Parties in the Age of Watergate

...TH~ AMEmCAN Constitution has been widely and rightfully regarded as one of the most impressive documeDts in the long and predominantly sad history of man's attempts to govern himself with at least some decency and humanity...

...In a denmcratic society, ideological politicsare no politics at all...

...It is a brief, and a rather unscholarly one at that, rather than an attempt to reach a full understanding of the impeachment process as intended by the Founders...

...It is to indicate that, as so often has happened since the Bolshevik Revolution, the differences between the se-called Left and Right may not be differences at all...

...The interesting question is whether the various emerging forms of collectivist orthodoxies in our time have the spiritual resources to establish a new order in which men can achieve some kind of human fulfillment, The evidence, so far, is that they do not---they seem to be morally and intellectually bankrupt from the outset...

...Indeed, Marcuse hin~self is involved in this paradox...

...They "constitutionalized" political parties and thus avoided the excesses of plebiscitary democracy and, in Aaron Wildavsky's phrase ( Commentary, August, 1973), a "plebiscitary Presidency...

...The massive and seemingly solid institutions of any society--the economic institutions, the political institutions, the religions institutions---are always at the mercy of the ideas in the heads of the people who populate these institutions...

...10, inveighed against them, reflecting the Washington-Madison-Hamilton animosity toward parties as "factions...

...After the initial period of revolutionary enthusiasm had passed, at a time when one might expect the revolutionary regime either to fall back into its old habits and patterns, or to degenerate into a tyranny, the Founding Fathers were able to deliberate upon, construct, and defend before a skeptical people a sophisticated system of government incorporating the "new discoveries" of a greatly improved ~'science of politics" as well as a high degree of political prudence...

...Yet when it came to the realities of governing "the first new nation" and assuring an orderly transfer of power from an incum~nt administration to a victorious political party in opposition, the Founding Fathers substituted experience for ideology...

...Nixon has neither, although he did seek his own version of a ~'one-party" state...

...The modern world, and the crisis of modernity we are now experiencing, was created by ideas, and by the passions which these ideas unleashed...

...Previous presidents have had their troubles with the party system, but the exigencies of war-making and foreignpolicy crises probably discouraged FDR, Truman, Kennedy, and Johnson from engaging in any remaking of the parties...

...And a reformation of modern utopianism, I think we will all agree, is what we are most desperately in need of...

...And once that distinction is made--as it was made in classical, premodern philosophy--both the legitimacy of the dream and the integrity of reality can be preserved...

...The Haldemarts and the Ehrlichmans thought that the United States could be run "scientifically," without politics...

...Watergate has made it clear to political parties that they should never again be so weakened as to become superfluous to politics...

...This does not sound like much--and yet it is much, much more than it sounds...

...The weakening or even disintegration of effective (not responsible) political parties leads to instability ff not to ungovernability of a democratic polity because it rereeves from the political process an unideological organized interest group capable of brokering for ideological "single-issue" interest groups...

...The Watergate mafia sought not only to delegitimize the Democratic Party, it sought to delegitimize the Republican Party as well...

...A utopianism which knows itself to be utopian is already on the way to denying itself, because it has already made that first, crucial distinction between dream and reality...

...Not only did he ignore the Republican Party qua party and actively oppose candidates of ,his own party--other presidents have done the same thing in greater or lesser degree but he also sought something different: to bring about nonparty government through the creation of a "presidential party" organized along personalist lines...

...If one looks at the major institutions of American society today--the schools, the family, the business corporation, the federal government--we can see this process going on before our eyes...

...they are not however, rule-or-ruin ideologues...

...This explains what is at first sight a paradox: the fact that so many of our Western intellectuals will simultaneously follow a utopian thinker like Herbert Marcuse in denouncing the bourgeois status quo and at the same ~Lme praise Maoist China or Soviet Russia where Marcuse's works are forbidden to be published...

...It was a process furthered considerably by the lVlcCmvern campaign, which dismantled the Democratic Party in favor of a personalist machine...

...9 for the importance of these "new discoveries...

...Only such a reformation can bring us back to that condition of sanity, to that confident acceptance of reality, which found expression in I~rd Macaulay's tart rejoinder to Francis Bacon: "An acre in Middlesex is better than a principality in Utopia...

...nevertheless, the result of the ratification process seemed to show an agreement with the point that Jefferson had made several years earlier in the Notes on Virginia: ~I~ne concentrating [all the powers of government, legislative, executive, and judiciary] in the same hands [i.e., those of the legislature] is precisely the definition of despotic government . . . . An elective despotism was not the governmont we fought for, but one which should not only be founded on free principles, but in which the powers of government should be so divided and balanced among several bodies of magistracy, as that no one could transcend their legal limits, without being effectually checked and restrained by the others" (Koch & Peden eds., The Life and Selected Writings of Thomas Jefferson [New York: Modern Library, n.d.],p...

...In whose political-party interest is it that President Nixon should succeed...

...Is New York a better place to live in since the fall of Tammany...

...The above essay has been adapted from a lecture given at Hillsdale College, I-]~llsdale, Michigan...

...he almost succeeded...

...What 1974 GOP candidate for Congress or governor-particularly in a tight race--will seek a Nixon endorsement or a Nixon campaign appearance in a local constituency...

...In actual fact, our constitutional system depends for its successful functioning on a fourth institution which has no constitutional existence: political parties...

...Utopianism dreams passionately of a liberation from all existing orthodoxies--religious, social, political--but, sooner or later, it must wearily and gratefully surrender to a new orthodoxy which calms its passions even as it compromises its dreams...

...Watergate is not an historical accident...

...In other words, President Nixon and his White House camarilla were exploiting for their purposes what had become the favorite design of New Left politics...

...Despite some discussion in the Constitutional Convention that the necessity of the president to seek reelection after four years was a sufficient guarantee against his misconduct, there seemed to be general agreement that some impeachment procedure was necessary...

...This is not a call for the return of powerful political bosses like Mark Hanna or Boies Penrose, or (shiver, shiver) political machines like Tammany...

...Watergate has shown how ethically corrupt politics without parties can become...

...A bit more honesty or reflection would point to a long-term subversion of professional political tradition, which morely culminated in Watergate...

...To surnmunt this crisis, without destroying the modern world itself, will require new ideas----or new versions of old ideas---that will regulate these passions and bring them into a more fruitful and harmonious relation with reality...

...Without the mediation, the brokerage, of organized political parties, a stable American polity becomes diiFrult to obtain...

...It will, on the surface, look like a mere academic enterprise, involving as it does a reexamination and fresh understanding of our intellectual and spiritual history...

...In the 1972 elections the Nixon Administration came closer than any administration in history to producing an end of politics...

...The paradox dissolves, however, if one realizes that the utopian impulse in the end must actively seek its own liquidation-because it is impossible to sustain indefinitely...

...It is no coincidence at all that the Nixon campaign to establish nonparty government came with the ending of the Vietnam War and the The Alternative June-~ptember 1974 9 waning need for bipartisan support to prosecute that war...

...President Nixon attempted to deconstitutionalize the party system by transforming both political parties into a presidential appanage...

...Indeed, as the staff notes, before 1863 bribery was not a federal crime for civil officers other than judges...

...The truth is that ideas are albimportant...

...IT TAKES WISHFUL thinking and a lack of historical perspective to conclude, as many people have, that Watergate happened because a handful of terribly ordinary people mistook themselves for philosopher-kings...

...For the real antidote to utopianism is a self-conscious understanding of utopianism...

...In other words, as politician-brokers, parties are compromisers, trimmers, sell-out artists, amoralists, what you will...

...But it must have been an impeachable oflense nonetheless, since it is specifically mentioned in the Constitution as a '2aigh crime and misdemeanor...

...Parties are also part of the checks-and-balances system...

...But just as it is ideas that alienate us from our world, so it is ideas which can make us at homo in the world--which can permit us to envision the world as a "homely" place, where the practice of ordinary virtues in the course of our ordinary lives can indeed fulfill our potential as human beings...

...The leverage of ideas is so immense that a slight change in the intellectual climate can and will--perhaps slowly, but nevertheless inexorably--twist a familiar institution into an unrecognizable shape...

...the psychological costs become too great...

...they have since learned b e t t e r . As he nears the end of his long political career President Nixon finds himself alone with few enthusiastic supporters even in what would be called his own Party...

...The antipolitics of the Nixon Administration reveals a sad ignorance of how a large, powerful, and denmcratic country should be run...

...Is it net striking that none of the Watergate conspirators could be described as a professional politician...

...For two centuries, the very important people who managed the affairs of this society could not believe in the importance of ideas---until one clay they were shocked to discover that their children, having been captured and shaped by certain ideas, were either rebelling against their authority or seceding from their society...

...237...

...It leaves us, I should say, with a dilemma--but a dilemma which is also an opportunity...

...In particular, the Founders were concerned to create a strong chief executive who would be able to withstand the usurpations of power that might be expected to proceed from a popularly elected legislature in a country which had recently completed a successful revolution against King George III...

...In a heterogeneous society, parties are administered by politicians or, as Mayor Lindsay called them quite accurately, "power brokers...

...I know that it will be hard for some to believe that ideas can be so important...

...The opportunity is simply the opportunity of taking thought, of reflecting upon our condition, of trying to understand how we got where we are...

...House of Representatives, 93rd Congress, 2nd Session, Committee on the Judiciary, Report by the Staff of the Impeachment Inquiry, ~'Constitutional Grounds for Presidential Impeachment," hereafter cited as Staff Report), they seem to approach their task in a partisan spirit and to regard themselves as i n t h e service of those who wish to impeach the President, for whatever reason, and from whatever motive...

...Where does that leave tts---we who inhabit the "free world"--the post-bourgeois bourgeois world...

...A president who tries to take on everybody, including political allies in his own Party, ends up crippled, unless he has the temperament and the apparat of a Stalin...

...Unfortunately, if we may judge by their report (U.S...

...This underestimation of ideas is a peculiarly bourgeois fallacy, especially powerful in that most bourgeois of nations, our own United States...

...Accordingly, the Founders wished to protect the independence of each branch of government while at the same time guaranteeing that no branch of governnmnt was in a position to abuse its constitutional powers or extend them beyond their proper limits...

...It quotes out of context, uses dubious historical analogies, and at times simply ignores inconvenient facts...

...New York City is ungovernable for many reasons, not least of which is the debilitation of political parties, a process which began with Fiorello H. La Guardia (in his three mayoral campaigns, he ran under nine different party labels) and reached its climax with Mayor Lindsay, who couldn't run for reelection in 1973 under any party label...

...The Founders may have been mere sensitive to this problem than many of their countrymen---at any rate, the Antifederalists found it convenient to argue against the proposed Constitution on the grounds that it created a monarch in the person of the president...

...President Eisenhower left the parties alone because, with Senator Lyndon Johnson as leader of the loyal opposition, there was no need to combat them...

...The most famous of the Federalist Papers, No...

...It is not merely something for senators and newspapers to examine to insure that it does net happen again...

...The construction of such a world is the intellectual enterprise that most needs encouragement and support today...

...But such a reexamination and fresh understanding is always the sign that a reformation is beginning to get under way...

...The impeachment inquiry staff of the House Judiciary Committee has a rare opportunity to continue the work of the Founders by delineating an impeachment standard which would preserve the independence of the presidency as well as protect the community against possible misuses of presidential power...

...This subversion has been the piecemeal alteration of our constitutional system, over a period of many years, from one of separate institutions--president, Congress, the courts--sharing powers to a system of all-power-tothe-people participatory, communitarian democracy in which power would run directly to the president in the name of the People...

...These harsh charges should sound incredible but they emerge from a critical examination of the report...

...But the creation of a.strong chief executive required, in keeping with the republican "genius" of the American people, a constitutional provision whereby the community could be protected from the possible misuse of the great powers placed in the hands of one man...

...One of these discoveries, whose perfection was due to the '~great improvements" in the science of politics of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, was ' t h e regular distribution of power into distinct departments," or the separation of powers (see Publius, The Federalist, No...

...These orthodoxies are sustained only by coercion-which means they are pseudoorthodoxies, exuding an odor of boredom which is also the odor of decay...

...Its primary conclusion that an impeachable offense need not be an indictable offense is perhaps sound...

...In such a world, dreams complement reality instead of being at war with it...

...But the arguments by which it reaches that conclusion are unsound, and raise suspicion as to where the staff is really headec[ Some examples of the stairs procedure 10 The Alternative June-September 1974...

...This is not to blame the New Left for Watergate...

...Political parties exist to take the heat off elected representatives, to make possible a Burkean relationship between voter and legislator, they exist to negotiate with clamant pressure groups whose power they measure net by decibel output but by vote input...

...It is a call to-realize that political parties are not some luxury which we can do without...

...Marxism may be the official religion of Russia and China, but it is a religion without theologian~ Chere isn't a Marxist philosopher worthy of the name in either country--and it is a religion whose holy scriptures, the works of Marx, Engels, I~nin, are ~ d by the masses...