Tocqueville, Marx, Weber, Nixon: Watergate in Theory
Wiener, Jon
Watergate is history. The time has come to seek a theoretical perspective on those tumultuous events, to move away from yesterday's feverish absorption with "the facts" and confront the...
...Noam Chomsky called Watergate a "tea party" in comparison to what Nixon was doing in Vietnam...
...And Cowboy capital is often linked to Yankee capital through interlocking boards of directors, holding companies, and stock ownership...
...called leader of men...
...12 Haldeman coldly denied that Nixon had been a charismatic figure for him: "I do not love Richard Nixon," he said...
...One Marxist answer is that he treated the liberals as if they were radicals...
...Wolfgang J. Mommsen, The Age of Bureaucracy: Perspectives on the Political Sociology of Max Weber (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974), chap...
...For Max Weber, "bureaucracy is a precision instrument which can put itself at the disposal of quite varied interests in domination...
...For CREEP was set up beyond the pale of pluralist consensus, which is to say, outside the Republican party...
...From the perspective of the Yankee-Cowboy theory, Nixon's role was not so much the Cowboy antagonist of Yankee interests, but the Cowboy who gained his place in history by turning U.S...
...Watergate was an unprecedented disruption of politics as usual, a genuine crisis rather than simply a media spectacle...
...Tocqueville was particularly concerned about political corruption in democracies...
...his policy there was more brutal than anything the archrimster Ronald Reagan ever did as governor...
...Those who savor paradox and irony will find this development particularly tasty...
...This was the crime to which liberals objected—treating them as if they were beyond the pale, like radicals...
...A judgment that Nixon's administration engaged in illegitimate activities might be necessary, but it belongs in the political arena and not the scientific...
...that no one seeks the annihilation of his opponents...
...Finally Gerald Ford proclaimed that the entire episode demonstrated that "our system works," Theodore White enshrined this success in his book, and Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford are playing Bernstein and Woodward in the Hollywood version of All the President's Men...
...All this was justified by a strident assertion of nationalistic ideology around the notion of the "Bicentennial Era," which was to correspond to Nixon's second term of office...
...It was essentially a single-issue campaign that was not incompatible with corporate interests, especially since many corporate leaders themselves no longer supported the war in Vietnam...
...adherence to a program, he feels, provides little inner satisfaction compared to devotion to great leaders...
...with Nixon's second term, "a tide of reaction...
...This was the orientation of most House Judiciary Committee members in their hearings, as well as of most interpretations by the liberal press...
...It suggests that behind Woodward and Bernstein's investigations, behind Leon Jaworski's indictments, behind Eric Sevareid's pear-shaped phrases lie the ideas of Alexis de Tocqueville...
...Similarly, Weber did little work on the social origins of charismatic authority...
...Charles Colson said he would stomp on his own grandmother if it would help Nixon win—a sentiment clearly incompatible with the spirit of democratic pluralism...
...He rejects the description of democratic politics as rational consideration of alternative policies—the classical Tocquevillean conception—and argues instead that it has become a "dictatorship resting on the exploitation of mass emotionality...
...Watergate was at best a bizarre overreaction, a major miscalculation by the President and his staff, not an objective necessity required by deepening contradictions...
...the past year has seen revelation after revelation of abuses of power by the federal government...
...Hans Gerth and C. Wright Mills, eds., From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1958), "Bureaucracy," pp...
...But if presidents from Roosevelt through Kennedy and Johnson accepted corporate contributions, played dirty tricks, and covered up with public lies, they did not get driven from office for it...
...Had there ever been a candidate who refused corporate contributions...
...The turn to the right also included an attack on the radical left unprecedented since the days of Joseph McCarthy...
...Class warfare, therefore, is of foreign origin...
...Watergate was the "battleground of a national struggle for power" between two groups within the corporate elite that had different politics...
...Only voluntary associations could serve as a check on such despotism, defending individuals against the tyrannical tendencies of the state...
...I, p. 268...
...Carl Oglesby, "In Defense of Paranoia," Ramparts, November 1974...
...But by early 1975 few were about to admit that they had loved Nixon, and Haldeman had never been the kind of person of whom it could be said that he was in close touch with his emotional life, much less given to effusive TV statements while his conviction was under appeal...
...In modern politics, for Weber, the message is not what counts...
...and, because the 1972 election had been so overwhelmingly one-sided, there would not be any Democrats who would argue that dirty tricks determined the outcome and therefore that McGovern deserved to be president...
...that party competition, by mutual agreement, remains within clearly defined limits...
...it was unpluralist behavior with a specific class content and a specific ideological orientation...
...Second, the political differences between Yankees and Cowboys are not fully explained by their different economic interests...
...Even the apparently more liberal social concerns of the Yankees are open to question...
...Nixon's resignation did not close the books but on the contrary has led to closer scrutiny of government attacks on the political freedom of radicals during the past 25 years...
...He seems to have assumed that charismatic leadership is, in principle, fully compatible with an otherwise instrumentally rational political system...
...Some of the eastern rivals of the Cowboy new money were members of the Democratic party, which has always found leaders from among the more liberal members of the elite— the Roosevelts, the Harrimans, the Stevensons...
...nor was it an example of the benevolent despotism that Tocqueville believed found fertile soil in the egotism and isolation of mass society (there was nothing particularly benevolent about the Nixon social policies of "benign neglect...
...This old money, represented above all by Nelson Rockefeller, was challenged by men of new money from the Sun Belt, above all by Goldwater, and later by Nixon...
...Here the contrast with a Marxist position is striking...
...This is what Theodore White was referring to in arguing that Nixon broke faith with the American people— and even with fellow Republicans...
...It was therefore necessary for the corporate elite to discard the veil of legality, the pretense to pluralism that prevails in normal times...
...A final problem with the Yankee-Cowboy 22 Associated Press dispatch, June 16, 1975 theory of Watergate is that the linkages between the two economic groups and the political structures through which the Watergate crisis developed are not clear...
...Would such a person tell the nation "I'm not a crook...
...The Watergate crisis was resolved by a reassertion of power by the elected officials of the legislative branch...
...The American revolution was not a class revolution, but a successful separation of a colony from an empire...
...Had not John F. Kennedy gained the presidency through a suspicious counting of votes in Chicago...
...Martin's Press, 1974), and Jurgen Habermas, Legitimation Crisis (Boston: Beacon Press, 1975...
...Indeed, for Weber, political commitment and action are fundamentally emotional and irrational responses to the claims of heroic individuals...
...3 This was precisely Tocqueville's concern: that there would be no check on the powers of central authority to move against citizens...
...But in fact the opposite has occurred...
...This leadership does not base its appeal on a rational political program...
...But according to his definition of charisma, the successful authority figure is "entitled to unrestricted obedience from his followers," who by definition see no conflicting obligations to a system of laws...
...Congress, Senate, Report of the Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1974), Testimony of Patrick Buchanan...
...From this perspective, argued by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and Archibald Cox, Watergate was a conflict between the administrative officials of the executive branch, with their characteristic attachment to secrecy, and the elected officials of the legislature, more committed to democratic values...
...The Cowboys seek high military budgets as the principal means by which the state can augment their capital, while the Yankees' interest is in a relaxation of international tensions and active government support for increased foreign trade...
...lies in a commitment by all of us to show a renewed respect for the mutual restraints that are the mark of a free and civilized society...
...Tocquevillean liberals fear that centralized power will destroy individual rights...
...Arthur Schlesinger has written that, as the presidential bureaucracy "overwhelmed the traditional separation of powers in foreign affairs, it began to aspire toward an equivalent centralization of power in the domestic polity...
...Thus it seems completely appropriate in Weberian terms to regard Nixon as a leader exercising charismatic authority...
...The Cowboys are foreign policy hawks and the Yankees more conciliatory...
...The Senate and House committees were not dominated by Yankees...
...but in fact, the leader rules by virtue of the devotion of his followers...
...it played dirty, played for keeps, played winner take all...
...Some Marxists contented themselves with the observation that Watergate was not a class conflict...
...This eminently Tocquevillean statement comes from, of all people, E. Howard Hunt...
...foreign policy down the road of new Yankee interests in detente and trade...
...Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Liddy, and Hunt didn't do it for the money, but rather because Nixon was their life...
...But stealing from the public purse or selling the favors of the state for money—these are matters any wretch can understand and hope to emulate in turn.' Selling favors of the state was precisely the kind of corruption that led to Agnew's fall, but it was not what Watergate was about...
...Thus Weber would have us ask, what were the inner justifications with which the Watergate principals acted...
...Why was Nixon forced out...
...From this perspective, the Nixon administration's attacks on the Democratic National Committee and the Democratic presidential contenders were a violation of the rules of pluralistic politics—that political groups accept each other as equally legitimate...
...There was no significant radical movement left on the campuses or in the ghettos arguing that the political system was illegitimate...
...His was not a socialist party, not an anticapitalist party, not a workingclass party, hardly even a party...
...And it has been congressional liberals and the Yankee press * who have done the investigating and made the revelations...
...today the notion that Richard Nixon possessed a unique gift of grace seems ludicrous—this man who was called "Tricky Dick," or of whom it was said, "would you buy a used car from him...
...Indeed, Goldwater has said of Rockefeller's foreign policy views, "he'd make me look like a dove...
...178 JON WIENER all, the economic interests of the two groups have not been shown to be clearly distinct...
...McGovern got virtually no support from the Yankee press in arguing that Watergate was a presidential crime for which Nixon should be excluded from office...
...This he does not see as a threat to democratic government, or a problem for liberal states...
...John Ehrlichman had an even more revealing exchange with Senator Talmadge: TALMADGE: If the president could authorize a covert break-in, do you think his power could include.., murder or other crimes...
...But then it must be asked, why was the eastern group willing to take such drastic and unprecedented measures against him...
...In any case, devotion to charismatic criminals is not grounds for overturning trial verdicts in the American legal system...
...he did not lead a national organization capable of pushing a program through Congress...
...New York: Doubleday, 1966), p. 513...
...From this perspective, the Watergate principals rejected the notion that their highest obligation was to a rationally created system of legal rules (the Bill of Rights...
...It was not until late in the conflict that the Yankees backed off from the war they had created, while the Cowboys continued to defend the old Yankee position...
...It is heroes, not party programs, that win the enthusiasm and devotion of followers, of the staff as well as the masses...
...220-21...
...The hawkish American intervention in Vietnam was the creation of the Yankee circle around Kennedy and Johnson...
...The winners are magnanimous and willing to compromise...
...3-25...
...This was Nixon's response to a domestic crisis of authority fostered largely by opposition to the war in Southeast Asia, and to an international weakening of American corporate power in relation to Japanese and European rivals...
...But in the depravity of great noblemen there is often a certain aristocratic refinement and an air of grandeur which prevents it from being communicated...
...In this respect, what has occurred is not a relegitimation of politics as usual but, on the contrary, a legitimizing of crucial elements of the radical critique of '60s liberalism, previously viewed as a paranoid fantasy...
...Weberian references to Nixon's "loss of legitimacy" coming in the wake of a "failure of charisma" offer no real analysis...
...But the crucial issue of a pluralist politics has to do not with money but with power...
...they do not use their new power to retaliate against those who opposed them...
...John Mitchell said in 1972, "This country is going to go so far to the right you won't recognize it," and the New York Times itself anxiously announced in January 1973, that 20Geoffrey Barraclough, "The End of an Era," New York Review, June 27, 1974, p. 19...
...19Kirkpatrick Sale, "The World Behind Watergate," New York Review, May 3, 1973...
...An alternative Weberian conception of Watergate is that it was a conflict, not between bureaucracy and democracy, but between two different conceptions of legitimate authority— between the rational authority of a set of legal rules, and the charismatic authority of the president...
...171 campaign was dedicated to the idea that winning was, the only thing that mattered...
...Nixon's strategy was thus a comprehensive and far-reaching attempt to shift the country to the right...
...15 Weber believed that the greatest threat to human freedom lay in the steady growth of bureaucratic structures, which brought with them a social ossification and a life-denying stagnation...
...The newness, the rawness of their wealth has made them typical self-made men, reactionary "individualists" with all the self-assurance, greed, and simple patriotism of the heroic first generation of robber barons...
...Weber would have to say that Nixon's staff valued him not so much for any rationally constructed political program as for his own status as a uniquely valuable individual...
...His analysis of Bonapartism does not seem appropriate for Nixon and Watergate...
...This was an explicit rejection on Weber's part, not an oversight...
...Patrick Buchanan, Nixon's speech writer, openly affirmed the strategy of seizing power, and keeping hold of it permanently, in his testimony before the Senate Watergate Committee.' Gordon Liddy told Mike Wallace that the break-in at Democratic National Committee headquarters was an "operation by one group of persons who were seeking to retain power, against another group who were seeking to acquire power...
...Weber writes scornfully of the . "merely abstract program of a party consisting of mediocrities" (and what party doesn't...
...he thought he had the power to do it...
...Weber makes a distinction between two ways of making politics one's vocation...
...Never again, they vowed, would they exercise genteel restraint in the face of such a risk...
...They claimed in their own defense that "everybody did it," a bastardized version of the "authority 'Archibald Cox, "Ends," New York Times Magazine, May 19, 1974, p. 28...
...The Sun Belt of the new money goes south down the San Diego Freeway, past San Clemente, the Versailles of the Rimsters, further south, past La Costa Country Club, where Nixon's staff retreated to plan the Watergate coverup...
...Their political ethics match their business and social ethics...
...The Republican 6Tocqueville, pp...
...then east by Lear jet into Goldwater's Arizona, to Texas, home of John Connolly and H. L. Hunt, and finally to Florida, to Senator Gurney, to Bebe Rebozo, to the Cuban emigres who did the dirty work for the Nixon reelection campaign...
...Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, J. P. Mayer, ed...
...Sam Ervin and Peter Rodino would never pass for Cabots or Lodges...
...But there are serious problems with the Yankee-Cowboy theory of Watergate...
...That's all it was...
...of American efforts to "destabilize" Chile, Kennedy's secret war against Cuba, and so on...
...Liberals hope that such groups will balance one another out, at least so long as the government itself does not tip the balance...
...What forces brought him down...
...3 Watergate Hearings, p. 53...
...It is useless to say that dishonest passions are found among all ranks, that one may find despicable men at the head of aristocratic nations as well as democracies...
...Instead of believing in the rules, they believed in him...
...crease," Tocqueville wrote...
...Rockefeller never pushed for exposure of Nixon's Watergate activities or for impeachment...
...All this suggests that the public debate over Nixon, the terms in which he was accused and in which he defended himself, were basically Tocquevillean...
...10 Watergate has been interpreted as the culmination of a long process of the centralization of power in the executive branch, a centralization that began as a response to foreign policy needs...
...7 Nixon was not the only Watergate figure to explain and justify his actions in Tocquevillean terms...
...For the "Kapitalistate" group around James O'Connor, Watergate was a Habermasian crisis of legitimation for the entire ruling class 23 Watergate constantly threatened to turn into an indictment of American "democracy" as a whole, as evidence kept appearing and suggested that Nixon didn't do anything his predecessors hadn't done...
...174 JON WIENER Why did Nixon fall...
...Even though we need to be reminded that Nixon committed more serious crimes elsewhere, such a unique political development deserves the Marxists' attention...
...What Tocqueville denounced as "corruption," Weber describes neutrally as one way of making politics one's vocation...
...WATERGATE IN THEORY 175 O'Brien, but against the people of Vietnam, and to a much lesser extent, against American radicals, black and white...
...Weber also lacks a conception of "illegitimate domination" that could accompany his theory of legitimate authority and would be useful in understanding Watergate...
...Nixon sensed that the case against him was based on a concept of pluralism, and defended himself by calling for a reassertion of pluralist virtue in words that Tocqueville himself might have uttered: Ultimately the answer...
...As long as Nixon confined his "fascist tactics" to radicals, he was not investigated, much less driven from office...
...20 It is useful to recall that the attacks on liberals in the campaign were only one part of a general push toward the right for which Nixon was gearing up at the end of his first term...
...2The Watergate Hearings: Break-In and Cover- Up (New York: Viking [hardcover], Bantam [paper], a New York Times Book, 1973), p. 521...
...Rockefeller's actions at Attica are difficult to explain from the viewpoint of Yankee- Cowboy theory...
...Weber welcomed charismatic "interruptions" of legal rationality as the only force that could keep modem society from becoming an iron cage of bureaucratic stagnation...
...There is an irony in this use of Tocqueville's notion of consensus to justify despotic treatment of political opponents...
...New York: Bedminster Press, 1968), vol...
...This in turn draws on James O'Connor, Fiscal Crisis of the State (New York and London: St...
...is sweeping across America...
...This conception is richer than the first but in some ways more problematic...
...its members do not challenge the fundamental rule of pluralistic politics that neither major party seek the annihilation of the other...
...Politics for Weber is first of all a question of the "inner justifications" people give to their acts of domination and obedience—the meanings people attribute to their relations with the powers that be...
...From Max Weber, "Politics as a Vocation," pp...
...84-85...
...The Nixon campaign consisted of a reactionary attack by the more right-wing element in the capitalist class against the older and more liberal, and the subsequent crisis and investigations were a successful counterattack...
...But if Watergate was a despotic attack on pluralism, it was not the kind of threat Tocqueville imagined would confront democracy in America...
...To develop a concept of illegitimate domination he regarded as an unscientific undertaking, a value judgment that belonged properly in the realm of politics rather than science...
...176 JON WIENER racily but was followed in the Watergate affair by the reassertion of the eastern group...
...Instead, Nixon's staff people saw themselves as acting on the basis of an absolutely personal devotion to Nixon's individual leadership...
...There is, in the corruption of those who reach power by chance, something coarse and vulgar which makes it contagious to the crowd...
...17 Though Nixon and his staff seem to have held precisely this view of McGovern, there are serious problems with such an analysis...
...An alternative liberal conception of Wate"rgate is the Weberian notion that it was a consequence of the growth of bureaucratic power to the point where it threatened democracy...
...I am indebted to Keith Nelson for calling this to my attention...
...This "new money" group seized control of the Republican party in 1964 when Goldwater defeated Rockefeller to win the nomination...
...First, because Nixon wasn't interested in compromise, he was interested in defeating the eastern old-money elite...
...Nixon represents them, he is their man—not just because he too is from Orange County, but because he found his financial backers, his personal staff, and his political ideology among them...
...This was not, of course, how the Committee to Reelect the President behaved...
...19 Nixon represented the "new money" group in challenging the dominant position of the "old...
...This kind of analysis stresses the relative autonomy of political developments and the shifting nature of political coalitions in American society...
...Why weren't these differences ironed out in private, at the Burning Tree Country Club...
...This is a crucial question for any theoretical account of Watergate, and there is a Tocquevillean answer to it...
...they are militantly antiunion, antiblack, and anti-Communist, with a lack of interest in high culture and little concem for "social problems" as perceived by the foundations of Rockefeller, Ford, and Carnegie...
...It does seem that the Cowboys are more immediately dependent on government contracts, but the Yankees too have their share of federal help...
...Nixon and his staff apparently developed this unprincipled commitment to victory-at-anyprice in the wake of the razor-thin victory of 1968...
...These three problems with the YankeeCowboy theory of Watergate—a lack of evidence of distinct economic interests, an unclear relation between the politics and the economic interests of the groups, and an absence of linkages to the politics of the Watergate crisis itself—have led some Marxists to argue that Watergate was a conflict between ruling groups that do not represent consistently welldefined sectors of the economy...
...others argued that Nixon's "real crimes" were not against Larry "'Max Weber, Economy and Society, Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich, eds...
...The push toward the right included an attack on working-class organizations, centering around wage controls, plus Republican support for the Teamsters in their struggle against the Farmworkers—pitting the most reactionary against the most progressive union...
...The argument that Watergate was "business as usual" cannot explain why this piece of political business should provoke the greatest political crisis in modern American history...
...it is the bread and butter of electoral competition...
...tyranny would unavoidably in"The White House Transcripts (New York: Viking [hardcover], Bantam [paper], a New York Times Book, 1974), transcript of June 23, 1972...
...For Weber, however, such a development was by no means necessarily a desirable one...
...One possible Marxist approach to Watergate is the argument that the McGovern campaign represented a genuine threat to the hegemony of the corporate elite, something close to a popular radical movement that could bring a fundamental transformation in the structure of power in America...
...that it was only an exaggerated case of politics as spectacle functioning to conceal the "real" historical developments with which Marxists ought to be concerned...
...Nixon seemed to doubt his own charismatic appeal, to have a gnawing suspicion that he was not what Weber described as "an innerly 12 Nixon's TV address of April 30, 1973...
...2 I It was in this context of a highly self-conscious attack on the liberal policies advocated by the eastern corporate elite that Watergate became an issue, and it was made an issue by precisely those elite groups Nixon sought to drive from power—network television news, the Times and the Post, the liberal members of Congress...
...Weber's writings lack any elaboration of the process by which charismatic figures lose legitimacy...
...It refused to go by the rules...
...Their interests tend to be in domestic enterprises rather than foreign...
...In general, Marxists have been considerably more successful at describing the social and political forces that form the background to Watergate than at describing the crisis itself...
...the challenge succeeded tempo"Bruce Brown, "Watergate: Business as Usual," Liberation, July—August 1974, P. 17...
...Second, McGovern was no threat to the capitalist class even had he won...
...6 This argument overlooks the possibility that some citizens might combine, not to defend freedom but to attack it, and that some voluntary associations might not play by the pluralist rules—as CREEP, for instance, did not...
...But this is not just a geographical theory of American politics, not just an argument that too much sun makes capitalists into right-wing extremists...
...The Nixon reelection 'U.S...
...they tend to be ruthless, to avoid the "civilized" restraints practiced by their eastern rivals...
...Charisma is the basis of political party life in modern democracies...
...But for Weber, charisma is not restricted to rare appearances of saints and prophets...
...Confronted with this problem, Congress and the liberal press defined the issues in such a way as to focus on the personal corruption of Nixon and his associates, rather than on American war crimes, systematic denial of civil rights to radicals, or corporate domination of the two-party system...
...It was his own party's refusal to defend him that led to Nixon's downfall...
...They did not believe that they had an ultimate duty to legal statute, that obedience to the rules is required in discharging statutory obligations...
...Charismatic leadership alone could break this deadening routine by its dynamism and creativity...
...It is difficult for the people to discover the baseness hidden under elegant manners, refined tastes, and graceful phrases...
...4 That is not a pluralist idea...
...As the President said to a trusted lieutenant, "We gotta win...
...He denounced "a few overzealous persons who mistakenly thought their cause justified violations of the law," and he refused to accept the "blame" for their excess of enthusiasm...
...This was accompanied by vicious attacks on the leading liberal ideological organs, particularly by Agnew's diatribes against network television news, the New York Times and the Washington Post...
...I refer here to Marx's discussion of the way different legitimist factions represented different capitalist economic interests...
...What was Watergate...
...Nixon's TV Address of August 15, 1973...
...The conditions favoring its demise, like the conditions favoring its appearance, remain largely unexplored in his work...
...In so doing, it is they who have been providing evidence for the case Marxists themselves were making during the Watergate crisis: Nixon's acts were not unique but were part of a pattern of repression that includes the nation's most celebrated liberal presidents...
...BKarl Marx, The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte...
...Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Imperial Presidency (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1972), p. 205...
...It was Barry Goldwater, and Hugh Scott, and Orange County's Representative Charles Wiggins who sealed Nixon's doom...
...Watergate was followed by revelations of massive illegal FBI and CIA surveillance of Americans that began under FDR and took a great leap forward on the orders of Lyndon Johnson...
...His work on "routinization" deals only with the cases in which charisma succeeds...
...Yet living "off" politics—corruption in the common Tocquevillean sense—turns out always to have lurked beneath the surface of Nixon's vocation—e.g., his tax deductions, his home improvements...
...1e The implication here was that Marxists should not be overly concerned with Watergate...
...In the Sun Belt, it is argued, there has arisen a new breed of capitalists in the post-World War II period, men who based their recent rise to wealth on government contracts in military and aerospace industries, on the oil depletion allowance, and on farm price supports...
...W III atergate seems to pose problems for Marxist analysis...
...WATERGATE IN THEORY 173 of the eternal yesterday...
...The time has come to seek a theoretical perspective on those tumultuous events, to move away from yesterday's feverish absorption with "the facts" and confront the significance of Watergate for American politics and society—particularly to consider the relative merits of liberal and Marxist attempts to deal with these questions...
...This has significant consequences for American politics in general and radical politics in particular...
...From a Marxist perspective, it can be seen as a split in the ruling class, a split of the kind Marx described in the 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, between capitalist groups with different economic interests that had been developing since World War II...
...3) Spring 1975, pp...
...Liberals, under an attack from the right unprecedented since the days of Joseph McCarthy, chose to fight back on the terrain of pluralist rules of the game and the rational authority of law by reasserting constitutional freedoms...
...WATERGATE IN THEORY 179 Constitution against a corrupt president...
...It's like brushing your teeth, Michael...
...Can it really be argued that the Yankees are more "civilized" in their domestic social policies...
...226, 229...
...From Max Weber, "Politics as a Vocation," p. 84...
...The mechanism is easily made to work for anybody who knows how to gain control of it"—even Richard Nixon...
...While George Gallup never hesitated to ask Americans "How much charisma does Nixon have: a good deal, some, or none...
...For Weber a stable political administration was by definition legitimate, and a genuinely unstable one would apparently not last long enough to require analysis...
...The Yankee-Cowboy theory describes the same regional class coalition as do the theories of the "emerging Republican majority" and "the southern strategy...
...We can understand the outcome of the Watergate affair as the triumph of a rationallegal system of authority over charismatic claims to legitimacy...
...Marxists must also ask, how was it possible that such a deep split between two groups within the ruling class was permitted to come out into the open...
...The dominant interpretation of Watergate has been a version of Tocquevillean pluralist theory: Watergate has significance as a despotic attack on pluralism by Nixon and his associates...
...In the Weberian conception, White House assistants committed the Watergate crimes for him, because keeping him in office was their most important task...
...103, 107...
...The major weakness of the various Marxist approaches is that they penetrate too quickly the ideological surface of political events—in this case, the terms in which the crisis was fought out and eventually resolved...
...22 Nixon's foreign policy, created by Rockefeller representative Henry Kissinger, was pure Yankee—disengagement from Vietnam, detente, and trade with Russia and China...
...in the words of one Marxist, 'BSee, e.g., Noam Chomsky, "Watergate: A Skeptical View," New York Review, September 20, 1973, P. 3. Watergate reveals that "the American ruling class can no longer exercise its power without resorting to the increasingly systematic use of methods which are illegitimate and illegal by this class's own standards...
...It was neither a case of the tyranny of the majority, the lack of protection for minority might (after all, the Democrats were the majority party...
...Nixon himself found it necessary to issue a disclaimer against charismatic justifications of Watergate...
...What we see in Watergate is a display of the political attitudes and practices characteristic of this group—a willingness to use ruthless tactics considered illegitimate by their eastern rivals for power...
...EHRLICHMAN: I do not know where the line is, Senator.' The usually restrained R. W. Apple of the New York Times referred to this as advocacy of "fascist tactics...
...The Southern Rim is anchored at one end in Orange County, California, land of the Birch Society, and particularly in Newport Beach, home of Nixon's personal lawyer Herbert Kalmbach, of his partners Frank DeMarco, who prepared the fraudulent deed for the donation of Nixon papers to the people of the U.S., and Arthur Blech, the President's notorious tax accountant...
...Nixon probably was financially corrupt, and it is possible that public outrage over this issue was the major cause of his downfall...
...It is no accident," as the Marxists say, that one end of the Southern Rim is anchored in San Clemente, the other in Key Biscayne...
...Indeed, the question is precisely why these lesser crimes led to a president being forced out of office for the first time in history, when far more serious ones did not...
...He aimed the same weapons at the liberal members of the Democratic party elite WATERGATE IN THEORY 177 that previous Democratic administrations had aimed at radicals in the antiwar and black power movements: bugging, sabotage, infiltration, acts of provocation...
...respect for the system by which our conflicts are peacefully resolved and our liberties maintained...
...Here it seems that the absence of any radical threat in the country convinced many that the society could take a large dose of political disruption at the top...
...Politics in democratic states, he wrote, consists of "a sort of charismatic rule concealed behind a legitimacy which is formally and rationally derived from the will of the governed...
...Americans join not only the League of Women Voters and the PTA but also the Birch Society and the Ku Klux Klan...
...Reiterating the development of their predecessors two generations ago, they are relatively unrestrained in pursuit of profits and political power...
...First of 21 New York Times, January 15, 1973, p. 28...
...9 This was a classic confrontation in which "democracy inevitably comes into conflict with bureaucratic tendencies...
...One would think that "relegitimation" would conclude with a celebration of American political virtue once the corrupt president had been expelled...
...Nixon was forced out because America is a society of consensus—a society that recognizes limits to what those in power can do to their opponents...
...Watergate was not a matter of living "off" politics...
...for them, Nixon possessed an extraordinary and personal value, the kind of appeal Weber called "charismatic...
...His staff was explicit about this...
...1s In the New York Review and Ramparts, Kirkpatrick Sale and Carl Oglesby have called this the "Yankee-Cowboy" theory of Watergate, a conflict between the eastern old money elite and the new money of the "Southern Rim...
...Nixon mounted a general attack on the liberal welfare state, which centered on revenue sharing to reduce federal social programs, and on turning the Supreme Court from an activist agency of change into a bulwark of the status quo...
...Yankee-Cowboy theorists would presumably describe counterinsurgency and limited war as policies whose purpose was to defend the global interests of international Yankee capital...
...If each citizen of a democracy did not learn to combine with his fellow citizens to defend their freedom...
...He apparently did not foresee that such a process could bring to power leaders whose "dynamism" and "creativity" would threaten freedom in a fundamental way...
...What was the crime for which Nixon was forced out of office...
...According to the Yankee-Cowboy theory, the conflict between the two groups was not only about the Cowboys' attempt to exclude the Yankees from power, but also over policy matters...
...Nixon himself labored mightily to acquire the sense that he too lived "for" rather than "off" politics, to persuade himself that he was one of those leaders with what Weber called "an inner balance" and a firm knowledge that their "life has meaning in the service of a cause...
...Nixon's only flaw, in Liddy's eyes, was that he was "insufficiently ruthless" in dealing with those who opposed him...
...8 For him, the implication is that class warfare°of the kind exhibited by, say, George McGovern, is unAmerican, outside the American consensus, and thus a legitimate target for ruthless tactics...
...In the view of Sale and Oglesby, the Yankee group consists of the eastern establishment, of second- and thirdgeneration elite families, of Wall Street and the Ivy League, with interests primarily in international finance and manufacturing...
...Weber thus lacks a conception of a possible conflict between charismatic and rationallegal forms of authority...
...While it is possible to find in Tocquevillean theory an analysis of the significance of Watergate—indeed, it is the dominant conception of WatergateTocqueville himself did not foresee the possibility that this kind of despotic attack on pluralism would be a significant threat to democracy in America...
...IV, esp...
...this is the essence of liberal democracy...
...Cited by Gore Vidal in the New York Review of Books, December 13, 1973, p. 6. 172 JON WIENER party is part of this consensus...
...First, McGovern was never close to winning, and thus there was hardly a need to "strip away the veil of legality" at this historical moment...
...it's basic...
...13 Thus Nixon told the country that his leadership had brought not just the end of a war but a generation of peace...
...There was no threat that the power of the corporate elite would be diminished or abolished...
...that all there is to be revealed about Watergate is politics as usual in bourgeois society--corporate domination of the candidates and dirty tricks against the people...
...The "dovishness" of the Yankees is at most a matter of degree rather than a difference in kind...
...Thus, from a Marxist perspective, Watergate was not simply unpluralist behavior...
...In retrospect he does not seem to have been capable of the kind of prophetic revelation and heroism that in Weber's terms inspire an absolutely personal sense of devotion...
...The public impeachment hearings in July 1974 served as the vehicle for relegitimation as committee members and commentators pitted the 23 "Watergate, or the 18th Brumaire of Richard Nixon," by the San Francisco Bay Area Kapitalistate Group, in Kapitalistate: Working Papers on the Capitalist State (No...
...One can live "off" politics, or one can live "for" politics—a distinction worth pursuing in relation to Watergate...
Vol. 23 • April 1976 • No. 2
