east Asia. But the domino theory turned out to be nonsense. Vietnam and Cambodia both fell to Communism, but instead of the dominoes tumbling in rapid sequence, they promptly started fighting one another. Then the Chinese got stuck in, too. Today Vietnam is still ruled by the autocratic Communist Party; yet it’s also a rapidly growing globalised economy with high inequality, high corruption and an unhealthy dependence on Western tourism.

As for the United States, it takes more than 50 years for such a traumatic defeat to fade. The deepest scars, naturally, belong to those who suffered most. “I came home from the war with the curious feeling that I had grown older than my father, who was then 51,” writes Philip Caputo in the preface to his memoir A Rumor of War. “A man saw the heights and depths of human behaviour in Vietnam, all manner of violence and horrors so grotesque that they evoked more fascination than disgust. Once I had seen pigs eating napalm-charred corpses — a memorable sight, pigs eating roast people.”

But there’s a case, too, that the shock of defeat fundamentally distorted American politics. It’s a misconception that the “Vietnam syndrome” made the United States less likely to embark on foreign crusades. The truth is surely quite the reverse: successive presidents were desperate to wipe away the stain. Would Ronald Reagan have sent US troops into the sideshow of Grenada in 1983, had it not been for his eagerness to show that he could succeed where John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson and Nixon had failed? Would George Bush senior have gone into Panama? Would the younger Bush have been quite so quick to assert his nation’s virility in Afghanistan and Iraq, had he not spent his college years during the height of the Vietnam War, when every night brought new footage of America’s travails in the jungle? Perhaps the answer in each case is still yes, because intervention is an inevitable consequence of wealth and power. But it’s surely worth asking the questions.

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Even the most recent presidents have been haunted by Vietnam. Barack Obama once called the treatment of Vietnam veterans “a mistake that must never be repeated”, and it’s pretty obvious that he was talking about the wider war, too. Indeed, his foreign policy mantra — “Don’t do stupid shit” — could hardly be a better encapsulation of the post-Vietnam mindset, which explains his reluctance to get involved in Syria. Joe Biden, too, is a post-Vietnam politician: one of his first major votes as a young senator in 1975, for example was to cut off funding to South Vietnam just days before the fall of Saigon.

But there is, of course, an exception — a recent American president who didn’t serve in Vietnam because he avoided the draft five times, and never really wrestled with its moral and strategic dilemmas because he always knew it was a terrible idea. He never really understood why other young men bothered going, he once said. “What did they get out of it?” And perhaps Donald Trump can be forgiven for not taking Vietnam seriously, because he had bigger things to worry about. He never felt guilty about ducking the war, he told Howard Stern, because “we have our own Vietnam — it’s called the dating game”. Dating was genuinely perilous, he explained, because of the risk of sexually transmitted diseases. Indeed, women’s vaginas were “potential landmines…there’s some real danger there”.

Some people might consider this a remarkable analogy. But the 45th President felt blessed to have come through unscathed. “It’s amazing, I can’t even believe it,” he mused. “I’ve been so lucky… It is my personal Vietnam. I feel like a great and very brave soldier.”

You’ll never think of Apocalypse Now in the same way again.

The dominant narrative in the press is that Republicans, or at least a significant cohort of them, were participants in the Senate Watergate Committee’s search for the truth in 1973 and not strictly partisan or obstructionist. This narrative, of course, has enjoyed renewed popularity because of the obvious comparisons between Watergate and the serial high crimes and misdemeanours committed by President Donald Trump.

One question, uttered on June 28, 1973, supposedly exemplified Republicans’ bipartisanship. “What did the President know and when did he know it?” Tennessee Senator Howard Baker famously asked John Dean, President Nixon’s former White House counsel, who was now fessing up to his role as desk officer for the Watergate cover-up. For some reason, the context of Baker’s very first question to Dean has been forgotten. The ambitious senator was not engaged in a bipartisan search for the truth; rather, Baker was creating a firebreak that he hoped would protect Nixon’s presidency against what he realised had been three-and-a-half days of extremely damaging testimony. But there was one very large hole in Dean’s cool and detailed account. His first direct meeting of any consequence with the President had not occurred until February 27, 1973, more than eight months after the June 17th break-in. So while Dean believed he was carrying out the President’s wishes, he could not actually offer direct testimony about what Nixon knew and did in the earliest and most crucial phase of the cover-up.

Baker’s gambit gave every evidence of working — for two weeks. Then, in mid July, White House assistant Alexander Butterfield revealed the existence of an extensive, voice-activated tape recording system that promised to resolve what appeared to be an insuperable obstacle: who was telling the truth? As the late Stanley Kutler, the dean of Watergate historians, wrote, “discovery of the tapes undid Baker’s careful handiwork. The tapes made irrelevant his question to John Dean… [Because now] Richard Nixon himself could answer Baker, and in indelible words.”

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Kutler’s observation was an understatement. Baker’s question had transmogrified into a battering ram against Nixon, until he was ultimately forced to give up the tapes, and it was his own words, more than any other single factor, that forced him into a humiliating resignation.

And what Baker did after his strategy backfired should not be forgotten either. He did not give up on his aim of being seen inside the GOP as the senator who saved Nixon’s presidency, a reputation that he hoped would put him head and shoulders above his party rivals for a future presidential run. While the president fought his way through the courts for months, hoping to avoid having to turn the tapes over to the special Watergate prosecutor, Baker and the minority counsel, Fred Thompson (a future Tennessee senator), desperately attempted a rearguard action. They sought to implicate the Central Intelligence Agency in the break-in, rather than the White House and Committee to Re-Elect the President. It was one of the most cynical acts in a scandal brimming with them.

About two weeks before the Senate Watergate Committee released its final report, in mid-July 1974, Baker and Thompson leaked their findings of alleged CIA complicity to the press. They landed with a thud, and were completely forgotten once the president released on August 5 what instantly became known as “the smoking gun” tape: an Oval Office conversation between Nixon and his top aide Bob Haldeman discussing how to use the CIA to impede the FBI’s Watergate investigation. Baker finally had the answer to his question.

Baker’s reputation suffered no lasting damage, in or out of the GOP. When his devastating question was remembered, as it often was, it was taken out of its intended context. And Baker exhibited no abiding impulse to correct the misunderstanding after Nixon’s disgrace was complete. Indeed, as time went on he absolutely welcomed the erroneous interpretation.

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If rose-colored glasses and wishful thinking drive the false narrative about Watergate bipartisanship, the same cannot be said for the driving force behind the other misleading narrative. Here, vested interests, reputations, and a lot of money are at stake.

Philip L. Graham, the publisher of The Washington Post before Katherine Graham of Watergate-era fame, is frequently credited (albeit erroneously) with coining the saying that “journalism is the first rough draft of history.” That phrase is the problem in a nutshell. Those who wrote the first rough draft of Watergate have persisted in doing everything to ensure the first draft is also the final draft, aided enormously by the press writ large, eager to bask in the reflected glory.

The ubiquitous narrative about Watergate is still largely the one laid out in All the President’s Men, the 1974 book by Washington Post reporters Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, which became an eponymous Hollywood blockbuster starring Robert Redford in 1976. As the literary critic Wilfrid Sheed noted, Americans might be getting fuzzy about the details of Watergate, “but at least they remember the movie: a couple of nosy journalists and an informer, wasn’t it?”

No one much noticed the degree to which the book was a product of, and influenced by, a passing fancy at the time, the so-called “New Journalism.” Books in this genre employed literary devices normally considered the domain of novels and put them to work in books that purported to be nonfiction. “Woodstein” exploited their factual authority as journalists while simultaneously enjoying the license granted novelists. The result was a gripping newspaper procedural focused most intensely on the first eight months or so of the scandal — but one that was a very narrow slice of that history and bore only a faint resemblance to what had actually gone on inside the confines of The Washington Post.

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Most notably, All The President’s Men neatly sidestepped the truth that a troika — not a duo — was responsible for the Post’s coverage. Barry Sussman, a city editor who became the special Watergate editor in mid-July 1972, had been indispensable in producing the stories that won the Post a Pulitzer Prize. Indeed, managing editor Howard Simons believed that if any one individual, rather than the paper as a whole, deserved a Pulitzer, it was Sussman, not Woodstein. As Simons told Alan Pakula, director of the feature film, “Barry made acceptable the work of two junior reporters . . . [who] didn’t understand what they had often and couldn’t write it.”

Other principal actors slighted, if not maligned, in Bernstein and Woodward’s fabulistic account were the three federal attorneys assigned to prosecute the Watergate burglars; a slew of FBI agents doing the investigating; and the grand jury empaneled to hear the evidence, issue subpoenaes, and draw up indictments. The Watergate cover-up was not broken by the press, but by the legal pincers these actors built, which inexorably closed in on those who had committed perjury during the January 1973 trial of the burglars or otherwise conspired to obstruct justice. No one has ever conveyed a more balanced account of the press vs. the government’s role than Sandy Smith, a legendary reporter for Time magazine who broke as many important stories about Watergate as anyone in the Washington press corps, including Woodstein. After Nixon’s August 1974 resignation, Smith observed,

There’s a myth that the press did all this, uncovered all the crimes . . . It’s bunk. The press didn’t do it. People forget that the government was investigating all the time. In my material there was less than 2 percent that was truly original investigation. There was an investigation being carried out here. It may have been blocked, bent, botched, or whatever [at times], but it was proceeding. The government investigators found the stuff and gave us something to expose.

Finally, there is one last aspect that tells us more about the false narrative presented in All the President’s Men than any other element in the book. It involves the shadowy figure who became as inseparable from the book as the authors themselves, i.e., Sheed’s informer, aka “Deep Throat,” aka W. Mark Felt, the number two executive at the FBI when the Watergate break-in occurred. From 1974 to 2005, Bernstein and Woodward, wined, dined, and gave lectures for which they were handsomely paid, telling and re-telling stories of their reportorial prowess, with their cultivation of Deep Throat the apex of their Watergate reportage. Both journalists were hailed constantly for their supposed fidelity to their über-secret source. You could remove their fingernails and they still wouldn’t reveal Deep Throat’s identity.

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It was actually a phoney mystery. A wizened, razor-sharp retired newspaper editor named Frank Waldrop, who was said to be “absolutely wired [in] to the FBI”, told the Washingtonian magazine, when asked about the Deep Throat guessing game in the spring of 1974, “Read the February 28 [1973] and March 13 [1973] Nixon presidential transcripts and then try someone like Mark Felt on for size.”

Nonetheless, that Woodstein held fast to their pledge of confidentiality to Deep Throat was widely accepted at face value. And it was true that they had, more or less, abided by all the “deep background” stipulations Felt laid down when he agreed to be a source for newspaper stories. But it was also true that Bernstein and Woodward had glaringly violated these same stipulations when writing their book. The public became aware of Felt’s existence as a source; his instrumentality in the stories; what he told Woodward and when. His words were supposedly quoted verbatim, and information he supplied Woodward was linked to specific Post stories, even exact passages. The only fig leaves left for Felt to hide behind was his risqué code name, after a pornographic film popular at the time, and the fact that he was identified as having worked at an unnamed “executive branch” agency.

Eventually the guessing game grew so popular, but wearying and tedious for the authors, that in 1976, Woodward developed a gambit that relieved the pressure while doing nothing to lessen public interest. Now celebrities in their own right, the duo declared that someday, they were fairly certain, history’s most famous whistleblower would come out of the shadows, claim his just reward by writing a fascinating book, and receive the acclaim that was his due. But until then, they were going to keep their word — unless Deep Throat were to die before publishing his story. No one imagined this was an entirely unilateral decision, just as the decision to include him in the book had been. Felt was already furious over the book’s serial violations of the “deep background” arrangement. He was not asked, and certainly did not agree, to be identified in the event of his death. Yet Woodward and Bernstein acted if this were a signed agreement stowed away in a safe-deposit box.

The dénouement finally occurred in May 2005, when Felt’s family and his lawyer outed him in the pages of Vanity Fair, hoping to cash in on the untold story. Bernstein and Woodward grudgingly admitted that Felt was Deep Throat, and the identification finally allowed for careful analysis about what Felt’s design had been all along — or what the late Christopher Hitchens said “rank[ed] as the single most successful use of the news media by an anonymous unelected official with an agenda of his own.”

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Woodstein had long fostered, of course, their preferred interpretation of Felt’s motive: Deep Throat was a selfless, high-ranking official intent on trying to protect the office of the presidency from a criminal in the person of Richard Nixon. Felt “was trying to protect the office [of the presidency],” they wrote in 1974, “to effect a change in its conduct before all was lost.” Actor Hal Holbrook’s brooding portrayal of Deep Throat in the film version had then turned Woodstein’s portrait into something indelible.

But then a curious thing happened. In his own 2005 book about Felt, The Secret Man, Woodward backed away from Felt-as-principled whistleblower, and offered a far more pedestrian — and bureaucratic — explanation familiar to anyone who has laboured in the federal government. Felt leaked because he “believed he was protecting the [FBI]” from a corrupt, lawless president. Eventually Woodward reluctantly threw a third element into his admixture of motives: Felt was “disappointed that he did not get the directorship” following the untimely death of J. Edgar Hoover, who had died seven weeks before the break-in.

The sale of Woodward and Bernstein’s Watergate papers to the Ransom Center in Austin, Texas for $5 million in 2003, however, along with the release of the FBI’s Watergate files, opened the door to an independent assessment. When Woodward’s raw notes from his conversations with Felt were finally opened, none of the above explanations made sense. But a new one did: that Felt’s actions were entirely and only consistent with the “war of the FBI succession,” a no-holds-barred, vicious, internal struggle to succeed Hoover that had been going on for years. Felt leaked not out of pique or bitterness, not to protect the FBI, and not out of any concern over the office of the presidency. His sole aim was to destroy Nixon’s confidence in the acting FBI director, L. Patrick Gray, smear presumed rivals for the job, and steer Nixon toward appointing Felt himself. Richard Nixon was Felt’s only ticket to the directorship and the idea that Deep Throat ever intended to bring the president to ruin was absurd.

It defies belief that two of the most celebrated investigative reporters of their generation did not understand Felt’s true design contemporaneously, or, say, no later than 20 years after Nixon’s resignation. That Bernstein and Woodward still pretend otherwise tells one everything one needs to know about their first rough draft.

It was a fable, almost as self-serving as Felt’s leaks.

That got my attention. At the time, I was a member of the White House staff. I ate lunch almost every day in the White House Mess with Chief of Staff Bob Haldeman, Deputy Chief of Staff John Erlichman, and a crowd of other political aides. I wondered if any of them were involved in this very strange political espionage operation.

Fortunately, my presidential appointment had nothing to do with domestic politics. Along with receiving a White House pass, I had been confirmed by the Senate as an ambassador and in practice was working as the president’s chief trade negotiator. Although I carried a diplomatic passport issued by the State Department, Nixon distrusted State. He often used me as his personal representative for sensitive discussions with foreign leaders and officials.

I had served Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson in several posts since 1962 and had decided, when Nixon was elected, to leave my assignment in the Office of the US Trade Representative. But shortly after Nixon was sworn in, a stranger wandered into my office, whom I soon discovered had been sent by the White House personnel office.

The stranger said his name was Murray Chotiner and that he had been Nixon’s campaign manager in California and during his first run for president in 1960. Murray said Nixon had originally planned to give him a presidential appointment after entering office, but the press had characterised him as Nixon’s “dirty tricks manager”, making Senate confirmation problematic. So he was assigned as general counsel in the USTR.

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Murray said he had been advised by several members of Congress that I was the best informed official on political and trade disputes with European nations. Could he accompany me on my visits to foreign capitals?  I told him I was planning to resign but would stay three months to bring the incoming Nixon team up to speed. Murray travelled with me for about 10 weeks. After a while we became travel buddies, and I came to like his humour and deep insights into politics.

Two years later, in mid-1971, Murray called me to ask if I would be willing to be a consultant to Nixon on international issues, and I agreed. At the start of 1972, Murray called again and said “the President needs you”. I agreed to join his staff full-time and my name was sent to the Senate for confirmation. When I met the president alone, he said he had several international tasks in mind that would likely be subject to political controversy in Washington. When I needed his approval for my decisions or initiatives, he said I could bypass the Haldeman bureaucracy and just tell Murray, who would notify him. “Just don’t tell anyone you have direct access to POTUS.”

In the early days in my new post, Murray took me aside, “Be careful when you speak in or near the Oval Office”, he said. “Recording devices are keeping records of everything said.” This was Haldeman’s idea. A control freak, he wanted to know whatever Nixon was saying or doing with other visitors whenever Haldeman was not present. Murray said he had warned the president that the recordings were a bad idea that would bite him eventually, but Nixon shrugged it off.

As the months rolled on and the Watergate scandal broadened, more and more White House officials and Cabinet officials seemed to be caught covering up inappropriate or even illegal actions.

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During this turmoil, I was busy doing my own job. In 1973, for example, Nixon and French President Georges Pompidou agree to hold a Summit in Reyjavik, Iceland, to address US-French tension following Nixon’s 1971 decision to abandon the gold standard. Nixon asked me to accompany him alongside Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, Treasury Secretary George Shultz, Treasury Undersecretary, Paul Volcker, and other key officials. A special side meeting had been planned for Shultz, Volcker and I to speak with French Finance Minister Giscard d’Estaing. To my surprise, Nixon asked me to do the talking. Later, Shultz explained that Giscard deeply disliked Volcker but seemed to respect me.

When Kissinger and Shultz scheduled a trip to Moscow to meet with Leonid Brezhnev and other high Soviet officials, Nixon asked me to tag along. He also asked me to go to London to assist the Prime Minister’s Cabinet Office in their negotiating UK joining the European Common Market in 1973. After Kissinger laid out a new Pacific security policy framework known as the “Guam Doctrine”, Nixon suggested I go to Canberra and Tokyo to begin dialogue on a potential US economic arrangement with Asia-Pacific nations, which I did.

During 1974, most of my time was spent shepherding Senate approval of the Trade Act of 1974. During this period of Congressional bargaining, Nixon gave me personal authority to sign off with Senate leadership the final drafts of that historic law.

As I was busy doing my job, I saw a building series of actions and cover-ups among the political appointees, resulting in the resignation of the Attorney General, and then successor Attorney Generals and their appointees. A Senate Committee was finally established to investigate the question: was Nixon personally involved in the cover-up? As Senator Howard Baker asked, “What did the President know, and when did he know it?”

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It turned out that the president knew a lot. On 16 July, 1973, one of Nixon’s aides, Alexander Butterfield, revealed the existence of the White House taping system in a televised interview, elevating the scandal from a curiosity to a national obsession. Senate investigators demanded the tapes; Nixon resisted, prevaricated, and dragged his feet, but eventually, in 1974, the Supreme Court ruled that the president had to make them available, and he complied. It then became clear that Nixon had long been complicit in the elaborate cover-up. Given the choice of impeachment or resignation, Nixon resigned in order to avoid further damage to the institution of the presidency.

Looking back, I saw catastrophic damage done to a president by a bunch of inept thugs bent on undermining his political adversaries. Sadly, I could not ask Murray for his opinion because he had been killed in a car crash in 1973. I thought Nixon should have fired everyone involved in the Watergate break-in as soon as the illegal raid on the DNC came to light. I remembered Murray’s warning to me that the White House recording system would come back to bite the president someday.

In some sense, history has been unkind to Nixon. Recently, Watergate has been compared to the raid on the US Capitol on 6 January, 2021, no doubt because both involved a presidential scandal followed by high-profile Congressional hearings. But Nixon was no Trump. His decision to cover up the break-in was a regrettable lapse in judgment, but when confronted with evidence that he was personally involved, Nixon chose his country over himself, resigning to avoid the impeachment of a sitting president. Trump, by contrast, sought to overturn a national election, and at no point since has he been willing to admit responsibility or even acknowledge reality.

In my experience, Nixon was an excellent foreign-policy president. He was actively involved in foreign policy and demonstrated more strategic thinking in this regard than most of his successors, even pulling off a handful of impressive diplomatic coups. His domestic policy decisions, on the other hand, were often questionable. But in that — going by the record of America’s more recent presidents — Richard Nixon was hardly alone.

Shortly after midnight on 17 June, 1972, a security guard at the Watergate Complex noticed that someone had taped over several door locks in the main office building and alerted the police, who arrested five men for breaking into the offices of the Democratic National Committee on the sixth floor. On 6 August, after the intruders were tied to President Richard Nixon’s re-election campaign, the Washington Post combined the words “Watergate” and “scandal” for the very first time.

Fifty years on, Watergate remains the political scandal, at least etymologically. Illegal parties at Downing Street? Partygate. A beer in Keir Starmer’s hand at a possibly illegal gathering? Beergate. The people who started a harassment campaign against women in the games industry in 2014 called it Gamergate, and that wasn’t even a real scandal. Even some countries where English is not the first language use the suffix. I suppose the sense of something opening, a threshold being crossed, is somewhat apt, but that’s not the reason why it is used. The man who started slapping -gate onto every potential scandal almost straight away was William Safire, a conservative columnist for the New York Times and former speechwriter for Nixon. Not all of Safire’s coinages stuck, and most are forgotten, but the format endured.

Safire later admitted that he might have been trying to minimise his former boss’s crimes, making Watergate just the first -gate of many. If that was the case, then he didn’t succeed. Watergate is the king of scandals for a couple of reasons. First, it epitomises the power of diligent journalists to bring high-level malfeasance to light. Played by Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman in the 1976 movie, All the President’s Men, the Washington Post’s dynamic duo of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein are still synonymous with dogged, shoe-leather reporting while Deep Throat (“Follow the money”) is the quintessential informant. Woodward and Bernstein were only part of the story but they gave it a halo of heroism. Second, the scandal had a satisfying conclusion: Nixon resigned in disgrace on the brink of impeachment on August 8 1974. Jimmy Breslin called his bestselling book about the scandal How the Good Guys Finally Won.

Watergate inspires nostalgia for a time when political crimes led to punishment. When Boris Johnson can ride out Partygate (for now) and Donald Trump can survive two impeachments thanks to partisan loyalty, Nixon’s downfall seems refreshingly decisive: truth prevailed and justice was served. Like all historical events, it took on an aura of inevitability after the fact. But the chain of cause and effect was not that simple.

The Washington Post’s first mention of the Watergate scandal, in August 1972, came in the context of despair. During Nixon’s re-election campaign, the paper complained: “Such potentially explosive issues as the Watergate scandal go by almost unremarked.” At that point, it had already been reported that the men who had broken into the DNC offices to plant listening bugs had received money from the Committee to Re-elect the President and that Martha Mitchell, wife of the committee’s director John Mitchell, had been held captive in the California hotel to stop her talking to the press. (Her story is the focus of the new Julia Roberts miniseries Gaslit.) A month before the election, Woodward and Bernstein reported that the FBI believed the break-in “stemmed from a massive campaign of political spying and sabotage on behalf of President Nixon’s re-election”. Nonetheless, Nixon went on to defeat Democrat George McGovern in a 49-state landslide with more than 60% of the popular vote, the killer irony being that none of the skulduggery was necessary.

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Strange though it seems, at the time, most journalists thought that Watergate was just an amusing caper which cast no shadow on a popular president who was scoring diplomatic coups in Russia and China. Few newspapers bothered to assign full-time reporters to the Watergate beat. On television, only CBS anchorman Walter Cronkite picked up the story. Throughout 1972, Woodward and Bernstein were too far ahead of the media pack, which made Watergate look like the Post’s hobby horse. Nixon’s campaign manager Clark MacGregor accused the paper of using “innuendo, third-person hearsay, unsubstantiated charges, anonymous sources, and huge scare headlines” to cook up a non-existent connection between the White House and Watergate on behalf of the McGovern campaign.

Not until the televised Senate hearings began in May 1973 did Watergate become a national obsession, inspiring comedy albums and novelty gifts such as the “jigsaw puzzle that will bug you”. Around 85% of viewers tuned in at some point. Amazingly, Nixon’s vice president Spiro Agnew was soon under investigation himself on unrelated charges of criminal conspiracy, bribery, extortion, and tax fraud. This shocking scandal, leading to his resignation in October, was a mere sideshow to Watergate.

In a scandal, the best defence is confusion. Nixon and allies such as Ronald Reagan shuffled through the full deck of excuses and decoys. It wasn’t a big deal. It was just a few bad apples. It’s a partisan attack by Democrats in cahoots with the liberal media, a witch hunt, a lynch mob. It’s hurting the country. “For America’s sake, let’s get on with the business of government,” said Reagan. In short, move on.

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Having first covered up his complicity in the original crime, Nixon then attempted to cover up the cover-up, and that was the real turning point for public opinion. The administration’s attempt to undermine the Senate investigation let slip the existence of a secret recording system in the Oval Office. Nixon then spent months fighting to block the release of the tapes.

On 20 October 1973, he ordered his attorney general Elliot Richardson to sack the staunchly liberal special prosecutor Archibald Cox, who was demanding that the White House hand over the tapes from the Oval Office’s secret recording system. Richardson refused and resigned. His deputy also refused and resigned. The third in line did sack Cox but this “Saturday Night Massacre” was a colossal miscalculation. Only then did the number of Americans who wanted him to resign finally overtake those who approved of his performance. Even if they didn’t understand exactly what he’d done wrong, they could see that he was acting like he’d done something wrong. Congress took the first step towards impeachment proceedings.

Despite all of that, one in four Americans continued to have Nixon’s back, even after the “smoking gun” tape revealed that the President had been involved in the cover-up since the beginning and triggered his resignation. Nixon and Agnew had energetically stoked white rage and resentment, and that was a faithful constituency. Nixon refused to quit until a posse of Republican greybeards sat him down and told him he was done, 26 months after the break-in.

As Leon Neyfakh’s brilliant 2017 podcast Slow Burn (the source material for Gaslit) argues, it could have turned out very differently. What if Nixon had destroyed the tapes, or there had been no recordings in the first place? What if the Democrats hadn’t held a majority in both houses of Congress? What if partisan polarisation had been as extreme then as it is now? What if influential news outlets had maintained throughout that it was all a smear campaign and reduced the scandal to a political litmus test? Much depended on the integrity of key officials. Elliot Richardson’s loyalty to the administration did not dissuade him from approving the investigations into Nixon and Agnew, even at the cost of his job. John Dean, White House counsel and Watergate conspirator, chose to collaborate with federal prosecutors. The FBI did its job. None of this was guaranteed.

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Yet for all the might-have-beens, Nixon did fall in the end. If it took an awful lot to bring down an election-winning heavyweight in 1974, then it’s even harder now, although it’s worth saying that the UK is in a better place than the US. Johnson may still be in office but a majority of voters, and 148 of his own MPs, want him to resign over Partygate. In Washington, meanwhile, only one Republican Senator voted against Trump during his first impeachment and only seven in the second. Even after the storming of the Capitol, his approval rating stood at 34%. Despite the damning findings of the House’s January 6 committee, Trump is still expected to run again in 2024 and may well win. When one Nixon loyalist was asked in August 1974 if new facts such as the smoking gun tape would change his mind, he replied: “Don’t confuse me with the facts.” During the Trump years that would made him a typical Republican.

Perhaps this failure to punish an attempt to overturn an election is a long-term consequence of Watergate. In 1964, 75% of Americans said that they trusted their government to do the right thing most or all of the time; in 1974, after a decade of gradual decline, it plunged to just 36%. It is currently 21% and has only once achieved a majority, immediately after 9/11. By cratering voters’ faith in politicians in general, Watergate bred a pervasive cynicism which took the air out of most subsequent scandals and explains why so many -gates have fizzled out without inspiring high-level resignations or prosecutions. If you think they’re all as bad as each other, then even egregious wrongdoing can seem like filthy business as usual, to the benefit of the worst offenders.

Thus the most paranoid of presidents gave birth to an age of national paranoia. Immediately after Watergate, this suspicion was dramatised by movies such as The Parallax View and Three Days of the Condor in which the truth either doesn’t come out or, worse, doesn’t matter. In All the President’s Men, Robert Redford plays a role in changing history. At the end of Three Days of the Condor, his CIA researcher, Turner, boasts to a senior official, Higgins, that he has told the New York Times all about a rogue operation and the murders the agency committed to cover it up. But as he walks away, Higgins shouts after him: “Hey Turner! How do you know they’ll print it?” Redford’s face says it all.

If the movie were remade now, I think the question would be even more cynical: sure, they’ll print it, but how do you know it will make any difference? How do you know enough people will care?

At the time, exactly 50 years ago, the US was deeply divided by the Vietnam war. Congress was refusing to fund both that increasingly unpopular war and also the broad build-up needed to match the Soviet Union’s huge military upsurge. It would ruin the Soviet economy a decade later, but in the meantime, the US was being outmatched — until, that is, Nixon went to China and secured a diplomatic revolution that would open up a “second front” for the USSR. Among other diversions of Soviet energies, by 1976 at least 45 Soviet tank and motor rifle divisions were deployed towards Beijing, thousands of miles from Nato’s front in Germany.

Whatever else may be said against Nixon or Kissinger, their decision to open up to communist China at its worst — in 1972, the murderous cultural revolution was still in full swing — was a clever idea that many might have thought of only to dismiss it out of hand. All President Nixon had to do was embrace the malodorous Mao (his doctor would reveal that he never brushed his teeth, or bathed, unless he was in merry company).

But for Nixon the politician, the sacrifice was much greater, although he did not know it until the Watergate scandal drove him from office on August 9, 1974, two years after he had triumphantly landed in Beijing. The connection was straightforward: the centre-Right core of the Republic Party coincided with the “Taiwan Lobby”, which in turn encompassed the anti-Communist bloc, and which formed the hard core of Nixon’s supporters from the start of his political career. When Nixon betrayed the cause by embracing the very worst communist on the planet — altogether more extreme than the Soviets when it came to abolishing private property — and when he turned his back on Taiwan, the Republican Right did the same to him as he pleaded for help to fight off the Watergate charges.

A strange man in many ways — who else would think of himself as an absolute underdog while sitting in the White House’s Oval Office? — Nixon was also a real patriot: in 1942, assigned to the safest of Navy billets in Iowa, he strove very hard to manoeuvre himself into a combat zone. But had he known that his Beijing foray would leave him unprotected before his enemies and cost him the White House, he might have stayed well away from Mao.

Neither the American nor the Chinese media misrepresented that momentous strategic encounter, but they did join hands in utterly concealing the reality of China itself. For example, none of the admiring descriptions of Beijing and its imperial monuments in the New York Times prepared me for the stomach-turning stench that pervaded the city, and reached indoors as one tried to eat in the Beijing Hotel dining room. Throughout the city, human waste was not flushed away but carefully collected as precious “night soil” fertiliser, and then ladled into handcarts that were slowly pulled through the city to the surrounding vegetable fields.

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Nor did I read in 1972 about how the crowds in Beijing’s streets trudged from place to place in various states of clinical depression, understandably enough given the deep misery in which they were living — from their one-room-per-family, courtyard houses with no hot water to everyone’s shabby Mao suits and grey faces that evidenced border-line malnutrition. All this stood out even more because of the ubiquitous posters depicting ecstatically happy, rosy-cheeked enthusiasts applauding Mao.

Nor did anyone in 1972 care to mention that the officials they encountered — as I did four years later — were all suffering from intense sleep-deprivation: they had to reach their offices soon after dawn for lengthy pre-work “struggle sessions”, with the janitors and junior staff who run their ministry’s Revolutionary Committee playing Red Guards to upbraid them. The topsy-turvy rituals of the Cultural Revolution persisted until Mao died.

Instead of any criticism, the US press praised everything, including the health-giving virtues of riding a bicycle to and from work, even though Beijing’s summer air was full of faecal dust, with carbon monoxide added in the freezing winters of the coal-heated city.

A journalist of great fame at the time, James Reston, had already recounted his own marvellous experience of Beijing when he suddenly needed emergency surgery there in July 1971. His acute appendicitis could have killed him, but it turned out that the nearest hospital was fully equipped, and the surgery went well. It was only many years later, when Mao’s doctor defected and wrote his memoirs, that it emerged that Reston was taken to the hospital reserved for the top party leaders — the only one in Beijing fully equipped to treat him, or anybody who needed surgery.

The smell went away in later years as chemical fertilisers arrived, but many of the misrepresentations of that 1972 trip linger till this day — of which the most important by far is the legend of China’s strategic statecraft, superior by virtue of its very long-range perspective, then personified by Zhou Enlai. Because Kissinger negotiated primarily with Zhou, he elevated that servile toady — who never once tried to save life-long colleagues from Mao’s murderous intrigues — into a statesman of transcendental wisdom, fully endowed in the long-view department.

This was exemplified by Zhou’s answer to Kissinger’s fawning request for his retrospective view of the French Revolution. Indeed, Kissinger never tired of relaying the Great Man’s answer: “Too early to tell”. You see, you see, Kissinger would add, China’s greatest minds look ahead 200 years. Today, authors and publishers still use “playing the long game” in the subtitles of books about China.

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They should not. Chas W. Freeman, the interpreter, immediately told Kissinger that Zhou was referring to the 1968 student uprising that overthrew De Gaulle, whose final outcome was indeed still unclear in 1972. But Kissinger refused to give up his two centuries for a mere four years, and continued to repeat the story when gracing the dinner tables of the extremely rich in subsequent decades. It was one of the simpler Kissinger mystifications: by turning Zhou into a great statesman, he qualified himself as one — unnecessarily, it would later transpire, because he had so little competition until Reagan arrived to deflate the balloon of Soviet power.

Kissinger’s lie about Zhou was only the tail of a much bigger rat: the historical falsification that ignores China’s stupendous record of strategic incompetence down the ages, in order to attribute profound strategic wisdom to the Han — a wisdom also embodied in China’s classic strategic manuals, with Sun Tzu’s the most famous.

To believe that legend, the most basic fact about Chinese history had to be ignored: again and again, after the downfall of the Tang — conventionally dated 618 to 907 — the Han were defeated, conquered and long-ruled by much less advanced invaders whom they hugely outnumbered. One can visualise how it went: a few steppe warriors in rags and furs would arrive, the Chinese generals in silks and shiny armour facing them would exchange oh-so-clever Sun Tzu citations, their army would be overrun, the country conquered, and then ruled for decades or centuries.

Over the thousand years down to the fall of the Jurchen-speaking Manchus in 1912, it was only during the Ming dynasty 1368–1644 that the Chinese were ruled by Chinese — very likely because the founder Zhu Yuanzhang started off as a monastery servant and could not have read Sun Tzu or any other of the delusional manuals that reduce warfare to clever tricks. Their uselessness was proved right into the 20th century, when the Japanese became the last of the badly outnumbered foreign conquerors to conquer Beijing, Nanjing, Shanghai, Canton and as much of China’s territory as they wanted, with both Communist and Kuomintang forces equally incapable of fighting them successfully.

At present no steppe warriors threaten Beijing, but the strategic incompetence of its rulers persists. Exactly at a time when the deeply divided United States needs allies to contain China, Beijing’s erratic aggressions since 2009 have overcome the neutralist preference of India (attacked in Ladakh and provoked over Arunachal state), the neutralist temptations of Japan (during the three-year ascendancy of the Democratic Party of Japan now extinct), the neutralist ambitions of Indonesia, and the pro-China tendency in the Philippines (just when many in the Philippines were inclined to slide into Beijing’s sphere, the Chinese responded by stealing islets and shoals).

Collectively, America’s new allies add enough mass to Vietnam and Australia — the first country to understand the China malady, in 2009 — to outnumber the Chinese, outweigh their economic achievements, and wholly overtake their less-than-stellar technological attainments. (Pentagon hyping of hypersonic FOBS missiles is shameless budget-pumping: they have no discernible purpose in the absence of ballistic-missile defences to underfly.)

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As for quantum computing and artificial intelligence, only the severely ill-informed think that the Chinese are ahead. As late as 2020, Huawei’s boasts about its supposedly superior Kirin 980 microprocessors were widely believed; they even deceived poor Xi Jinping. Yes, they were indeed quite good but the technology was not Huawei’s — it belonged to the UK and US, which meant that Trump’s National Security Council could and did shut down Kirin production and much of Huawei’s as a whole with a couple of phone calls.

But Kissinger, who is still going strong, rated Chinese statecraft very highly when he published his China book in 2012. He believed, correctly, that the Chinese would continue to work hard, expand their economy and overtake slow US growth. He also thought, incorrectly, that Chinese leaders would transcend their zero-sum mentality, thereby allowing Washington and Beijing to arrange the affairs of a “G-2” world, in which — as he wrote — countries like India and Japan would have to find their places.

Always improbable, G-2 became impossible when Xi Jinping arrived. For him only G-1 is good enough. Not because he is a megalomaniac but the opposite: he thinks, accurately, that unless the Party establishes an unchallenged global hegemony, with its rule is deemed superior to democratic governance, Communist China will collapse just as Soviet rule did. He is right.

On September 9, 1976, while visiting a military unit near Beijing — I was the number-two in the delegation of J.R. Schlesinger, the just-fired Secretary of Defence — everything suddenly ground to a halt. Mao had just died. What followed was a series of bizarre events that would transform China forever.

First, there was the lying-in-state, in the shabby immensity of the Great Hall of the People in front of the imperial palace compound. The diplomats already in Beijing formed a long queue going up the steps — not in order of precedence, as is the custom, but in order of preference: Romania was then Number One because the Chinese had quarrelled with Albania while the “revisionist” Soviet Union was way in the back.

When we entered the hall where a very green Mao was lying dead, we saw that we were alone with China’s absolute rulers, “The Gang of Four”, were standing there: Jiang Qing Mao’s half-mad, super extremist, last wife; (he had long preferred sex with his very young “nurses”), Zhang Chunqiao and Yao Wenyuan (two shabby Party bureaucrats), and Wang Hongwen (Shanghai’s tall, good-looking absolute boss, who had even transferred tanks from the border to strengthen his own huge workers’ militia).

He was the only one who greeted us with a nod while the others seemed… terrorised. They knew, as we did not, that they would be locked up very soon. Next, after I had made quite sure that Mao was dead, we were ushered into another room to mourn with the selected “best friends” of China: the North Vietnamese and North Korean ambassadors, with whom we could not speak given the absence of diplomatic relations, two Khmer Rouge envoys who looked like  murderous dwarfs, and the Romanian ambassador who walked around saying what a really, really sad day it was, frantically trying to generate a minimum of civility between people determined to ignore each other.

Nor was I of any help: born in Romania’s Arad, I answered nu sunt sigur (“I am not sure”) to his “sad day” incantation. Utterly startled to hear me speak in his language, and totally embarrassed by my remark, he went to Schlesinger to be reassured that we were not all Romanians sent to catch him out.

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I had left Beijing when the Gang of Four were arrested, but was back again when Deng Xiaoping announced that it was all over: the Cultural Revolution, the closure of China, Maoism. After that, it all went smoothly until the 2009 financial crisis when the Party bosses thought it was all over for democratic capitalism. Their reaction was perfectly predictable: since 2010, the PRC has behaved as if it were a cheap wind-up toy car, rolling straight ahead to collide with its neighbours, provoking increasingly adversarial reactions, and persisting regardless.

One example is enough for all: just when the Japanese government was sliding into neutralism, the PRC leadership turned a banal, drunken fishing-boat skipper episode just off the Senkakus (absurdly claimed by China) into an all-out attack on all things Japanese, from embassies and consulates that were besieged by hostile mobs to attacks against Japanese corporate offices, car dealerships, and even against individual Japanese — all provoked by incessant calls for revenge from hysterical officials. The final outcome was the election of Abe Shinzo’s LDP, which squarely took on China as an adversary.

Meanwhile, the US elite, both with Nixon at the start and then after Deng Xiaoping’s opening of China’s economy, was more than content to preside over the de-industrialisation of the United States, uncaring of the ultimate political consequences of replacing many millions of $30 per hour factory jobs with $10 an hour “service economy” jobs, with the incoming flood of cheap consumer goods supposedly alleviating the impoverishment.

Now, of course, China presses against all its neighbours, endowing the United States with new alliances, some overt and official, others overt but without any formal treaty, and others emerging — a process destined to continue until Xi Jinping, who, with his talk of “war readiness”, is now in his Mussolini phase, triggers an armed affray serious enough to stop the arrival of tankers and bulk carriers into Chinese ports.

When that happens, malnutrition will not be far behind, because of China’s critical dependence on imported animal feed. In 1976, rice, sorghum, cabbage and rare slivers of chicken were enough. Not today. If Xi Jinping falls, pork prices could be the cause.

I had first met Putin seven years before and was not surprised by his rapid domination of the new Russia. We were introduced by Yevgeny Primakov, widely known as “Russia’s Kissinger”, who I had met in Moscow multiple times during the Cold War years when I advised Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon and Ford. Primakov was a no-nonsense thinker and writer. He was also a special emissary for the Kremlin in conducting secret discussions with national leaders around the world.

When Yeltsin tasked his advisor Anatoly Sobchak with identifying and recruiting Russia’s best and brightest, Putin, then a local politician in his hometown of St Petersburg, was top of his list — so Primakov took Putin under his wing to tutor him in global power and security issues. Eventually, Primakov introduced Kissinger to Putin, and they became close. That both Primakov and Kissinger took time to coach Putin on geopolitics and geosecurity was a clear demonstration that they saw in him the characteristics of a powerful leader. It also showed Putin’s capacity for listening to lengthy lessons on geopolitics — as I was soon to learn.

In 1992, I received a call from a meeting organiser at the CSIS think tank inviting me to join a US-Russia St Petersburg Commission to be chaired by Kissinger and Sobchak. The purpose would be to help the new Russian leadership in opening channels of business and banking with the West. Most of the Western members would be CEOs of major US and European companies, as well as key officials of the new Russian government. I would attend as an expert. I was told that a “Mr Primakov” had personally asked if I could make time to participate. I could hardly refuse such a request, and I was intensely curious about the emerging Russian leadership, especially about Putin.

Arriving at the first meeting, I saw several people gathered around Kissinger and a man I was told was Putin. An official identified himself to me and said he had been asked by Primakov to introduce me to Putin. He interrupted the conversation with Kissinger to announce my arrival; Putin warmly responded that he was looking forward to chatting with me about how I see the world from inside Washington.

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We spoke on several occasions between meetings, and he arranged to sit next to me at a dinner, accompanied by his interpreter. At that dinner, he asked me: “What is the single most important obstacle between your Western businessmen and my fellow Russians in starting up business connections?”

Off the top of my head, I responded: “The absence of legally defined property rights — without those there is no basis for resolving disputes.”

“Ah yes,” he said, “in your system a dispute between businesses is resolved by attorneys paid by the hour representing each side, sometimes taking the dispute to the courts which normally takes months and accumulation of hourly attorney fees.”

“In Russia,” he continued, “disputes are usually resolved by common sense. If a dispute is about very significant money or property, then the two sides would typically send representatives to a dinner. Everyone attending arriving would be armed. Facing the possibility of a bloody, fatal outcome both sides always find a mutually agreeable solution. Fear provides the catalyst for common sense.”

He used his argument in the context of disputes between sovereign nations. Solutions often require an element of fear of disproportionate responses if no deal is struck. The idea of forcing adversaries to face horrific alternatives seemed to excite him. In essence, he was describing to me the current Ukraine impasse between the US and Russia. Putin knows Russia cannot afford a prolonged ground war with Ukraine. He also can see Biden is facing crucial midterm elections with a domestic congressional impasse, and cannot afford a major foreign crisis distraction. The two sides have no choice but to strike a deal.

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On a different occasion, Putin asked me how decisions are really made in Washington, with its complex division of Presidential and Congressional powers. He said Kissinger could explain the broad parameters of a Presidential policy decision, but could not clarify how political consensus was achieved between the House, Senate, and the Executive Branch.

It was evident he had been given a deep intelligence brief on my career. He said Kissinger enjoys the public theatre of powerful people meeting in elaborate dinners or meetings with many aides ready to guide them. And he told me he had been informed that I preferred backroom meetings to shape consensus and provide room for negotiating details.

I tried to explain the elaborate process of balancing the interests of the many players in Washington, including Congress, the major agencies, and the intricate business arrangements that might be affected by any decision. I told him of my first personal meeting with Nixon, who had said he was impressed that I had strong personal support from leaders of both major parties. However, he added, this raised worries among his staff in the White House — so he really needed to know whether I was a Republican or a Democrat. To which I replied: “Yes.”

When Nixon asked what that meant, I explained that I was not a partisan warrior, but rather a problem solver. To get a solution I would always be ready to work with key players of both parties depending upon the specific problem. This seemed to amuse Putin.

The impression of Putin that I was left with was of a man who was more intelligent than most of the politicians I had met in Washington and in other capitals around the world. I was reminded of my childhood: I grew up in a predominantly Sicilian neighbourhood, with a mafia maintaining order. No disorganised crime allowed. Putin did seem to have the instincts of a Sicilian mafia boss: quick to reward but quick to pose mortal risk in the event of non-conformity to the family rules.

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Looking back to those times of growing disarray in Russia’s leadership, I can recall the prolonged, multi-year paralysis of the Brezhnev Presidency, which was followed by the brief Presidencies of Andropov and Chernenko. Gorbachev was not strong enough to impose his will. Yeltsin had good ideas but was easily distracted and lacked follow through. Russia was in urgent need of a strong leader — and so Putin stepped in.

As for how Putin sees himself, he did bring up several times his admiration for Peter the Great, so much so I was convinced he sees himself as his incarnation. I have not been a guest of the Kremlin since 1988, but I am told Putin had portraits of Peter the Great hung in several important meeting rooms there — rather than portraits of himself, as would be more customary. What this means for Biden, Nato and Ukraine is slowly becoming clear. There is more to Putin than meets the eye.

Last month, the company proudly announced that its Nixon had been nominated for a South Bank Sky Arts Award. Yet less than 48 hours later, the company withdrew from the nomination and issued a grovelling apology for causing “offence”. It begged for “space” to learn from its errors.

What had changed between 2020 and 2021? The meltdown among global elites over systemic racism after the death of George Floyd in May 2020. In this fevered, racialised atmosphere, the hapless Scottish Opera committed an offence that heretofore no one had known existed.

The company’s transgression lay in casting white singers in the roles of Communist Party Chairman Mao Zedong and Chinese Premier Chou En-lai, consistent with over three decades of performance practice. The fact that a black baritone sang the role of President Nixon, a first for Nixon in China, earned the Scottish Opera no protection from accusations of racism.

“Yellowface in opera has to stop,” commented British baritone, Julian Chou-Lambert. “It’s like blackface, but applied to East and South-East Asian characters. It’s offensive and dehumanising for ESEA people. Opera folks, please learn about this and do better.” A Scottish MP from the Labour Party, Sarah Owen, lamented the paucity of Asians in the production and the “exaggerated winged eye make-up”. She wondered ominously if Nixon in China had received taxpayer funding.

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The company tried to defend itself by explaining that its production “intended to portray the character of Chairman Mao as old and in ill-health and in no way were we trying to change his ethnicity”. Not good enough. “There is clear photographic evidence,” an obscure advocacy group called BEATS (British East & Southeast Asians in Theatre and on Screen) shot back, “that the practice of yellowface was employed on dancers in the production.”

Apart from BEATS, Chou-Lambert, and MP Sarah Owen, there was no groundswell of outrage against the Scottish Opera and its arts nomination. Nevertheless, the company caved immediately to its detractors. It issued a statement of classic neo-Stalinist self-abnegation: “We are deeply sorry for the offence caused by the casting of our 2020 production of John Adam’s Nixon in China. We are also sorry for any misrepresentation caused by the stage make-up.” Though the company practices diversity in casting, “we accept there is a lot more work still to be done. . . . Once again, our heartfelt apologies to everyone, most especially our ESEA communities.”

If the Scottish Opera owes these “communities” an apology for “yellowface” and “whitewashing” (defined by BEATS as using non-Asian singers for Chinese roles), so do the creators of Nixon in China and nearly every director that has mounted the opera since its 1987 premiere in Houston.

It would be hard to come up with a more progressive team of collaborators than Nixon in China’s composer (Adams), inaugural director (Peter Sellars), librettist (Alice Goodman), and original choreographer (Mark Morris). Peter Sellars reigned for years as the enfant terrible of opera, updating operas to modern times and Left-wing politics, sometimes imaginatively, more often anachronistically. When Sellars ceased being an enfant, he continued being merely terrible. He opines regularly on social justice from the lectern and in his capacity as regisseur.

His Nixon in China staging, for example, was inspired by the Reagan White House, he said in a 1994 interview. Reagan and his cronies were “tearing the country apart”, “dividing profits among their close friends, slashing budgets, putting cities deeply in the hole,” while distracting the country with photo ops. In response, Sellars and librettist Goodman sprinkled elephant jokes throughout that first production.

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The elephant imagery did double duty, referring not just to the GOP but also to operatic imperialism. Verdi’s Aida was playing concurrently with Nixon in China at the Houston Grand Opera. According to Sellars, Aida raises questions about the “imperialist tradition” of grand opera. Since many in Nixon in China’s audience would also have seen Aida the night before or after, the Nixon collaborators were, he said, “quite consciously commenting” on what it means to move an opera plot into Egypt.

And yet, despite Sellars’ exquisite sensibilities about imperialism and cultural appropriation, it apparently never occurred to him or to his colleagues that they were committing a racial transgression by casting all white singers for the original Nixon in China production. Within a few years of its Houston premiere, Nixon in China had been performed in Brooklyn, Amsterdam, Edinburgh, Bielefeld, Germany, Los Angeles and Paris. Those casts, too, were virtually all white.

And when Adams, Sellars and Mark Morris got together again in 2011 for the opera’s premiere at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, the lead Chinese characters were once more all white. No one protested. Indeed, the New York Times’ lead classical music critic, Anthony Tommasini, singled out one of those white Nixon in China singers, Robert Brubaker, as capturing Chairman Mao’s “authoritarian defiance and rapacious self-indulgence.” Today, Tommasini is lambasting classical music for its racism (see “Classical Music’s Suicide Pact,” City Journal, Summer 2021); in 2011, he did not mention Brubaker’s race.

That blindness to whitewashing continued into 2020. In its review of the Scottish Opera’s Nixon in China, The Guardian, hardly a conservative mouthpiece, praised both Mark Le Brocq as Chairman Mao and Nicholas Lester as Zhou Enlai.

A norm against “whitewashing” would make Nixon in China almost impossible to stage in the West, an anonymous source told the Telegraph recently. Finding enough Asian singers of requisite quality to fill the large roster of Chinese characters “in a country the other side of the world from China” would be “just too difficult”.

Nixon in China’s creators would presumably have an interest in defending their work and its production history against a potentially fatal new casting restriction. They are keeping out of the fray, however. When I asked John Adams if he thinks that it is problematic to cast a white tenor as Mao Zedong, he declined to comment. Peter Sellers also refused comment.

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And so it is left to BEATS to explain the nuances of yellowface and whitewashing. Why is it acceptable for a black singer to sing Nixon but not acceptable for a white singer to sing Mao or Zhou Enlai? I asked. The answer turns on whether a singer’s skin color helps or hurts a political agenda.

“Casting a black singer (or other Artist of Colour – AoC) as a white historical personage can be progressive,” the group responded, “as it works to balance out the historical and current exclusion of AoCs on stage, and the discrimination they have experienced, and continue to experience”. But “casting a white actor in a specifically non-white role, such as a Chinese historical personage, is regressive, as it perpetuates the exclusion of ESEAs (East & South-East Asians) from the stage.”

But no singer is presently “excluded” from roles because of his race. Asians and blacks have sung leading white characters in Mozart, Rossini, Berlioz, Bizet, Verdi, Puccini, Wagner, and Offenbach, in the world’s major opera houses. If there are fewer Asian singers on opera stages than in the orchestra pit, that is because Asian involvement with Western classical music began with the string instruments. But training in Western opera techniques is catching up fast.

Staying current with “progressive” casting rules will require full-time study. Would it be acceptable for a black singer to play a Chinese character such as Mao, I asked BEATS. Not really. Here pan-Asian casting would be recommended. So artists of colour may bump whites from white roles but different categories of AoC’s should enjoy monopolies over their respective identity-defined characters.

For an organisation intent on policing identity boundaries in art, BEATS is remarkably lax in defining those boundaries. A Korean or Japanese singer may perform Mao or Zhou Enlai, the advocacy group said in response to a further question —notwithstanding the large differences in culture and history between the Chinese, Koreans, and the Japanese.

In fact, all the groups which BEATS regards as interchangeable for the purpose of casting are wildly heterogeneous. Individuals from the following countries may substitute for each other in roles written for any particular nationality: “Brunei, Burma, Cambodia, China, East Timor, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Japan, Laos, Macau, Malaysia, Mongolia, North Korea, Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, Vietnam and their diasporas.”

Never mind that many of these peoples spent millennia subjugating and colonising each other. Today, their most important characteristic is that they are not white, so someone from Brunei may sing a Chinese Communist leader even though Brunei had almost no connection with either Imperial or Communist China. Someone from Brunei could also sing Madama Butterfly, even though Japan invaded and occupied Brunei during World War II. This conflation of distinct identities under one “Asian” umbrella is little different from the “Orientalist” tropes decried by Edward Said and his epigones.

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Such ecumenicism is already behind the curve, however. To see the future of the diversity crusade in the arts, one must, as always, look to the United States, where casting directors henceforth will need a spectrometer to decide if a performer is sufficiently “coloured” to fill a role.

At the moment when the Scottish Opera was self-destructing, In the Heights, a screen adaptation of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Broadway musical, landed in American movie theatres. It, too, had an immaculately progressive creative team, with Miranda writing the screenplay and Jon Chu directing. The movie, about New York’s Dominican community, which is concentrated in Manhattan’s Washington Heights, received generally favourable press.

Miranda’s diversity credentials would seem unassailable, given his portrayal of the Founding Fathers as rap-emitting black and Hispanic citizens in the musical Hamilton. In the Heights used an all-Hispanic cast, thus obeying the rule that whites may not play person of colour roles. But the diversity racket has moved beyond such blunt categories. One critic complained that the actors in In the Heights were not dark-skinned enough, even though the proportion of dark-skinned actors among the lead characters — 16% —matches the racial demographics of Washington Heights.

A new offence was born, which may be dubbed “brownwashing.” Miranda fell on his sword immediately. “In trying to paint a mosaic of this community, we fell short,” he tweeted. “I’m truly sorry. I’m learning from the feedback, I thank you for raising it… I promise to do better in my future projects, and I’m dedicated to the learning and evolving we all have to do to make sure we are honouring our diverse and vibrant community.”

Every time arts leaders and institutions cave to racial pressure, they deal creativity another blow. The dumb literalism of today’s censors is a frontal assault on the human imagination, which frees us from the constraints of time, place, and the boundaries of our own subjectivity. One of drama’s most mesmerising set pieces is an onstage actor putting on his make-up and costume, effacing one identity and taking on another right before our eyes. Ovid’s Metamorphoses is a classic of erotic literature because transforming oneself into another being is an act of God-like power and seduction, whether of an amorous target or of an audience.

The next step in imaginative emasculation is obvious: Only elderly actors can play King Lear, only hunchbacks can sing Rigoletto or play Richard III, only fat people can play or sing Falstaff, since using stage make-up and body suits to transform non-old, non-handicapped, and non-fat actors into those roles represents ageism, fat-shaming, and ableism. Certainly no straight actor will ever be able to play a gay or “trans” character, as Sean Penn recently observed. But then again, maybe only Falstaff should be able to play Falstaff, since surely between a fat actor and Falstaff himself there are significant differences of identity. Jorge Luis Borges could have figured this puzzler out, but not the rest of us.

Ultimately, theatre itself may have to be segregated, since to claim that a white audience can identify with a black-themed work is a more subtle form of cultural appropriation. A recent play, lauded twice by the New York Times, asked white audience members to leave the theatre before the play’s conclusion so that black attendees could experience undisturbed racial solidarity.

Imaginative empathy—the ability to project oneself into someone else’s shoes–has been a key to expanding liberty and toleration. The arts have played a crucial role in widening human understanding. Now, however, they are leading the way back into a world of tribal barriers and stunted experience.

This was a considerable improvement on Imagine’s last prominent public outing. In March 2020, Wonder Woman star Gal Gadot decided to cheer up everybody on lockdown by asking 26 of her celebrity pals to film themselves singing a line, irrespective of their ability to hold a tune. The a cappella montage did at least provide the most terrifying phase of the pandemic with a shared moment of unintentional hilarity and a lasting monument to the hubris of well-meaning celebrities with nothing to do. One guilty participant, the actor Chris O’Dowd, put it down to “that first wave of creative diarrhoea that seemed to encase the entire world”. Of course, Gadot had to choose Imagine.

Imagine, which turns 50 in September, occupies a unique place in our culture. When the song’s producer, Phil Spector, first heard it, he thought it was “like the national anthem”; but like Spector’s reputation, that assessment has proved complicated to say the least. While some regard it as beautiful and profound, or at least unifyingly inoffensive, others damn it as a sanctimonious monstrosity. It was voted the UK’s favourite song lyric in 1999, the best single of all time in 2001, and the greatest song ever in 2004. Yet it has also been named as the worst song in the world so often that to despise it has become a cliché. “I am hardly the first writer to dislike Imagine,” wrote the critic Tom Ewing. “In fact, the laurels on the comment thread are likely to go to anyone who can make a really good case for its beauty, wisdom or excellence.” This cannot be put down to just its chronic overfamiliarity. Other played-to-death songs such as Hey Jude or Bohemian Rhapsody aren’t nearly as divisive. So what is it about Imagine that drives so many people crazy?

It is annoying that Imagine has been used to caricature a painfully complicated man as a gentle saint, so it’s essential to understand where Lennon’s head was at when he recorded the song in his home studio in Tittenhurst Park, Berkshire in May 1971. His experience of Arthur Janov’s primal scream therapy had enabled him to let go of the “father-figure trip”, he said. “Facing up to reality instead of always looking for some kind of heaven.” At the same time, Lennon and his wife Yoko Ono were in the throes of political radicalisation.

In 1968, he had written the Beatles’ Revolution, which told the counterculture to steady on there and drop the pictures of Mao. By the end of 1970, he was telling Rolling Stone: “I really thought that love will save us all. But now I’m wearing a Chairman Mao badge, that’s where it’s at.” Shortly after an interview with Tariq Ali and Robin Blackburn for the Trotskyist magazine Red Mole in January 1971, he wrote a new song based on their conversation. Combining socialism and feminism with a Black Panther slogan, Power to the People flipped the ambivalent opening line of Revolution into a call to arms: “Say you want a revolution/ We better get on right away.” The US New Left magazine Ramparts republished the interview under the headline “The Working Class Hero Turns Red”.

Lennon saw Imagine as a different kind of revolution. The black comedian and activist Dick Gregory had given him a book of positive prayer, which Lennon explained to Playboy in 1980 like so: “If you can imagine a world at peace, with no denominations of religion — not without religion but without this my-God-is-bigger-than-your-God thing — then it can be true.” Imagine, therefore, is protest rewritten as a secular prayer. The idea chimed with Ono’s “instruction paintings”, collected in her 1964 book Grapefruit, each of which began “Imagine…” Lennon later said that Imagine should have been credited to Lennon/Ono because “it was right out of Grapefruit” and her name was finally added in 2017.

The Yoko factor turns a lot of people off. While a song like Working Class Hero draws its political power from Lennon’s distinctive flinty sarcasm, Imagine is driven by Ono’s utopian whimsicality. It’s of a piece with the couple’s subsequent billboard campaign, “War is over! If you want it.” The idea that you can simply will a better world into being can seem like impotent New Age guff but the New Left’s philosopher-in-chief Herbert Marcuse was then arguing that imagining radical change was the essential first step towards realising it. The critic Robert Christgau acutely observed that Imagine was “both a hymn for the Movement and a love song for his wife, celebrating a Yokoism and a Marcusianism simultaneously”.

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By Dorian Lynskey

People who find Imagine about as deep as a Keep Calm and Carry On poster might be surprised by how seriously contemporary critics took it, but it is a startlingly radical lyric wrapped in a musical comfort blanket. Running from the myth of Beatle John, Lennon was desperate to shed every form of baggage, and Imagine magnifies this process of renunciation to global proportions. Like Gimme Some Truth, God or Give Peace a Chance, it is a list of things to reject. The first verse scraps heaven and hell; the second bins nations, religions and war; and the third abolishes possessions and poverty.

As the chorus acknowledges (“You may say I’m a dreamer”), that’s a lot for one song to ask for. Its haters are divided between those who consider this prospectus anodyne drivel and those who find its picture of a godless, classless, borderless world “a vision of hell”, as one writer put it. Lennon told the NME that it was “anti-religious, anti-nationalistic, anti-conventional, anti-capitalistic, virtually the Communist Manifesto, even though I’m not particularly a Communist and I do not belong to any movement”. He preferred “a nice British socialism” to “the way some daft Russian might do it”.

“Imagine no religion” angered the kind of people who had still not forgiven Lennon for saying the Beatles were more popular than Jesus but it was “Imagine no possessions” that became the main bone of contention. “Was it a millionaire who said imagine no possessions?” sang Elvis Costello in his 1991 single The Other Side of Summer. Lennon himself realised that he’d misjudged the next line, tweaking the inadvertently condescending “I wonder if you can” to “I wonder if we can” in at least one performance.

The visuals don’t help his case. Lennon decided to film the making of the album and a clip from the movie — John playing his white baby grand piano in his big white mansion — became the music video for Imagine. He should have anticipated that this tableau of smug luxury would sit uneasily with the third verse, but to be fair to him, he was at the time very happy to play benefit concerts and give money to all kinds of causes, including two of the Chicago Seven defendants, Biafran refugees and Clydeside shipbuilders, one of whom misheard the name of the donor and shouted out, “But Lenin’s dead!”

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I’m not convinced that it’s inherently hypocritical for a rich man to imagine a different world, given that anyone who has a big enough platform to spread such a message is almost inevitably wealthy. Still, one has to love the card that Elton John sent to the couple at their extravagant home in Manhattan’s Dakota Building: “Imagine six apartments/ It isn’t hard to do/ One is full of fur coats/ Another’s full of shoes.”

By the time they moved into the Dakota in 1973, Lennon’s revolutionary phase had flamed out. Lennon biographer John Wiener argues that Imagine “seemed to many movement people a hymn to the New Left in defeat”. Not long after the hot mess of Lennon’s 1972 protest album Some Time in New York City, Richard Nixon won reelection in a landslide and Lennon made a brisk, bitter retreat from politics. The FBI, which had been monitoring him as a potentially dangerous radical, closed its file.

It seems remarkable now that when it was released as a single in the US, Imagine hung around the charts for no longer than Power to the People had done and was outperformed by Paul McCartney’s amiable Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey. It didn’t come out in the UK until 1975, when it peaked at number six. McCartney angered his estranged friend by telling Melody Maker that he liked Imagine because it wasn’t as political as John’s recent stuff. Lennon shot back with a furious letter: “So you think Imagine ain’t political? It’s Working Class Hero with sugar on it for conservatives like yourself!! You obviously didn’t dig the words. Imagine!”

It’s the sugar that makes the song so portable. It may have the most comprehensive agenda of any hit single ever made but Imagine sounds modest, tentative and unassuming. On a compositional level, it is almost childishly simple. (You can hear an instrumental scrap of it, called John’s Piano Piece, in outtakes from the Beatles’ 1969 Let It Be sessions.) The basic track was recorded in less than half an hour (they used the second of three takes) and the subsequent string arrangement was extraordinarily restrained for a Spector production. The Tokyo version, orchestrated by Hans Zimmer, is far too grandiose; a thought experiment should not be oversold.

Imagine, therefore, lends itself to occasions when something hopeful but not overbearing is required. After Lennon was murdered in 1980, the song topped the UK charts for four weeks but its suitability for mourning is much broader than that. Stevie Wonder performed it in 1996 in honour of the victims of a terrorist bombing during the games, Neil Young reached for it at a 9/11 tribute concert and Madonna chose it to remember those who died in the 2004 tsunami. As Slate’s Katy Waldman wrote when it again became a song of grieving after the assault on the Bataclan in Paris in 2015, “No one who has just watched footage of families mourning their loved ones in the wake of a terrorist attack is ready to swallow a dose of unalloyed affirmation. The song seems veined with the sad understanding that its own dream is too simple.”

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Yet at the same time, Imagine still carries enough of a residual political charge to have been banned by the BBC during the first Gulf War and (briefly) by the US radio network Clear Channel after 9/11. At the end of 2001, Rolling Stone called it “a new national hymn, a strong, quiet counterweight to the institutional psalms and fight songs… that have filled the air since the terrorist attacks.” Former President Jimmy Carter told NPR that on his travels around the world, he heard it “used almost equally with national anthems”.

Imagine is rather like a tourist attraction in your hometown: you’re so used to seeing it in the background that you forget why it’s remarkable. To be honest, I need never hear it again but I’ve warmed to it in recent years precisely because its naked idealism is so very uncool and so easy to deride. There has never been a song like it and it would take a supernatural blend of talent, ego and idealism for anyone to even attempt one. Can you imagine what Twitter would do if, say, Chris Martin tried it?

Unless I am seriously underestimating the global appetite for utopian socialism, most listeners are not embracing it on a literal level as a time-capsule of Lennon and Ono’s post-Sixties art-school radicalism. As Rage Against the Machine’s Tom Morello has said, “If people really believed the sentiments John Lennon expressed in that song, we would have had revolution in this country a long time ago.” It has become instead a generous vessel for all kinds of aspirations, both big and small. Three years ago, the Observer asked Ono what the word “imagine” meant to her and she replied simply: “To think of something to hope for.” You may say I’m a sucker but I find that idea hard to hate.

And what rankles most about all this Brexit triumphalism is that it distorts the reasons why many of us voted to Leave. I had no idea whether Brexit would be “a success”. And I didn’t vote for it because I thought it might be – I voted out of sheer principle: for me the nation state is the upper limit of democratic legitimacy. Others believed that co-operation was intrinsic to the European project, and voted for that. I respect that view, even though I don’t hold it.

Even more problematic, though, is how an essentially moral decision – and a clash of different principles – has been turned into a kind of glorified guessing game. One in which how things turn out is the only basis on which a decision should be counted as morally commendable. After all, if you save a child from drowning, and that child goes on to be some mass murderer, you don’t conclude that the saving act was a morally bad one.

The trouble is, if a decision is to be judged solely on the basis of its consequences, then we consign moral success to the swirling darkness of the future, with all its unknown unknowns, all its unintended and unexpected twists and turns. So we can never be confident that we have made the right call. In any case, at what point in the future might we judge a decision the right one – after a year’s consequences, after 10 years, a century? When do we close the book on a decision’s consequences, and proclaim some final judgment? Consequentialists don’t tell us because there isn’t an answer. In other words, they don’t have enough respect for the utter mysteriousness of the future, enough humility before the unknown.

Kant understood the alternative — that we make many moral decisions on the basis of principle and not consequences. As he put it: “A good will is not good because of what it effects or accomplishes, because of its fitness to attain some proposed end, but only because of its volition, that is, it is good in itself … Usefulness or fruitfulness can neither add anything to this worth nor take anything away from it.”

This basic principle applies just as much to many who voted to Remain as it does to Leavers. I take it that many Remainers believe the basic principles of the EU are so morally commendable that they would regard their decision to vote as they did to be right, even if, over time, its “usefulness” seemed to tell against them. To this extent, I do not believe that the failure of the EU vaccine roll-out has anything significant to tell us about the rightness — or not — of the decision to leave the EU.

But I must acknowledge a deep problem with my position. For notwithstanding my commitment to principle over consequence, we do often accept the moral valence of consequence irrespective of intention. For example, in law, we broadly accept there is a difference between murder and attempted murder. In terms of intention, the two are indistinguishable. If I seek to shoot someone, and they trip just before the bullet reaches them, the difference between murder and attempted murder is nothing more than luck. The mens rea (“guilty mind” in Latin) is surely identical. Yet nonetheless, we treat the two actions differently. Success or failure does seem to have a moral significance here. And this moral significance is something that the philosopher Bernard Williams described as “moral luck”.

In his famous paper of the same name, published in 1976, Williams considers a semi-fictionalised Gauguin who makes a decision to leave his family and head off to Tahiti to become a great painter. For Williams, the question of whether he made the right — in some sense, the morally justifiable — decision hangs on something he could not possibly know: whether he would indeed produce works of great art. In other words, the view that would mitigate the abandonment of his family on the basis that he went on to produce some extraordinary works of art is a kind of retrofitting that could not have been justified at the time.

Williams’s essay set the cat among the pigeons. And it doesn’t feel to me like we have satisfactorily resolved the problems he raises. To what extent does future success – subject to the vagaries of change and chance – effect the rightness of a decision made? Like Kant, I want to defend an approach to moral decision making in which the rightness of the decision does not depend upon outcomes. Does the economic flourishing of China justify the human rights abuses of the Communist Party? No. The ends do not justify the means.

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There’s an apocryphal tale told about Zhou Enlai, the first Premier of the People’s Republic of China, being asked by Richard Nixon in 1972 whether he thought the French Revolution was a good thing. His alleged response, “It’s too early to tell”, would make for a refreshing contrast to the short-termism of the modern political mind-set. It shows a proper humility in the face of an unknown future. But there is a cynicism about it too.

For if this is how we are to judge the rightness of our moral commitments, how can we ever know if we have decided right about anything. And if so, then why bother with morality at all? Because the answer to any moral challenge can be “just wait and see”. And that is another way of saying that morality doesn’t count.

Kant’s “good will” — or what I would call principle — may not suit the technocratic and utilitarian approach to politics so prevalent these days. But without it, the question of whether an action was moral or not has almost no meaning, relegated as it is to the distant court of history. How convenient for our politicians.

Consequentialist leavers may have been lucky — for now. But that doesn’t mean they were right. Something else will no doubt turn up soon for the Remainers to cheer about. “I told you so” follows an opposite “I told you so” in an endless tit-for-tat. Never to be settled as history keeps on stretching out before us, with new things to argue about, debates over Brexit will go on and on. It’s like some hideous never ending Groundhog Day. The trouble with consequentialism is that it never allows you to move on.

Given this “veil of ignorance”, drifting unmoored from history, what would you choose? A cutthroat, greedy glorified casino? A land structured by the hierarchies of class, wealth, race and gender? An egalitarian but oppressive East German dictatorship? Or, more plausibly, some kind of Scandinavian-style social democracy, in which the strong and ambitious have room to rise, but there’s a well-provisioned welfare state for the weak and unlucky?

Such, in very simplistic terms, is the argument developed in John Rawls’s seminal book A Theory of Justice, which was published exactly fifty years ago this month. For many readers, it remains the last genuinely great work of Anglo-American philosophy, an enduring guide to the principles behind a good society. In the United States it sold an estimated 300,000 copies, though how many readers made it all the way through is an unanswerable question. And almost overnight, it turned Rawls into the leading champion of liberal democratic pluralism, apparently reconciling individual liberty and social good, freedom and fairness, aspiration and responsibility.

That was Rawls in January 1971. Half a century on, what went wrong? In the academy, Rawls retains a high position. Even though his book has been challenged, philosophy students and professors across the English-speaking world still speak his name with awe. Yet the values he came to represent – justice, fairness, decency, pluralism – have rarely seemed so embattled. Perhaps, in some parallel universe, Hillary Clinton is currently hosting a White House event to mark Rawls’s legacy. Not in our own, though. Instead, in an irony of exquisite cruelty, the anniversary of Rawls’s most famous work coincided with the gravest crisis in American democracy since the Civil War: an orgy of violence at the United States Capitol actively encouraged by President Trump.

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“President Trump”. To Rawls – a shy, gentlemanly, scholarly man, who taught for four decades at Harvard and died in 2002 – those two words would surely have been utterly unimaginable, the antithesis of everything he held dear. But of course philosophy – just like history, social science, art and culture – reflects the age in which it was written. And Rawls’s world, to put it bluntly, is dead. He may be about to exit the White House, but we live in Trump’s world now.

Rawls’s life tells the wider story. He was born in Baltimore in 1921. In those days his hometown was a handsome and enormously successful port, railroad hub and manufacturing city – a far cry from the drug-scarred wasteland depicted in The Wire. The son of a well-known local lawyer, he lost two of his brothers in childhood to diphtheria and pneumonia – a reminder of the fragility of life in pre-New Deal, pre-Great Society America. And he grew up in an environment suffused with understated religious belief, studying theology at Princeton and seriously considering entering an Episcopalian seminary.

Yet the single biggest influence on Rawls was the Second World War. He served in the infantry in the Pacific and endured days under fire in the trenches in the Philippines. According to one account, the future philosopher found this particularly traumatic because he and his comrades knew it would end in torrents of blood: the Japanese would never surrender and would take no prisoners. “One soldier in a dugout close to Rawls stood up and deliberately removed his helmet to take a bullet to the head,’ it says, ‘choosing to die rather than endure the constant barrage.” That was not all. A few weeks after the war ended, Rawls was sent to Hiroshima. There he gazed upon the ruins of what had once been a thriving city, the ultimate demonstration of man’s power for destruction. Some fifty years later, he was still haunted by the sight.

For the next quarter-century, however, Rawls lived in a world that was demonstrably getting better. It is hard to think of any society, at any time, that has ever matched the dynamism, optimism and cultural confidence of the United States in the 1950s and 1960s – the years of booming suburbs and jangling jukeboxes, drive-in movies and Technicolor blockbusters, Vladimir Nabokov and Marilyn Monroe, the civil rights movement, the Apollo missions and the New Frontier. This was the world in which Rawls moved to Harvard and began work on his great work. The articles flowed: “Justice as Fairness”, “The Sense of Justice”, “Distributive Justice”, laying the foundations for the behemoth to come.

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Later, critics complained that Rawls had been too kind to his own society, his own time. He was too comfortable, they said, too moderate. He assumed too much common ground; he had produced an elegant justification for the liberalism of his class. As the New Republic’s Linda Hirshman later put it: “Just close your eyes, Rawls said, and think of what kind of political society you would make if you didn’t know who you were … and you’d produce unlimited free speech and moderately redistributive capitalism.” In Hirshman’s words, “this white male Harvard professor closed his eyes and produced the government of Cambridge, Massachusetts”.

Even if that’s true, can you blame him? In the mid-1960s, if you had asked most people around the world where and when they would choose to be born, where they would take their chances behind a veil of ignorance, they would probably have chosen the United States of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. In the richest, most powerful country on earth, the latter’s Great Society was transforming the lives of millions, offering a hand-out to those who needed it. Unemployment was a thing of the past, inflation not yet a pressing concern. Americans drove American cars, and they always would. Things could only get better. In this context, why wouldn’t you assume that given the right liberal principles, people would inevitably find their way to a fairer society?

But in January 1971, when A Theory of Justice reached the shelves, the wheels were coming off. This was Richard Nixon’s America now: more abrasive, more divided, more anxious about the future. The carnage in Vietnam was taking a heavy toll. The shambles of Watergate, the last time sensible people were seriously worried about a presidential coup, would deal a severe blow to the image of American democracy. The OPEC oil shock, the widening fissures of race and gender, the growing anxieties about crime and pornography, the sense of a chasm between the “elites” and the “people”, even the first glimmers of a technological revolution that would destroy millions of jobs worldwide – all these things were taking shape in Nixon’s America, at the very moment of Rawls’s intellectual triumph. Even Donald Trump was taking his first steps into the Manhattan real estate market.

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The decades since then, spanning the lifetime of anybody under the age of fifty, have not been kind to the assumptions with which Rawls grew up. In 1971 it was reasonable to think that with the advances of the civil rights and feminist movements, social solidarity would become stronger, not weaker. As rising affluence closed the gap between rich and poor, people would become more aware of what they had in common. And the new gospel of court-protected human rights – of which Rawls is often seen as a champion – would ensure even the weakest were treated fairly and equally. All perfectly sensible expectations. All wrong.

Perhaps the biggest thing, though, is simply a question of style. When critics discuss Rawls today, they almost always mention that he was a middle-class, Ivy League-educated white man. In radical circles, the value that he personified above all – a quiet, reserved, urbane civility – is now treated as fake, inauthentic, a marker of privilege. Even that brilliant image of the “veil of ignorance” is now used to beat him. “Eyes Wide Shut: John Rawls’s Silence on Racial Injustice” reads the title of one blistering academic essay. “He placed many layers of muffling abstraction between his readers and real-world struggles for justice,” complains another critic. “Rawls was so deeply in the grip of white ignorance about the centrality of racism and white supremacy to the creation of the modern Western world,” the black philosopher Charles W. Mills recently explained, that black students who dream of change “will get no help from white Rawlsianism”.

So much, then, for one of the greatest philosophers the New World has ever produced. There’s plenty of time for a comeback, of course, and A Theory of Justice will surely never go out of print. But will the next fifty years be kinder to Rawls? Probably not. The next half-century is unlikely to be an age of self-confident liberal pluralism: quite apart from the strongmen in Russia, China, Turkey and Iran, American democracy itself has rarely seemed in weaker health. And the common ground, the tolerance and decency for which Rawls stood, seems vanishingly elusive.

One story says it all. Last autumn, while the staff of the New York Times were tearing themselves apart about the Black Lives Matter movement and the growing violence in America’s streets, one columnist circulated a copy of Rawls’s essay on public reason. “What we’re having is really a philosophical conversation, and it concerns the unfinished business of liberalism,” she wrote. “I think that all human beings are born philosophers, that is, that we all have an innate desire to understand what our world means and what we owe to one another and how to live good lives.”

“Philosophy schmosiphy,” one of her colleagues wrote back. “We’re at a barricades moment in our history. You decide: which side are you on?”

As furious crowds flooded on to streets across the country, Robert Kennedy landed in Indiana on the stump to win the Democrat’s presidential nomination. He was, of course, a man who had suffered personal loss in another terrible political murder. Police advised him to cancel his event but instead he spoke from the heart for a few minutes. “What we need in the United States is not division,” he said. “What we need in the United States is not hatred. What we need in the United States is not violence and lawlessness; but love and wisdom and compassion toward one another. And a feeling of justice towards those who still suffer within our country whether they be white or they be black.”

Some listeners cried. Others stood still in shock. But elsewhere rioting broke out and cities burned. It was start of the country’s worst unrest since the Civil War, with dozens killed, hundreds of shops destroyed, thousands of citizens injured and tens of thousands arrested. Two months later, Kennedy himself was shot on the campaign trail in California. It felt as though American society were falling apart as cultural, political, social and racial fissures beneath the surface of the nation erupted. African-Americans, anti-war protesters, hippies and women were fighting for profound change. Yet that summer of fire and fury ended with election of Richard Nixon as president.

Now look across the Atlantic. Once again, the US is horribly divided, its cities burn with rage and the curse of racism continues to corrode the world’s richest nation in an election year. Nixon, the former vice-president who had slunk away in 1962 after defeat in his previous presidential campaign, won through overt appeal to white anxiety as he promised to restore order and played into fears of his ‘silent majority’. Today we see Donald Trump pursuing the same strategy but in far less subtle style. “When the looting starts, the shooting starts,” he tweeted, reviving a phrase popularised by the segregationist George Wallace in 1968 as he sent troops on the streets.

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History never repeats itself exactly, even when it ricochets through time. Now there is rioting over the murder of another black man taking place against backdrop of a public health battle rather than bloody conflict in Asia. Yet there is one clear political continuum that links these two turbulent years half a century apart. For 1968 was the year in which the Right took firm control of the Republican Party, driving away the liberals in a strategy that has reached its dark apotheosis in Trump.

Nixon won as a populist, using the language of law and order to lure fearful white Southern, suburban and working class northern voters into the Republican fold to create his conservative majority. This was nasty party politics: brutal, divisive but effective. He repudiated a liberal consensus that had held sway for four decades, speaking directly to some citizens’ anxieties on crime, economic status and racial integration. The success of this strategy, four years after the crushing defeat of conservative champion Barry Goldwater, confounded many analysts.

Nixon’s coalition was solidified by Ronald Reagan as he seduced Southern Democrats with sunny optimism and cemented by the Bush dynasty, then the politics of fear revived by Trump to win narrowly in 2016. The narrative remained much the same: that government is bad, spraying around cash on anti-poverty programmes and threatening traditional values. There was a clear racial subtext. And this contempt for consensus and its ultimate embodiment through the state ended up with the fanaticism seen on the American right today, resisting controls on anything from firearms through to a new disease even as they cause carnage.

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It seems strange to recall when we look at today’s America that it was once — and within my lifetime — southern Democrats who defended segregation. Wallace, the repellent Alabama governor called “the most dangerous racist in America” by Martin Luther King but now quoted admiringly by a president, ran three times for the White House as a Democrat. Meanwhile there was a strain of liberal Republicanism that sought to use the state for progressive ends. Their last standard-bearer was Nelson Rockefeller, the governor of New York who sought to prevent developers such as Donald Trump’s father, Fred, from practising housing discrimination. King once said that inequality might have ended in months if the south had leaders like ‘Rocky’.

Instead these progressive Republicans were driven out to the delight of centrist Democrats. That seminal election of 1968, with defeat for Rockefeller’s belated bid for the Republican nomination, marked the extinguishing of liberalism in their party. It died when John Lindsay, the New York mayor and another prominent liberal, finished speaking at the convention with an appeal for unity — as noted by Lawrence O’Donnell in Playing With Fire, his fine book on the campaign. Some hoped Lindsay might have become Nixon’s pick for vice-president. Instead, he ended up running for the White House four years later as a Democrat.

This Republican strategy proved electorally successful, winning eight out of 13 presidential races since 1968. But it has ended up handing the party to Trump, backing someone obviously unfit for office while descending into the cesspit of his hate-fuelled populism. Bear in mind that Trump’s first political action in public was paying for full-page newspaper advertisements demanding the execution of five ethnic minority teenagers accused of rape who were later exonerated. Like father, like son. Typically, he has never apologised. Yet the Republican Party remains in thrall to him, even when he advocates the injection of disinfectant to beat a disease that has killed more Americans than the war in Vietnam.

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There is a straight line from Nixon in 1968 to Trump in 2020, a pair of rogues who ended up as president, and it runs straight through the heart of the Republican Party. Shortly before winning the party’s nomination four years ago, Trump even praised his predecessor, a disgraced crook yet a far more serious political player than the reality television star. “What Nixon understood is that when the world is falling apart, people want a strong leader whose highest priority is protecting America first.” His team embraced Nixon as a role model with his appeal to those citizens alarmed by conflict, disruption and racial unrest.

Nixon was a big admirer of Benjamin Disraeli — yet could the US have moved any further from the concept of One Nation politics? Trump has taken that populist appeal to the silent majority and, pushing it to the limits, infused it with Wallace’s bigotry and his own vanity to appeal to a shrinking demographic. Even the right to protest, hailed as a key part of America’s greatness in King’s last speech, seems in jeopardy. So a party that talks of faith and freedom is undermining democracy by colluding with a president who teargases peaceful protesters so he can pose for a publicity stunt with a bible. And a political force that wraps itself in the flag ends up assisting in destruction of America’s global leadership while China uses a pandemic that erupted within its borders to extend its influence.

There are still some liberal conservatives trying to resist the Republican descent into darkness, including prominent governors and members of Congress — although the loss of the combative and widely-respected John McCain leaves a big gap. There are groups such as Defending Democracy Together, founded to fight nativism infecting their party as “antithetical to what it means to be a Republican and what it means to be American”.

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The decision of the former president George W Bush to speak out this week on racism is signifiant on several levels, not least since he has been battling behind the scenes for the soul of his party. If the Democrats can travel from supporting segregationists to backing the first black president over four decades, there must some hope the party can pull back from its far-Right flirtation before it is too late.

Among the most prominent Republican voices against Trump has been David Frum, the former Bush speechwriter and author of Trumpocalypse, a savage indictment of his party’s current leadership. Frum wrote in 2018 about how class and racial divisions enable demagogues. “For two political generations, Republicans have proclaimed the purity of their conservatism. But in a democratic society, conservatism and liberalism are not really opposites. They are different facets of the common democratic creed. What conservatives are conserving, after all, is a liberal order. That truth has been easy to overlook in the friction of partisan politics. It must be reaffirmed now, in this hour of liberal peril.” His wise words ring even truer today.

The entire debate, like the rest of recorded history, is available to watch on YouTube and is instructive in all kinds of ways. Many regard it as the moment that TV became the final arbiter in politics. When, as Neil Postman puts it in Amusing Ourselves to Death, we moved from the Typographical Age to the Age of Show Business.

Looking at it today it is hard to see it in that light. It seems hesitant and apologetic, and still rather bookish. Like most Sixties’ current affairs programming, from Firing Line to Blue Peter, one is struck by the simplicity of the sets, the static camera work, and the almost offensive levels of decorum shown by the participants. One might think the two would-be POTUSES (POTI? PsOTUS?) … one might think they were joint participants in a school prize giving, for all the acrimony visible.

Kennedy makes no jibes about Nixon’s conk. Not once does Nixon, for his part, take advantage of Kennedy’s tantalising middle initial. Neither man references the size of the other’s package, hints that the other is on the nursery slopes of dementia or accuses him of harbouring prejudice against any specific ethno-religious group (there was really only one that mattered, to be fair — Christian Americans — although JFK’s Catholicism would come under scrutiny in due course).

Nevertheless, the criteria on which their respective performances were judged in these debates notoriously set the tone for the coming decades. Kennedy wowed the electorate as much with his evident vigour and hamster-cheeked good looks as his grasp of the challenges facing America. Nixon, on the other hand, was only recently out of hospital. A knee injury sustained while campaigning had become infected — Nixon was a septic Sceptic. He looked wan, and Kennedy won — one nil.

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There were four debates in all; but it remains the first that is legendary for the unfortunate Nixon, whose palour, sweatiness and even, it is said, poor choice of suit colour — it blended in with the background — all diminished him in the eyes of viewers. Remarkably, it is claimed that radio listeners, unable to see his furtive glances and glistening upper lip, believed that Nixon had won. Though that might easily reflect the demographic that chose to absorb the arguments through the more conservative medium to begin with.

Kennedy of course went on to win the race too, decisively in terms of the electoral college, which is what counts, though by a very narrow squeak in the popular vote — an interesting reverse of the divergence facing Republican and Democrat candidates today. Camelot lasted barely three years, before he was gunned down on November 22, 1963, leaving Lyndon B Johnson, who stepped up to steer the USA through its various mid-Sixties convulsions — from Civil Rights to the Vietnam War. Be careful what you wish for.

Nixon meanwhile became well aware of the power and the pitfalls of TV campaigning from then on, and swiftly mastered the art. He eventually won the election of 1968, and was re-elected in 1972, only to leave the office less than two years later under the most ignominious circumstances of any Presidential departure in History, though arguably preferable to those of Kennedy. One might say of both men, be careful what you wish for.

Ever since then, TV audiences have looked to TV to provide then with a short cut, a clue to the character of the candidate they are faced with that will enable them to confidently back or decisively reject them without having to do all that boring manifesto stuff. Like professional poker players, they know the real game is never where your gaze is being directed. They hope for a tell. A twitch, a guilty start, a darting eye. And human nature being what it is, whatever they are really hoping to see, they will.

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Reporting on the TV debates and interviews has focused almost entirely on what one might call the Nixonian details. Corbyn’s glasses, slightly askew on one occasion. Was Johnson more or less stammering than usual, when challenged over his lifetime record of mendacity and half-truth? Did the BBC really edit out derisive laughter from his interview? Did Channel 4 deliberately mishear Boris Johnson as saying that “immigrants of colour” were to be welcomed but only under democratic control?

I have seen perhaps two or three serious attempts by well-informed journalists to analyse and cost the manifesto promises of the parties, in language ordinary people might understand, for every hundred excited jabberings about who has got the wind in their sales, or looked exhausted, defeated, or fat.

For my money, however, the most telling interview was a BBC exclusive with a young woman who was asked what issues she would be considering before deciding how to vote. She said that she felt she had not been properly informed of the issues — passive voice — and had not been adequately educated, and that consequently she tended to just vote the way her friends did. Their collective vote was it seemed a sort of emergent phenomenon, of the kind familiar to anyone who has attended a séance.

Now, as I always emphasise when I am trying to establish a rapport with young people, perhaps to discover who left seven wet towels on the bathroom floor, the main thing I look for is openness and candour. We can make no progress without these.

And tempting though it is to roll our eyes, this woman is being admirably honest and self aware. To a greater or lesser extent this is how millions of people decide.

Suggested reading

Brexit is going to drive us all mad

By Ed West

Many develop a tribal loyalty to their first love and never re-examine the premises. They respond to peer-group consensus, however ill-informed, they think it is someone else’s fault that they are not better informed, and they wouldn’t read a manifesto in the loo while there are the backs of shampoo bottles to reach for. And it is perhaps worrying that many base these initial judgements on unexamined groupthink.

To the extent that they can be persuaded to switch tracks, they are strongly influenced by random but vivid visual stimuli of the kind that made 1960 famous. Unplanned, unscripted events that convince them they have accessed some fundamental, revealed truth about the character of the individuals they are being asked to vote for, an insight that will enable them to decide without having to grasp the implications of anyone’s fiscal or immigration policy. This is sometimes known as the availability heuristic.

Our would-be leaders are now trained to suppress all such revealing traits, of course. And while these things provide a brief flare in the darkness they rarely decide elections. The bacon sandwich may have done for Ed Miliband, but the young woman in the clip will not have found her prior beliefs challenged too hard by the past few week’s coverage. She will still trust her better informed friend, and will by now I suspect be familiar with that comfortable feeling of being able to fit anything that happens into her established world view, however second-hand and arbitrary she knows it to be.