The Most Catastrophic Political Decision in United States History Ever and Its Ongoing Metastasizing Dire Institutional, Legal and Constitutional, Economic, Ideological and Political Consequences

In this essay, I want to propose a very bold new way of looking at and also of understanding what became known as the Watergate Scandal in U.S. history. In order to be able to do so I must first lay down some basic rules about what I am fundamentally trying to do here and also to suggest for future and for much more detailed work along the lines I am laying down here on the ground. Important in this context, is especially to quote the late Milan Kundera: “The point I want to make is this: the only time when one can recognize a phenomenon in all of its horror is when it is still new.” Indeed, this is the case because after a while most people and also the society in which they live become increasingly accustomed to the new horrific phenomenon and to the horrific new circumstances, especially now in various societies where people are constantly being forced to work so hard just in order to desperately be able to barely keep their heads above water. This is exactly what Watergate was in many different ways all about and what makes it so very important, I would argue, for it was the very beginning of a new and of a highly problematical horrific political phenomenon, which up to now has not been analyzed or understood in the fundamentally right way. I must say here that I am not going to be analyzing Watergate in any great detail (1). This is because that has already been done in many different places and various books already, although, I certainly will be touching on Watergate, and at the very same time re-framing and re-contextualizing it, in a new and in a different manner, which is exactly what this provocative ideological and political essay, is all about going forward. Richard Nixon after losing the Presidential election to John F. Kennedy in 1960, and also subsequently losing a run for governor in California in 1962, which in those days seemed to inevitably toll the ending of his rather controversial political career, in which he was the second youngest Vice-President in U.S. history under President Dwight Eisenhower (1953–1961) in the 1950s. Before becoming Vice President, Richard Nixon, had been a Republican member of the House of Representatives and subsequently also a Republican U.S. Senator from California. In other words, he had significant political experience and he had also been involved from early on in various political scandals and controversies, which he was able to politically overcome. Nevertheless, Richard Nixon, decided to move to New York with his family and to practice law and make some money while doing so living and working there. At the law firm where he worked in New York City and where he would also eventually become a partner, he subsequently helped to bring in Pepsi and other big U.S. companies for the law firm to represent. While at the law firm, Nixon was also able to assemble a group of talented political people around him, who would play an important role, in helping him to eventually become U.S. President (1969–1974) by winning the very close 1968 Presidential elections against Vice President Hubert Humphrey. Before the 1968 Presidential elections, Nixon was involved in highly problematic dealings with the South Vietnamese government during a time in which President Johnson was trying to negotiate a deal to the Vietnam conflict, in other words, he was already involved in highly problematical and criminal political maneuvers even before becoming U.S. President, and this was also something, which Ronald Reagan would later on repeat with the Iran hostages. Still, I want to fundamentally focus on Watergate here because of its many different significant horrific domestic political implications. Richard Nixon while there at the law firm in New York City, and equally going to various upscale parties in New York City, and having regularly meeting with various business elite groups in different places, clearly in the regularly protesting and sometimes even rebelling 1960s, was also constantly hearing, the ongoing elite business and the white elite corporate fierce critique as well as their ongoing rejection of all of the important protests and the resistant socio-economic and political demands on the part of many formerly excluded groups (women, environmentalists, poor people, consumers, black people, students, Native Americans, Latinos, gay people, anti-war protesters etc., etc.) in U.S. society in the 1960s. All of these various groups of people and their respective organizations were all constantly struggling in many different ways during those times in order to try and make the U.S. political system as well as the U.S. society, which longtime and from its very founding, had been a deeply hierarchical racist imperialist country (first against Native Americans), a profoundly segregated, and it was still a deeply sexist and patriarchal male elite white-dominated United States in the 1960s, and, they were all in their very own ways trying to turn the country into a much more peaceful, democratic, socially and economically just and also a much more equally inclusive society with all and also for the good of all moving forward (2). There can be no question about the fact that the much broader and the much more deeper participatory democratic inclusion in the 1960s (what I have called elsewhere “the most democratic decade” (MDD) in U.S. history) and early 1970s, indeed forced the various U.S. federal governments (John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard M. Nixon) of those highly-resistant and deeply democratizing times, and these different U.S. administrations, which were to a certain extent and in different ways also much more open to responding to the ongoing fundamental demands of the many more restless formerly and largely excluded ethnic and social groups from meaningful participation and inclusion, in the continually changing U.S. society as such, to at least invest some more money in the many different as well as in new U.S. government programs, especially under President Lyndon B. Johnson (1963–1969) dealing with education, health care, significant ongoing poverty and societal marginalization reduction, with social security, welfare, public transportation, housing, and eventually under Nixon, also in the deeply polluted environment and in environmental protection and clean up, as well as working out some early nuclear arms deals with the Soviet Union. Especially, during the 1960s, for the very first time in U.S. political history, many more ethnic minority and other groups, were being included into different governmental programs on a somewhat much more equal basis, which until beginning first in the mid-1950s, when more minority groups started to be included under President Eisenhower, had mostly ultimately benefitted and greatly helped poor white working-class U.S. citizens to be able to move upwards in society (3). Still, in this context, it also must be emphasized that the growing cost of the criminal and of the illegally vicious racist imperialist war in Vietnam, did indeed also limit, the amount of money the U.S. government, was able to spend on its various social programs in the 1960s, as Martin Luther King, Jr., had pointed out during those times as well. Nonetheless, various different taxes on the wealthy and also on the large U.S. corporations, were much higher in those days, leading to an ongoing decrease in the historic income and wealth divide in the United States of America, than they have once again become now under the reigning continually plundering and the profoundly unequal as well as the increasingly authoritarian and anti-democratic neo-liberal capitalism, which has been dominant now for over forty years. This growing income and wealth divide not only in the United States, but to a somewhat lesser extent also in Europe as well, is increasingly squeezing the life out of whatever remains of the “existing democratic systems of governance” in many different ways, including the increasing dangerous and violent strength of the neo-Nazi and neo-Fascists popping up more and more everywhere nowadays in the North and West. Also, the growing wealth and income, in the U.S. after WWII, was being much more “fairly redistributed” under the then existing system of New Deal capitalism, especially in comparison with what is happening nowadays, under large sections of the white population and in particular under upward mobile working-class whites in those days in a still deeply racist and fundamentally segregated powerful North American country. All of this had made by then in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the wealth and income divide in the United States, to be much smaller than it is once again nowadays and also much smaller than it had always historically been in U.S. history. It also helped many poor working-class whites to be able to join the middle-class by the mid to the late 1960s and early 1970s. Still, the at least somewhat greater developing wealth and income equality in the 1950s, 1960s and early 1970s, in effect, led or resulted also in a somewhat greater level of “economic democracy”, which was equally coupled to the much stronger trade unions and many more workers in the United States being part of various trade unions in those days. Ultimately, by the early 1970s, this “greater wealth and income equality” had led to a greater level of equality in the U.S. society as such, which is crucial to a much more equally inclusive and also therefore to a much more democratically functioning political system as well. At the very same time when all of these many different protests and revolts by the many different groups in many different ways were taking place in and across the restless 1960s and early 1970s United States of America, many in the highly conservative wealthy white U.S. elite classes, who were very much deeply ideologically troubled and ever more strongly politically opposed to all of what was socio-economically and politically occurring in the United States, and they were therefore constantly busily elite organizing, their very own elite authoritarian and deeply anti-democratic elite ideological revolt, white reactionary elite political backlash and systematic political resistance against the various ongoing socio-economic and political demands for a much more deeply and broadly participatory democratic, more accountable, transparent, peaceful, less racist, less sexist and also a much more equally inclusive socio-economic and political system in the United States going forward (4). The wealthy U.S. elite reactionary classes set out to fundamentally put an end to what was going on starting out in the mid-1950s, in especially the 1960s and early 1970s, under New Deal or “class-compromise” capitalism, a special form of U.S. capitalism, which goes back to The Great Depression (1929–1942) and to the 1930s under President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and which they had increasingly critically come to view, as being completely incompatible with their longtime elite hierarchical white socio-economic and political interests in the United States. Many in the elite classes including many important U.S. intellectuals increasingly came to view the many different kinds of popular resistance and the various anti-war, civil rights, women’s rights, student rights and student protests, gay rights, environmental demands and also economic justice protests of the many different groups in U.S. society, as ever more leading to a “crisis of democracy” in their view, and also as dangerously continually opening the way for “too much democracy” in the United States, where from the very beginning a small white elite class, which had changed its make-up over time with the socio-economic changing and developing of the United States, and they had been able to largely run the society in their own white elite interests with minor compromises being made on their part in terms of the socio-economic and political interests of the rest of the population. It is and can be of no surprise to those who are aware of the various ongoing class leanings in regards to democracy and democratic rule that the 1787 U.S. Constitution, which was mostly written by wealthy large slaveholding white landowners turned out to be so profoundly anti-democratic. This is because large landowners have always as political scientists should know tended to be the least democratic group and the most anti-democratic group and force in society (5). Obviously, it tells you everything you need to know about the U.S. elites and also about many of the so-called important U.S. intellectuals (e.g., James McGill Buchanan, Milton Friedman and Samuel Huntington just to name some) when just a little bit of “true participatory democracy” starts to bloom in the U.S. society in the 1960s, that for a very long time, had little or nothing whatsoever to do with democracy, and then all of a sudden, they are all so very worried about the possibility of “too much democracy” in the U.S., developing and unfolding going forward (6). But, then again, what to expect because this is exactly the role of so-called important and influential intellectuals in a capitalist society with a few important exceptions here and there along the way. At that time, the wealthy white U.S. elite classes, were increasingly ideologically afraid that the many different protests and various rebellions in the United States, could politically encourage many more people to become much more cynical and much more critical of the way in which and still largely, in whose fundamental socio-economic and political elite interests, the U.S. society as such, daily functioned and was nonetheless still being governed for. They fundamentally wanted to radically demobilize and to distract those that were regularly protesting against the various ongoing multilayered injustices and socio-economic inequities in the country, and the U.S. elites also wanted to quickly return the large majority of the U.S. population, in many different ways to its former state of “passivity and obedience” to the elite socio-economic and political interests of the ruling classes. In this regard, what later on became better known as the 1971 Powell Memorandum, written by Lewis Powell, an elite lawyer, who had worked for and had also defended many large U.S. corporations, and who was the head of the American Bar Association, published a confidential memo, entitled “Attack on American Free Enterprise System”, and which he had done for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. In his 1971 Memo, the elite corporate lawyer, Powell called for a longitudinal multilayered ongoing corporate mobilization in the United States in order for them to over time transform both U.S. law and politics, but not only those things for he also strongly called for and on the U.S. corporations and the big businesses, to invade other leading U.S. institutions such as universities, schools, publishers, newspapers, magazines, ad agencies, TV networks and particularly the courts, which as a talented corporate lawyer, he emphasized the great importance of for big business in the United States, and he emphatically encouraged them to make sure to make all of these various important U.S. institutions over time to work much more in the interests of business in general (7). Clearly, as a very elite and important corporate and big business lawyer, Lewis Powell, was quite aware of what corporate and wealthy elite white United States of America, was very worried about and thinking in those days, and in his memo, he was also building on some of the work others had been doing before him such as the highly conservative economist, James M. Buchanan, in this regard. In his 1971 memo, we see Lewis Powell, strongly calling on the U.S. corporations, to, in effect, seriously start fighting to limit the ideological functioning of U.S. democracy in the political interests of the majority of the U.S. population. During that time, the sitting U.S. President Richard Nixon, quickly nominated the conservative pro-corporate Lewis Powell to the U.S. Supreme Court and the U.S. Senate confirmed his appointment. This was part of Nixon’s political strategy to try and start moving the U.S. Supreme Court more to the right, an ideological judicial move, which would pick up more speed under Ronald Reagan, and subsequently under President George H. W. Bush and his son, President George W. Bush, and the ongoing move of the U.S. Supreme Court to the right, was for the time being successfully completed under President Donald J. Trump. We have increasingly come to see the outcome of this horrifically ideologically and philosophically judicially ongoing moving of the U.S. Supreme Court ever more to the right with its quite catastrophic decisions dealing with the environment, with abortion, guns, religious rights, labor rights, with voting rights as well as with affirmative action just to name some. All of these highly problematic U.S. Supreme Court decisions will eventually cumulatively have increasingly destructive anti-democratic “Jim Crowing” effects on the ongoing societal struggle to constantly try and create, a much more socially just, environmentally sound, equal, inclusive and democratic society with all and in the interest of all moving forward. Again, all of this building elite U.S. profoundly reactionary wealthy white political backlash in the 1950s, but really going back to the 1930s, beginning under and against President Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal, into the 1960s and in the 1970s, is very much ideologically in keeping with the democratic, lesser democratic and non-democratic leanings and orientations of the various classes in U.S. society, as political science, has shown us time and again namely with the most democratic class in society being the organized working-class and with the large landholding class being the least democratic of all of the various classes in society followed by the wealthy and the industrial and business classes, including now also the very wealthy financial classes, quite often involved in ongoing and different forms of highly problematic white-collar crime and sometimes even very destructive and highly fraudulent financial speculation, which are all, as elite classes, in different ways, quite in favor of continually plundering the now highly overwhelmingly “excess white U.S. elite controlled and excess white U.S. elite” dominated “safe” and fundamentally “tamed pretend-democracy or highly superficial ceremonial representational democratic U.S. political system”, at least as long as it does exactly what the U.S. elites absolutely want it to do and in the exact way they fundamentally expect it to do so.

This is also all very much in keeping with what Adam Smith, in his classic book, The Wealth of Nations (1776), in which he was one of the very first to fundamentally and to much more systematically analyze the developing early capitalist industrial system, which was a new socio-economic and also political phenomenon in those times, and he, in his time, the late 18th century, calls the abovementioned elite classes, which have changed over time with the continually dynamically changing capitalist system as such, but in his days the ”masters of mankind”, as he memorably called them, were fundamentally the merchants, the manufacturers and the large landowners of England, but especially the merchants and manufacturers in the new and evolving industrial capitalist system, who he described as the “principal architects” of government policy, which he pointed out they shaped to ensure that their own socio-economic and political interests are “most peculiarly attended to” going forward, however “grievous” the effects on others might be, including especially for the poorer and much more marginalized people in England, but also much more severely so, in regards to especially those, who were subject, to its “savage injustice” abroad in the colonies. In this context, Adam Smith, emphasizes that these arrogant elite white English classes, constantly pursue what he quite elegantly called their ongoing “vile maxim”: “All for ourselves, nothing for other people.” And, clearly it once again must also be emphasized here that Adam Smith, did not only mean this absolutist elite attitude in only an economic and/or in a financial sense but also very much in an ideological orientation and a political sense as well, and which therefore inevitably makes all of this so much more “politically suffocating” over time for the vast majority of the population, as the various elite industrial, merchant and large landholding classes, increasingly gain in political power and ideological influence. In the existing plundering and equally increasingly anti-democratic and ever more authoritarian neoliberal socio-economic system, we find ourselves trapped and sucked into and under the ongoing multilayered contemptuous anti-democratic excess elite domination, and with its constantly growing and ultimately untenable, “democracy and representation destroying” destructive wealth and income divide, and we have seen this “vile maxim” once again, nearly in full operation, over the last 40+ years now, as New Deal capitalism, has been more and more systematically destroyed over time in the neoliberal United States (1978-….) with the loyal ongoing help of especially the increasingly insurgent extremist and more and more anti-democratic and increasingly reactionary authoritarian Republican Party, and also with significant ongoing help from the continually “ideologically and politically intimidated and terrorized” Democratic Party by the ever more hard-rightwing Republican Party. Nonetheless, as a direct result of all of these governmental programs and also of the ongoing redistribution of wealth and income in those days, the U.S. economy between 1945–1975, when New Deal or so-called “class-compromise capitalism”, was still very much in effect, especially under President Lyndon B. Johnson (1963–1969) with many new anti-poverty and social programs, including Medicaid and Medicare, which the Republicans, have been trying to privatize for many decades now going back to the badly losing 1964 campaign of the radical rightwing Republican Presidential candidate, Barry Goldwater (8), and the then existing U.S. New Deal economy, grew about twice as fast as it is doing now under neoliberal capitalism over the last 40+ years. The badly losing Republican Presidential candidate, Barry Goldwater, who was also in 1964, also somewhat ahead of his time with his radical rightwing socio-economic and reactionary political ideas, and he strongly wanted to slash governmental spending and shrink the U.S. government (we can already hear in his reactionary rightwing campaign, the early echoes of Reagan’s notion that “the government was the problem”) and, in so doing, to allow capitalism to once again do its own thing, which has indeed largely been happening in the United States since Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, at a huge and growing cost to at least 80% of the U.S. population, and especially to the bottom 40% of the highly marginalized population (over 120 million people). Obviously, with the increasing disastrous consequences of global warming as well as the ongoing environmental collapse taking place every day all around us everywhere nowadays, such economic growth in the North and West, as was happening in the 1950s and 1960s, even under the very best of conditions (“greening the economy”) is very unlikely to be possible and even sustainable going forward anymore, especially when over half of the world population are still very poor and live in largely undeveloped or underdeveloped regions of the constantly changing world. Nevertheless, this over time changing and regularly adapting New Deal capitalism, still resulted in a population at large in the United States that had a great deal of trust in the political system as well as in the political leaders unlike the case nowadays where everyone is continually being encouraged only to look out for themselves and to continually compete against and to distrust each other, and also any political notion of “public interests” and/or “the common good”, is now long gone from the existing bankrupt and deeply ideologically cynical as well as increasingly authoritarian political neoliberal discourse, which inevitably leads to a growing polarization, deepening mistrust, increasing atomization, spreading meaninglessness, and as a result also to a deepening distrust in political system with significant sectors of the northern and of the western populations, increasingly drifting into ever more dangerously anti-democratic and violently authoritarian neo-Nazi and neo-fascistic political direction (9). All of this ongoing drift into increasingly utterly reactionary authoritarian and fundamentally anti-democratic politics, is equally a building direct consequence of the fact that we have been living now over more than 40+ years in a political system, functioning in a heightened state of carefully constructed and elite imposed utterly and destructively reactionary “ideological paralysis” as well as in a state of growing “ideological confusion”, which is systematically being spread by the bankrupt and by the fundamentally corrupt corporate controlled and U.S. elite dominated media “infotainment” system, religious, educational, economic and political systems, in which no real socio-economic and political alternatives to the disastrously functioning neoliberal capitalist system, is being offered to the population and only more of the same, more of the same, more of the very same utterly increasing reactionary and destructively anti-democratic socio-economic and political system, is morning, noon and night, being repeated and displayed nearly everywhere time and again. The issue here is how could all of this happen after the vibrantly multilayered deepening democratizing in the 1960s and early 1970s, and what does the 1972–1974 Watergate Scandal therefore really have to do with all of this? In the resistant and sometimes even rebelling and also equally deepening “constantly participatory democracy-expanding” 1960s and early 1970s, had you explained to most people, including to the ever more reactionary resisting U.S. elite business classes, that we would be living in the type of hyper-individualized, profoundly atomized, and deeply mutually alienated hyper materialistic excess consumption society with the dangerous and with the utterly destructive and also fundamentally anti-democratic level of wealth and income divide that exists nowadays, and in a political system so fundamentally loyal, to the ongoing massively and quite often also criminally plundering U.S. elite corporate, investor and financial interests, they would have in all probability believed that you had completely lost your mind. Had, as a recent Rand Corporation study, income inequality, remained at the same level at its 1975 level through 2018, the bottom 90% of the U.S. population, would have made 47 trillion dollars more than they did ($47.000.000.000.000), which would have indeed allowed many more or even most of them to be able to live at least somewhat much easier and more comfortable lives than they were able to do. Instead, the 47 trillion dollars, went to the top 10% of the U.S. population with much more of this total number going to the very wealthiest (10). Again, we can see here very concretely, one of the ways in which the economically and financially very brutal and deeply anti-democratic “vile maxim” of “the masters of the universe”: “All for ourselves, nothing for other people” is continually at work under a much more deregulated form of heightened U.S. free market neoliberal capitalism. In all probability, that number is now over 50 trillion dollars after the 2017 Trump tax breaks, which mostly benefitted the very wealthy and this together with the Covid-crisis’ mostly massive business and corporate benefitting government spending. Most people in the 1960s and early 1970s, would have believed that the U.S. society nowadays, would have at least been a much more democratic, and also a much less racist, much less sexist, much less xenophobic as well as a much more economically equal and inclusive country with many more social government programs and social spending in the interest of all and for the good of all instead of what it has turned out to become and to be now. If, a “democracy” or a “representative government”, is going to regularly function on the basis of the vile maxim then as a matter of fact such a society, is going to have to become increasingly criminogenic, including in terms of exploding white collar crimes, and on various other levels (including law enforcement) as well. Inherent in the very ongoing operationalization of the vile maxim: “All for ourselves, nothing for other people” is rampant anti-democratic authoritarianism as well as spreading and deepening criminality and rampant corruption on various different and also elite socio-economic, legal, law enforcement, political and institutional levels. This is exactly what we have increasingly seen taking place in the United States over the last neoliberal 45, and especially the much more extreme neoliberal 43 years now, developing and being implemented under President Reagan, and again the criminal political 1972 Watergate break-in (s), was a massive early introduction to all of this developing and deepening elite white collar socio-economic, financial and also political criminality and corruption. Still, in taking over the U.S. Presidency in August 1974, from the deeply disgraced former U.S. President, the new President Gerald Ford (1974–1977), boldly told the nation: ”Our constitution works. Our great republic is a government of laws and not of men (there were in those days in 1974 still very few women in positions of power). Here people rule.” The very fact that the new U.S. President had to proclaim all of this to the U.S. population tells you the grave doubts that already existed surrounding these very longstanding and continually rehearsed U.S. political myths. The new U.S. President also talked not only about justice but also about mercy, in effect, therefore indicating that he would pardon Nixon. The real question in this regard is how much in keeping with the notion that the U.S. constitution truly equally works for all and that the United States was “a government of laws and not of men”, his subsequent decisions in regards to the disgraced and the criminal Richard Nixon are, and it is indeed really a crucial question that has to be considered time and again. Again, the Ford’s speech, was given against the backdrop of a large and ever more diverse country still intensely suffering in many different ways from the tremendous criminal political consequences and the horrific ideological aftershocks of what Richard Nixon had done while in office. The United States in those days in the 1970s, was also facing a massive ongoing economic crisis, which was partially caused by the rising energy prices, but it also fundamentally had to with the fact that both Western Europe and Japan, had by that time rebuilt their industries, societies and their respective economies after the oftentimes massive industrial and economic destruction, they had suffered during WWII, and they were now able to compete with the United States on a much more equal footing going forward. All of this would lead to an end of the post-WWII New Deal capitalism or “class-compromise” form of capitalism (1945–1975), and which had led to a massive increase of the much better educated white middle-class in the United States after WWII. In this context, the new U.S. President Gerald Ford’s “full and unconditional pardoning” on September 8, 1974, of the disgraced former U.S. President Richard Nixon, who had resigned his office on August 9, 1974, and who had stepped down from the U.S. Presidency when it had become abundantly apparent to him that he would certainly be impeached in September 1974, if he did not resign, for his myriad corrupt criminal activities, in regards to Watergate, will I am convinced go down, as one of the most catastrophic political decisions ever made, and this is really something to say, given the many horrific and also catastrophic decisions undertaken over time in the U.S. political system as such, in U.S. political history. How much in keeping with the notion that the U.S. was being run by “a government of laws and not of men”, was President Gerald Ford’s decision, to pardon Richard Nixon while many others around him involved in the same Watergate coverup together with Nixon, still had to go to jail as well as to pay hefty fines? Should they not also have been pardoned at the very same time as well? Or was that simply something that was politically impossible to pull off during that particular point in time? Another major problem with the pardon was the very fact that President Ford was pardoning a former U.S. President, who was himself a lawyer, and he therefore, should have absolutely known that was he was certainly doing even before and also during Watergate, was absolutely illegal and was totally unconstitutional. What would all of this important complete pardon really signify for the United States, for the U.S. population as well as for the ever more powerful U.S. federal government, and especially for the possible highly problematic and maybe even corrupt, criminal and unconstitutional political actions to be undertaken by at least some of the future U.S. Presidents going forward?

The 1972–1974 Watergate Scandal began with the arrest of five men for breaking into the Democratic Party Offices in the new Watergate building complex in Washington, D.C., on June 17, 1972. This was their second break-in into the offices of the Democratic Party, which they had already done once before and they had gotten away with it on May 11, 1972, when it was claimed that they had broken into the very same offices, and they had seemingly taken photos of secret Democratic Party documents and they had also seemingly placed or removed earlier placed wire taps on the phones there. All of this was being done in order to give the Republican Party a leg up in especially the upcoming Presidential election in November 1972. In this context, others have proposed and have strongly suggested that the break-ins into the Watergate Democratic offices, had little or nothing whatsoever to do with trying to gain insight into the upcoming Democratic Presidential election strategies, and, on the other hand, that it had everything to do with trying to collect and to gain information on important Democratic politicians, who were using the nearby call girl ring of the Columbia Plaza escort service. In other words, the break-ins were fundamentally about trying to obtain crucial sexual blackmail information on various important Democratic politicians in those days of ongoing sexual liberation (11). Again, this either or, or maybe to some extent even both reasons for the illegal Watergate break-ins, does not change anything in terms of what I am proposing here, in regard to a fundamental new way of understanding the illegal and the criminal Watergate break-ins into the offices of the Democratic National Committee (DNC). Very quickly, the then sitting U.S. President Richard Nixon, categorically denied he had anything to do with the Watergate break-in, and also that his staff was in anyway involved in the entire matter. During the 1972 Presidential campaign, President Richard Nixon, was able to keep his political distance from the brewing scandal, and as a result he was overwhelmingly re-elected against the very liberal Democratic Presidential nominee, George McGovern by the U.S. population, in one of the largest Presidential victories, in U.S. history in November 1972. Two young Washington Post reporters, Bob Woodard and Carl Bernstein, were from very early on chosen to start looking closer into what had gone on in the Watergate complex with the break-in (s) into the offices of the Democratic Party. Quickly, Bob Woodard, was able to develop relations with a significant source, who would go down in history as “Deep Throat”, and who much later on would be revealed to have been the deputy director of the FBI, Mark Felt, who from the very beginning helped to confirm some of the information they were coming up with as well as to continually encourage them to keep digging and to keep working on the case. One of the earliest problems for Nixon was the fact that some of the money and the cheques found on those involved in the break-in, were able to be traced backed by the FBI, to the Committee to Re-Elect the President (CRP) (12). Some cynically and ironically called the CRP, CREEP, as a result of what it had been up to. Still, at that time it was not clear exactly what all of this had to do with either President Nixon or with his administration and his closest advisors. Eventually the many different horrific crimes for which Richard Nixon was responsible and in which he had been involved, and with the very telling exception of the genocidal Vietnam War under his leadership since 1969, led the House Judiciary Committee, to approve three articles of impeachment against President Richard Nixon at the end of July 1974. The first article of impeachment was Obstruction of Justice, and which alleged that the U.S. President, had obstructed justice by attempting to impede the ongoing investigation of the Watergate break-in. Richard Nixon did so by massively trying to abuse and to misuse “executive privilege”, which the Supreme Court eventually rejected, although it accepted “executive privilege”, which only served to open a huge can worms in this regard moving forward to be used by other U.S. Presidents as well. The second article of impeachment being put forward by the House Judiciary Committee against President Nixon was regarding the Abuse of Power on his part. This was based on the fact that President Nixon had been using various U.S. federal agencies, including the IRS, to illegally intimidate and also to unconstitutionally harass his political enemies and opponents (Nixon’s enemies lists) as well as for his authorization of burglaries of the private homes of private citizens, who opposed the President, and or places private citizens went to for treatment such as the psychiatrist’s office of the late Daniel Ellsberg, of The Pentagon Papers, or where it was believed important documents were being kept (The Brookings Institute). Again, in the last instances, President Nixon, was really just following in a very long and highly-conservative tradition of elite “ideological policing” of the U.S. population that went back to the very founding of the United States with the passage of the 1798 Alien and Sedition Acts, which came about as a result of the fear on the part of the U.S. elites about new European immigrants bringing along with them and subsequently spreading under the poorer and much more marginalized sections of the U.S. population, radical socio-economic and political ideas based on the originally much more radical French Revolution than the U.S. Revolution (13). If, one thing becomes very clear in this ongoing process of reactionary and of the oftentimes illegal elite-organized and elite-led U.S. “ideological and political policing” of the constantly changing U.S. population, it is the very fact that from the very beginning of the new North American country, the various and over time with the changing and with the transformation of the make-up of the dynamic U.S. economy, the changing and the new U.S. elites, were always indeed very class-conscious, but at the very same time they certainly did not want others such as the poor, the violently enslaved, the resisting Native Americans, whose longstanding productive lands were continually violently being stolen from them also by recent newcomers to North America, or the marginalized, the excluded and the highly exploited workers, in the U.S. society, to be or to become class conscious as well. This was the beginning of the laying down of the elite-led ongoing “ideological and political policing” of the diverse U.S. population in many different ways in order for them to largely remain loyal or at least loyal enough to their highly conservative property and also quickly contract oriented free market capitalism, which was in their best white elite socio-economic and political interests going forward. The next big ongoing and more and more white elite industrial corporate organized and elite-led “ideological and political policing” of the constantly changing U.S. population with the help of the U.S. government as well as with the help of various local and also various state governments, and which was equally as a result of the ongoing significant immigration and also of the increasing industrialization of the United States after the Civil War (1860–1865) as well as of the continuing increase of the ever more radicalizing and urbanizing U.S. working-classes in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This ongoing U.S. working-class radicalization was a direct consequence of the oftentimes very brutal, highly exploitative and largely unregulated capitalist working conditions in the United States during those times in the late 1800s and into the early decades of the 20th century, which greatly benefitted the U.S. industrialists of those times. Many would even argue that these conditions continue to haunt the U.S. even today, and that certainly things for the various U.S. working-classes, have especially increasingly deteriorated over the last 45 years with the beginning of the implementation of increasingly deregulated neoliberal capitalism under President Jimmy Carter, in 1978, but which really fundamentally was implemented under President Ronald Reagan, and completed under President Bill Clinton, who socio-economically largely “Reaganized” the Democratic Party, which had already been moving in that direction. Still, all of this ideological power and influence allowed these ever more powerful U.S. industrialists quickly to accumulate a massive amount of wealth by the ending of the 19th century (The First Gilded Age), and this wealth and newly acquired power also allowed them to exert great political influence in their very own elite socio-economic interests in the U.S. body politic. Again, it must be emphasized here that all of this was once again very much in keeping with what Adam Smith had said about them over a century ago and also about their tireless reactionary elite commitment to the “vile maxim”. In many ways, these new extremely wealthy white U.S. industrialists, were doing in their times, in a constantly changing and rapidly industrializing, urbanizing and developing United States, exactly what the rather conservative and the largely anti-democratic slaveholding large land owners and merchants, had been doing during the creation of the undeveloped U.S.A., with its new white elite-written and decided Constitution. They were equally trying to protect their evolving elite industrial socio-economic, financial and political interests in a quickly industrializing and urbanizing U.S. with a large and radicalizing working-class. All of this together inevitably led with the coming of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia under Vladimir Lenin, and which was quickly to become the Soviet Union, to the very first anti-Communist, anti-Socialist, anti-leftist and anti-trade union “Red Scare” (1917–1920) in the United States, beginning when the United States joined World War I, under the aggressively and the deeply racist imperialist President Woodrow Wilson (14). Again, this is was what I would like to define here as an ongoing elite-led “ideological and political campaign”, and which can vary in intensity over time but never disappears, in order to systematically clamp down on all of the various types and different kinds of radical political ideas challenging U.S. racist, sexist and deeply segregated elite white led free-market capitalism, which was under significant pressure from an organized and also from a highly progressive U.S. working-class in those days. The next massive elite-led “ideological and political policing” of the U.S. population began in the late 1940s with the beginning of the Cold War (1947–1991) under President Harry Truman with his March 21, 1947 Executive Order 9835, which required all federal civil-service employees to be screened for their loyalty to the United States and to the U.S. Constitution. All of this just further helped to radicalize what was already starting to happen under the highly problematical Congressional 1945 created so-called House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) that had been in effect since 1938 under different leadership, and which led the way into McCarthyism, and the so-called second Red Scare in the United States in the early 1950s, and the oftentimes illegal and highly unconstitutional going after suspected communists, socialists and radicals in the United States with many times little or no evidence to back up any such claims, and a hugely problematical “ideological and political policing” House Committee, which after a name change, was only finally abolished in 1975, although that certainly did not put an end to going after and to constantly monitoring leftist critics and political radicals by the U.S. government in many different ways, and which continues up to the present. This is happening while all of these various radical political activities should really constantly and overwhelmingly be protected by the first amendment, but once again who cares? All of these various activities had oftentimes quite catastrophic consequences for many people in the U.S., suspected of leftist and/or radical political opinions (See e.g., the so-called Hollywood Ten and Robert Oppenheimer partly also under McCarthyism (1950–1954), and it caused many of them to lose their jobs and it destroyed their careers and livelihoods as well as their family lives. Some were even forced into exile as a result of their “ideological and political persecution” in those days, and all of this taking place in a large and diverse country that is very proud of its first amendment rights (15). But, then again, I suppose the very cynical and hypocritical genius existing at the very heart and also at the very center of this ongoing elite-led waxing and waning “ideological and political policing” of the multi-ethnic and multicultural U.S. population, is for all of these incredible internal contradictions, to be able to largely continue to exist, with little or no problems whatsoever, at least up to now. While all of this longstanding multi-dimensional anti-radical “ideological and political policing” has been going in the U.S., in many different ways on many different levels, at the very same time little or nothing, is most often being done against the ever-present and the dangerously anti-democratic longstanding and oftentimes elite-led and massively elite-financed utterly reactionary rightwing forces in the United States, which have been much more violent and much more deadly overtime than the so-called U.S. “revolutionary forces.” Again, it is also quite important to emphasize the fact here in this very important ongoing elite-led and organized U.S. “ideological and political policing” of the dynamically changing U.S. population make-up over time; that this ongoing intense “ideological and political policing” of the U.S. population, constantly plays out across many different levels in the diverse U.S. society, in many different ways at the very same time, which is ultimately what makes it so very powerful, influential and even seem so natural and commonsensical to so many U.S. citizens. “Ideological and political policing” is constantly being done in schools, in families, in universities, in and through the various entertainment media, in the economy, through foreign policy, the military, in domestic politics, with the ongoing help of various so-called think tanks, in and with the ongoing committed help of the corporate (social) media system, especially in and through advertising, which can and really should be seen and understood to be the cynically outsourced and privatized massive and unending U.S. propaganda system par excellence, and also in and through religion and religious channels, in and through the legal and the judicial system, in many different ways in and through U.S. culture as well, although there is also some critique still coming from the various cultural fields and cultural activities as well, but all of this critique, is oftentimes still mostly limited to the very few and mostly to the well-educated. All of this should come as no surprise to anyone who has any knowledge whatsoever about the very fact that the United States was originally Constitutionally founded, as a deeply anti-democratic, profoundly racist, sexist and also deeply segregated class-ridden white elite-led society, and that whatever little and/or superficial democracy that might have evolved over time in the United States, was a direct result of the ongoing struggles from especially the organized working-class people in the United States. In many ways, under President Richard Nixon, and against the backdrop of the protesting 1960s, the “ideological and political policing” of the resisting U.S. Population was broadened and increased in order to try and once again to begin to better control the U.S. population going forward. All of these intense and oftentimes illegal “ideological and political” governmental actions by the FBI, the CIA as well as by various local police departments under Richard Nixon against many different resisting groups, were also a direct result of the developing reactionary white U.S. elite backlash and rejection of the radical 1960s, and which the 1971 Lewis Powell memo, had summed up very well and underscored. Still, under this second article of impeachment, the horrific and the genocidal bombing campaigns Nixon unleashed over southeast Asia in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia (killing in the process of the entire war between some 3–5 million people), could also be put forward as part of his ongoing Abuse of Power as well as international law, but this was not done by Congress, and in so doing, opening the way for future U.S. Presidents, to be able to continue to internationally act in very much the same way. We saw this taking place under President Ronald Reagan (1981–1989) with the Iran-Contra Affair (1985–1987) for which he really should have been impeached, but he was not because the powerful politicians (see the views in this matter of e.g., House Speaker “Tip” O’Neill, Jr.) in those days were afraid that to impeach Reagan just after Watergate, could create significant political chaos and a major political crisis in the United States, and subsequently once again under President George W. Bush (2001–2009) with his costly criminal and monstrously deceitful massive 2003 attack on Iraq (“shock and awe”) as well as under President Barack Obama (2009–2017) with his regular droning campaigns killing many innocent civilians in the process in Pakistan, Yemen and in Somalia, and in which he together with his advisors, regularly played the pre-emptive, unilateral and hegemonic role of judge, jury and executioner all-in-one, and also with little or no Congressional oversight in the matter, which is absolutely politically disgraceful (16). Again, as long as the various U.S. Presidents, mostly focus and direct their criminal aggression outside of the U.S. borders, and they fundamentally impose it on black and brown people and countries overseas, they are largely protected from any real legal and particularly from any political consequences for their criminal and illegal acts. In this context, all of this is equally very much in keeping with the white elite-led deeply racist founding principles of the United States, and also with its ongoing genocidal and violently murderous westwards and southwards invasion and take-over of first various longstanding Native American territories and eventually Mexican territories as well. In politics, this is oftentimes referred to and/or called “path-dependency”. The third article of impeachment had to with Contempt of Congress and which accused President Richard Nixon of refusing to cooperate with the Judiciary’s Committee’s investigation into Watergate (17). Clearly, the first and the third articles of impeachment being brought by the House Judiciary Committee, also had to do with the House of Representatives, the most democratic federal U.S. political institution, which is elected every two years, once again confirming its important legislative role as well as its crucial ‘checks and balances’ role in those days, in regards to the U.S. Presidency, and its executive actions and various other domestic and international undertakings.

Since WWII, the U.S. Presidency, had greatly grown in ideological, economic, financial and institutional power and political influence in regards to the U.S. legislature and also the U.S. judiciary, and the balance of power, among the three important foundational Constitutional trias politica, had and has increasingly shifted ever more in its powerful expanding executive favor. This ongoing problematical political intra-governmental institutional shift in power towards the U.S. Presidency from very early on, but especially since the Great Depression and WWII, was built into Article II of the U.S. Constitution, which was constructed with few enumerated limits on the powers of the President and also in order to weaken the so-called controlling U.S. Congress over time. Article II, is practically silent in regards to exactly what the U.S. President cannot do, and even when there are some limits, the sitting U.S. President, can oftentimes claim “emergency powers” in regards to natural emergencies, conflicts, wars, internal unrest and rebellions as well as when dealing with crime situations via more and more policing, mass oppression and the intensifying intimidation of entire then “unpopular” and also of the ongoing oftentimes highly marginalized segments of the U.S. population. In all probability, deepening global warming, and its increasing horrific consequences, will also only increasingly result in ever growing U.S. Presidential powers, in the coming decades as well, if the U.S. Congress, does not step in and also start playing a larger role in this ever more troubling weather-related regard as well. In this context, the increasing fact that the U.S. Congress and/or the U.S. judiciary seldom challenge or is even willing to absolutely stand up and to systematically challenge any of these regular U.S. Presidential claims and recurring power grabs, including as well as the ever more ongoing Presidential use of quasi-legislative “executive orders”, with little or no ongoing oversight and/or control by the U.S. Congress, makes the continuing growth of U.S. Presidential power and dominance of both the U.S. Congress and the legal system by the U.S. President, in many different ways, so very highly constitutionally problematical and deeply dangerous moving forward (18). What would indeed happen, if a future U.S. President, who has the very strong backing of between 30–40% of the U.S. population, decides to use his or her growing ideological power and political influence, to start systematically wreaking havoc on the already now barely functioning U.S. democratic and representative system of governance while his or her party also holds enough power in Congress, to stop the opposition party from being able to do anything about it? And, what if the President, is doing so in order to fundamentally benefit the wealthy and influential U.S. classes even much more, would the U.S. corporate and elite-class controlled media system, be able or would they even be willing to critically step up and to speak out against these illegal presidential acts? Would the U.S. Supreme Court even be willing to step in and to stop these unconstitutional presidential actions? And, even if the U.S. Supreme Court, was willing to do so, it does not really have the power to carry out its own decisions and it is dependent on the other branches of government to follow its decisions, which the U.S. President under these conditions, would clearly be unwilling to do?!!. What then, if it also becomes increasingly apparent that the sitting U.S. President, is clearly willing to use any and all force necessary to carry out his illegal, corrupt, unconstitutional and violently criminal decisions?!! We have increasingly seen this very dangerous process playing out more and more since Nixon’s time in office, and especially under various Republican Presidents with President Donald Trump, recently being the most menacing example of all of this, but he will certainly not be the last one to do so. And, what if the next Donald J. Trump, simply turns out to be just a little bit smarter and somewhat more politically sophisticated than he was, what type of a disastrous ideological condition or political conditions, can all of this ultimately lead, if the U.S. Congress, does not really quickly start stepping in and systematically regaining some more control over the functioning of the existing powerful U.S. Presidency?? Seemingly, President Gerald Ford, had tried before granting Richard Nixon, “the full and unconditional pardon”, to get the disgraced criminal former U.S. President, to express his regrets and/or to at least accept some measure of responsibility for what had happened during the 1972–1974 Watergate Affair, but he was not successful in doing so. In this context, I am convinced that President Gerald Ford, should have at least made any pardoning of Richard Nixon, conditional on disgraced ex-President Richard Nixon, offering his sincerest apologies to the entire large country, in a nationally televised speech for his various horrific criminal and illegal acts while at the very same time emphatically warning others never to do what he had done. In all probability, President Ford, may not have chosen this right political way of acting, in this very important regard because he and his advisors were afraid that in so doing the U.S. Presidency, would have been ideologically damaged and politically weakened even much more in the process after the very ugly and criminal Watergate political disaster. I do not believe that to be the case. Nonetheless, President Ford, still decided to go right ahead and grant Richard Nixon, a highly intelligent but somewhat troubled and deeply conflicted man, who was fundamentally responsible for many different national and international criminal, unconstitutional and genocidal war activities, a full and unconditional pardon on September 8, 1974. In this context, it also important to emphasize the fact that pardons, in effect, can only really be handed out to (deserving) people after they have been convicted of a crime, what in all likelihood would have happened to the highly disgraced and the disliked ex-President Richard Nixon, but President Gerald Ford (1974–1977), unilaterally and pre-emptively went ahead and pardoned Nixon anyway for all of the possible crimes he may have committed while being U.S. President, and these crimes were very many and hugely legally problematic especially for a lawyer to commit. I suppose, as the very new U.S. President, President Ford, fundamentally wanted to try and wipe the Presidency clean of any ongoing criminal political white collar domestic activities it had been involved in, under President Richard Nixon, especially for popular U.S. public consumption as well as for the future political standing of the most powerful office in the United States and also in the world. A powerful U.S. political office, which has historically been in the hands of many different U.S. politicians, who have subsequently used it to oftentimes do horrific things, both domestically and internationally, going back to the founding U.S. President George Washington, whom the native Americans, cynically and sarcastically called a “town destroyer.” In essence, President Ford, was during that time desperately trying publicly to keep up the “endless dance of monstrously empty democratic and representational Presidential pretense” to the angry and the deeply disappointed U.S. population when the U.S., was not only facing a major internal political crisis, but also ongoing problems in Vietnam coupled to an ongoing severe economic crisis as well. The last of which would be used to ultimately start introducing in 1978, neoliberalism under President Jimmy Carter, and even much more viciously and brutally so as a much more deregulated increasingly hyper-plundering and also intense free market neoliberalism under President Reagan (1981–1989). In this tense and cynical domestic political context, new U.S. President Ford, had to desperately ideologically try and politically convince at least enough U.S. citizens that the various white men, who were occupying and would eventually occupy the U.S. Presidency (and, again it was only white U.S. men in those days), were indeed worthy of their ongoing respect and support, and also that they were “highly decent, honorable and good people”, no matter whatever they may have done or not done while being in office. Anything wrong or bad or destructive they may have done or not done while being U.S. President, had to be seen and/or to be understood by the U.S. population as merely being a mistake, an oversight or simply a misunderstanding, but it certainly could not be understood and/or seen as something that was inherent to being U.S. President. Another great irony in this context, is the very fact that Richard Nixon, in many ways was “the last U.S. New Deal President”, but the socio-economic and political contradictions both domestic and international that the United States, was increasingly facing in those days in the early 1970s, increasingly forced the U.S. President, to continually try and illegally, unilaterally, criminally pre-emptively and unconstitutionally hegemonically take back and take over control of the U.S. political-economic system as such, and all of this was going on against the still loudly echoing backdrop of the many different significant protests and societal demands in the 1960s and early 1970s, which limited what President Nixon could do. As a result of the many different socio-economic and political problems the U.S. was facing both domestically and internationally in those days, the new President Gerald Ford, explained to the nation that he had taken the difficult decision to completely pardon disgraced ex-President Richard Nixon because he felt that the brewing political crisis being caused by Watergate could go on and on, and in so doing creating even much more division and tension within the United States of America in those days, and that he therefore was of the opinion that there was a need to immediately put an end to all of it (19). I suppose that President Ford in granting the complete and comprehensive pardon to a horrific political criminal like Richard Nixon, and to the many different monstrously criminal Presidential actions and the political crisis, he had committed and created with his ongoing massive and multilayered abuse of power, President Ford must have believed that such and other criminal acts by other and future U.S. Presidents, was and would be simply a “one-off-event” and subsequently certainly was going to forever disappear (again, we can see here the extremely powerful internal workings of the very notion of “American exceptionalism”), and he believed that other and that future U.S. Presidents also doing many different illegal and various criminal acts, would not also expect to be pardoned as well. Did Ford and his advisors really seriously consider, if in granting Richard Nixon a full and complete pardon, weren’t they in the process in 1974, not, in effect, opening an ideologically very dangerous and a potentially politically metastasizing can of worms going forward in terms of the ever more powerful U.S. Presidency?? We see now the consequences of all of this starting with the 1974 Watergate pardon, resulting in various Republican Presidential candidates, openly promising their Republican supporters that they would indeed pardon a profoundly criminal and an utterly corrupt and authoritarian Donald J. Trump, if they go on to become U.S. President. In other words, politically, legally, judicially and constitutionally, they are increasingly openly saying “to hell with the rule of law” in terms of the U.S. Presidency in the United States under the existing ever more anti-democratic and increasingly rightwing authoritarian Republican Party. Under these political conditions, even a “quasi or a pseudo-democracy or a pretend-democracy and pretend-democratic rule” cannot long continue to exist. This is exactly why it is so very important that the vast majority of the oftentimes politically “distracted” and “turned-off” U.S. population with the ongoing help via the elite-controlled media and with the ongoing cynical encouragement of the always themselves politically-involved U.S. elites, that the vast majority of the U.S. population, should indeed more and more seriously start paying ongoing close political attention to what is now going in their powerful country. After the 1974 Presidential pardon, the former and the still deeply disgraced U.S. ex-President Nixon, put out a very general statement saying: “That the way I tried to deal with Watergate was the wrong way and is a burden I shall bear for every day of the life that is left to me.” In his vague statement, Richard Nixon, does not indicate in what way or ways he had dealt with the 1972–1974 Watergate Scandal wrongly, nor does he really offer any concrete statement of contrition for what he had criminally done wrong on many different levels to the United States as well as to the U.S. body politic as such, in the process, and he also certainly does not offer or express any hope that such political mistakes and/or criminal wrongdoings should never be done or made again by a future U.S. President. In many ways, Richard Nixon’s general statement, is really nothing else but a very telling and arrogantly contemptuous slap in the face of President Gerald Ford, who would eventually lose the 1976 Presidential elections against Jimmy Carter, partly as a result of his full and unconditional 1974 pardoning of Richard Nixon. In this context, many leading U.S. political voices as well as many leading U.S. historians and academics, have argued since then that the political decision taken by President Gerald Ford, to quickly and completely pardon Nixon, was the right decision to take at that time, which I am convinced is a very laughable, a rather complicit and a fundamentally unsophisticated position for so-called sophisticated and educated people to take, on this very important legal, constitutional and political matter. It should be noted here that the new U.S. President always takes an oath “to uphold and to defend the U.S. Constitution while in office”, and unless one views this Presidential oath, as really merely being an “empty ceremonial propagandistic nonsense” with which to continually fool the U.S. public at large, the U.S. President, and given his and eventually her continually growing amount of power and influence in the U.S. political system as such, absolutely needs to be held to that very important oath. That is why I am convinced and I would emphatically call here for the sitting U.S. President, who is also head of the U.S. government, in other words he and eventually she, are both U.S. President and Prime Minister at the very same, therefore the sitting U.S. President, as also the head of the U.S. government, should be forced to show up at least twice a year, in a joint-sitting of the chosen members by both the Democrats and the Republicans of the House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate, to answer questions about his or her various policies and policy proposals to the different members of the U.S. Congress in widely nationally televised political events. That is indeed one of the ways in which real and meaningful ongoing multilayered Congressional “checks and balances” on the powerful U.S. Presidency, should start to work in the United States going forward. The fact that the U.S. President shows up once a year to give a speech in front of Congress (“State of the Union”) is simply not enough anymore going forward. These important twice-a-year question-and-answer Congressional political sessions with the sitting U.S. President, should always last an entire day. I am convinced that many U.S. citizens would be highly interested in them and they would follow them very closely and intently going forward. In this context, the sitting U.S. President, can bring various members of his cabinet along with him, who are much more specialized in specific areas of governance, to help him answer the various specific questions of the different members of Congress. Or, maybe, unless one views the role of being U.S. President, as being a kind of an exceptional Top-Mafiosi job, in which and where one has to both domestically and internationally, regularly break and violate both the national and international law and do many horrific things, and therefore as a result, they ultimately cannot be held responsible for their Presidential deeds. Clearly, we can already see some of this growing and this newly deepening anti-democratic authoritarian Presidential political arrogance on display in a very well-paid for set of interviews that Richard Nixon did with the British journalist, David Frost, and which were originally broadcast in May 1977. In one these interviews, the former and still disgraced ex-U.S. President boldly opines that “when the President does it, that means that it is not illegal”, which he goes on to make somewhat more precise, but as a lawyer, himself, he should have understood and he certainly must have known that what he was saying was fundamentally incorrect, but then again the 1972–1974 Watergate Scandal, largely clearly resulted from this deeply contemptuously politically arrogant and the horrifically criminal attitude on Nixon’s part in regards to both the U.S. constitutional system and political structure (20). Again, in this context, it once again needs to be emphasized that if the U.S. Presidency, is increasingly going to be involved in all types of criminal, corrupt, unconstitutional, and/or illegal activities and actions, then the only way to keep the U.S. President, out of jail, as Richard Nixon, was doing in his deeply troubling but nonetheless highly revelatory interview with David Frost in 1974, is to fundamentally place the U.S. President, above the U.S. law and above the U.S. Constitution as well as also above international law in the process. Without doing so, who would then want to be or even to become U.S. President?! Under Richard Nixon, the U.S. Justice Department, had come out with the legal view and/or constitutional opinion in a 1973 memo that the U.S. President while in office could not be indicted and held criminally responsible (21). Therefore, in essence, “to hell with the Presidential oath”, which is often taken on one bible or the other. Against this backdrop, it is therefore also very important to emphasize the political fact here that the U.S. Congress should always pay very close attention to the person, the U.S. president, is proposing as his or her Attorney General going forward. Are they truly really politically independent enough from the U.S. president? Are they willing to constitutionally stand up and to legally contradict him or her whenever and wherever necessary? If, the U.S. President, is doing or proposing to do illegal, corrupt and/or unconstitutional things, are they willing to publicly speak out and to openly challenge the president on these acts, after first trying to do so internally and in personal and in cabinet meetings, even though it may also mean that they will lose their job in the process? In this context, the U.S. Congress, whenever necessary needs to step up now and then and to absolutely demand that the U.S. President fires and replaces his or her Attorney General when they are not doing their very important job in the legal, judicial and constitutional interests the U.S. citizens. In this context, the U.S. Congress also needs to keep a close watch on the sitting U.S. President, not to make them doing their important job impossible, but in order to ensure that they are continually doing so in a fundamentally legal and constitutional fashion. Still, this hugely problematic notion since 1973, that a sitting U.S. president, cannot be indicted or prosecuted, has strangely continued to be the operational legal and constitutional view at present, an absolutely once again utterly cynical and not very serious legal and constitutional view, but again if the U.S. Presidency, is increasingly being viewed, as having to be inevitably involved in ongoing illegal, corrupt, criminal and unconstitutional acts, both domestically and internationally, then what other and much more “enlightened” legal and constitutional understanding, would you really expect the U.S. Justice Department, which has increasingly come to be controlled by the sitting U.S. president, to come up with under those specific political circumstances? Clearly, in an even somewhat constitutional and democratic state, which is so-called proudly based on the “rule of law and not of men and eventually also of women”, the U.S. President, if he or she is doing criminal, illegal, corrupt and/or unconstitutional things in office, should be held both politically and criminally responsible for doing so while in office, and they should be impeached and also criminally prosecuted for their illegal and criminal actions or non-actions depending on the circumstances of the case. It is not as, if the U.S. President, whomever he or she may be, will not be able to obtain some of the very best U.S. lawyers to defend them, and also the notion that the U.S. President is simply too busy to have to go to court, is utterly nonsense. This is because the President is always very busy doing many different things at the very same time and he or eventually she also has or they should have many good advisors and other talented people working for them in many different positions in the government. In this context, this is fundamentally really the only ongoing and continually urgent way to ensure that the sitting U.S. President, will constantly try and do everything in his or her power, to rule the powerful country in a constitutional and in an ongoing legal fashion going forward. Obviously, you would have to think that the U.S. Justice Department, had heard in this very important political and constitutional regard about the beloved legal, judicial and law enforcement notion of “deterrence”. Still, Richard Nixon, from the very beginning of his political career in California and in the U.S. House of Representatives in the 1940s, had been playing all different types of deeply cynical and highly problematic and maybe even criminal political games (See: his 1952 “Checkers speech”), and, if, Richard Nixon, displays one fundamental political truism, it is that most politicians, will continue to behave in the ways they always have done when they move into higher political offices. What you have already seen, is largely what you are going to get, but only now because they have much more power and influence, they will also be able wreak much more havoc on the entire political system as well as on the U.S. society and on the world going forward. In this context, concerned and involved U.S. citizens everywhere, should always be very aware of this political truism when they are voting.

Again, what we clearly see the former President Richard Nixon doing in this interview with David Frost, even out of office, is once again very wrongly pulling and centralizing even many more power(s) within the powerful U.S. Presidency, and, in the end even the absolute power to place himself or herself above the law and beyond the U.S. Constitution, and this is exactly what he had, in effect, been doing from early on in his Presidency, and also which as a matter of fact and also partly absolutely based on the crucial “checks and balances”, have to be shared with the U.S. Congress. In many ways, to quote Milan Kundera here, this is indeed a new ideological phenomenon with all of its legal, constitutional and political horror (s) being put on full display in this interview. This increasingly centralizing of more and more unaccountable as well as “unchecked and unbalanced” military, foreign policy, media, economic, financial, institutional, legal and “quasi-legislative” as well as political power in and around the U.S. Presidency, are really the first ideological signs of growing U.S. Presidential authoritarianism again avant la lettre, coupled with Nixon’s deepening contempt for and war against the U.S. media, as well as his ongoing disdain to play by the legal and constitutional rules, which is now also ever more largely being carried by many recent U.S. Presidents. During Watergate, Nixon also illegally and criminally encouraged many of those around him to destroy as much evidence dealing with Watergate as possible, something which we have now seen become a normal habit for many more white-collar criminals to do, caught up either in elite corporate as well as in elite governmental illegal, corrupt and criminal activities nowadays with little or no consequences for them whatsoever. Nevertheless, I would argue that Richard Nixon, was not politically able to get away with what he was horrifically politically destructively and criminally doing on many different levels in those days, as a direct result of the still deeply echoing various 1960s and early 1970s democratic demands, protests and rebellions, and also because he was somewhat ahead of his times with his many different and highly arrogantly corrupt, illegal, unconstitutional and criminal actions. Nonetheless, Richard Nixon, who was maybe the last real New Deal U.S. President, cannot be blamed for the constantly growing power of the U.S. Presidency. This is because this continuing growth in increasingly Congressionally “unchecked and unbalanced” U.S. Presidential power, had been ongoing especially since WWII, and it was also an inevitable outcome of the brutal and vicious Vietnam War (also under Eisenhower, but starting out much more under John F. Kennedy and especially under Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard Nixon) as well. In this context, it is very important to emphasize the fact that war, especially all wars and all conflicts, as a matter of fact, tend to concentrate and to centralize over time even much more power within the hands of the U.S. President (as the “Commander in Chief”) going forward, and once this new power accumulation occurs within the Presidency, it is never returned and it becomes the “new political and constitutional normal” within which the U.S. constitutional and the U.S. political system, largely tries to continually operate going forward. In 1973, the U.S. Congress, obviously against the backdrop of the many different protests against the illegal and criminal Vietnam War, including the horrific bombings of Loas and Cambodia, passed the 1973 War Powers Resolution, in an attempt to limit the President’s authority to wage foreign wars, as it reasserted or tried to reassert its authority over foreign wars (See for more on this crucial Congressional authority to declare war: Article 1, Section 8 of the existing U.S. Constitution). Not surprisingly, President Nixon, vetoed the bill, but Congress overrode his veto, and the resolution became law, the 1973 War Powers Act, following the 1973 U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam based on the “Vietnamization” of the ongoing conflict there with ongoing U.S. military aid to the South Vietnamese forces. The big ongoing problem in this extremely important context, is the very fact that various U.S. Presidents since then have often paid little or no attention whatsoever to the 1973 War Powers Act, and this has especially been the case since the first successful Gulf War under President George H. W. Bush (the end of the “Vietnam syndrome”) and the U.S. Congress, has done little or nothing to stop them in the process, although it absolutely could, if only it really wanted to do so, based on the U.S. Constitution (22). Against this backdrop, it is equally very important to underscore the crucial fact that the Founding Fathers, were very critical of militarism as well as of large military forces, which they viewed as increasingly leading to ever more authoritarianism going forward. In many ways, this is also increasingly what the U.S., is and has been facing with its massive ongoing military forces as well as with its huge military spending, infecting directly and indirectly everything in the diverse U.S. society, in many different and highly problematic ways at present. In this context, President Eisenhower in his last speech to the nation had strongly warned it about the dangers inherent in the growing “military-industrial complex”, but clearly his warning did not lead either the U.S. population or the various U.S. politicians, to put an end to the growing problem of the ongoing militarization of the U.S. society. Again, Richard Nixon played a very crucial role in all of this ongoing militarization of the United States by deciding to move to a professional military, as a result of the ongoing resistance on the part of many young white U.S. men, not wanting to go to Vietnam, to fight in a pointless and in a deeply unjust and criminal war. Nevertheless, ff, you are constantly spending such huge amounts of money on the military, inevitably you will regularly have to go to war in order to justify continuing to spend such large sums on the military, especially in a society with so many other pressing needs. Still, this deeply anti-democratic and authoritarian 1977 Richard Nixon’s notion, “when the President does it, that means that it is not illegal”, is the beginning of the turning of the U.S. Presidency ever more into a kind of an “indirectly elected” by the U.S. population, given the crucial role of the profoundly antiquated and the increasingly problematical as well as the fundamentally anti-democratic Electoral College, and the Presidency itself into a kind of an Absolute Presidential Monarch, and therefore increasingly into an “exceptional and unique power unto himself or herself”, and ever more also “unchecked and unbalanced”, by the U.S. Congress. Ironically, that was exactly something against which the U.S., had originally revolted during the American Revolution. We have now seen the former U.S. President Donald J. Trump taking the next step, in this regard, by boldly and falsely claiming that the U.S. President, does not even have to act, as at least Nixon pointed out to be the case, but that all he or eventually she needs and/or has to do, according to Donald Trump, is to simply think about it, and that is more than enough to make his or her acts and/or future actions legal as well as constitutional. In this new and evolving context, future U.S. Presidents, I suppose, will have to be surrounded by aids, who are also going to have to be “very good presidential mind readers.” Another great benefit of the U.S. President only thinking and not acting is the very fact that when the aids in the future make a mistake in “reading the mind of the U.S. President”, the sitting U.S. President, can then boldly proclaim they were wrong and as usual they will have to bear the legal consequences of the actions. Obviously, when the actions of the aids work out in the favor of the sitting U.S. President, he or she, can then claims that his close aids, were doing exactly what he wanted them to do in that case. This is exactly what we also see regularly occurring in big business as well when they are being accused of or indicted for myriad criminal and/or fraudulent activities, the C.E.O. and the upper management, in this case, are always completely unaware of all of this, but if the actions turn out to be beneficial to the company or corporation, then they are always intimately involved in helping to bring about all of these benefits and profits for the company. Again, all of this is a direct result of Watergate, the Iran-Contra Affair etc., etc., which has now bled over into the ideological powerful and politically influential neoliberal corporate United States of America as well. Clearly, all of this increasingly places the President and the U.S. Presidency, outside and above the law, and the U.S. Constitution, in a country continually claiming for everyone listening that it is a country based on the “rule of the law and not on the rule of men (and eventually women)” and it is rather strange and horrific phenomenon indeed. As a direct result, U.S. governing, will increasingly become a highly interesting affair under these newly evolving political and psychological conditions. I suppose under those specific ideological conditions and political understandings of the U.S. Presidency, as a high and powerful kind of an exceptional Mafiosi Boss, inevitably regularly involved in various domestic and international corrupt and criminal acts as well as murderous undertakings, the deeply troubling 1974 Richard Nixon pardon, can then be ultimately justified, but then that still raises the significant and the troubling question about what kind of a country the United States really was, is and/or has become? It is also very important to point out here as well that disgraced ex-President Richard Nixon’s complete pardon, was also partly based on the belief that his quick and dramatic fall from power, and it was really neither quick nor truly dramatic, given what he was being accused of doing, and it was, in effect, therefore considered to be enough of a punishment for him. White-Collar crimes are the various delinquent acts being perpetrated by persons with a higher socio-economic and political status such as powerful, (sometimes even well-known), wealthy and successful businessmen, professionals and politicians in society as such (23). This entire pardon for Richard M. Nixon, is indirectly the ongoing excuse that is constantly being put forward for elite white-collar crimes and criminals and as well as for those criminals in high political office, and it ultimately only regularly serves to undermine the “rule of law” as well as that of ongoing urgent accountability and transparency of those holding and exerting great socio-economic, financial and political power in society in general, and also in so doing, increasing a sense of deepening cynicism and of mistrust on the part of the diverse U.S. public at large over time in regards to both the existing U.S. economic and political system as well as the functioning U.S. legal system. All of this is clearly not a very productive and/or a sustainable foundation on which to continually imagine and to build a strong and a vibrant democratic form of U.S. governance. The very important and highly problematical political decision to completely pardon Nixon, was certainly in those days not without its major critics, with the Harvard law professor, Archibold Cox, who had been dismissed by President Richard Nixon, as the special Watergate prosecutor, on October 20, 1973 (the so-called “Saturday Night Massacre”), correctly claiming that the “full and unconditional pardon” of Richard Nixon by President Gerald Ford, might lead to the conclusion that the law did not apply to those in high office in the United States. In other words, Cox was really suggesting here the very beginning, in a time of ongoing economic crisis and the growing stagnation and inflation, that was eventually to become better known as “stagflation” in the United States of America, and which would also subsequently lead to the very radical restructuring of the up until then existing New Deal capitalistic system, of the ongoing “Animal Farming” of the US political and legal system with therefore some being considered to be “much more equal than others”, and all of this in society that had just come through over a decade of nearly ongoing internal revolts and protests by all kinds of different groups of people, demanding a much more peaceful, deeply democratic, socially just, less racist and less sexist society with the much greater inclusion of all, who live within it as well as a society where above the entrance into the US Supreme Court, you can read the challenging and very bold words, “Equal Justice Under Law”. Against this increasingly socio-economically and politically backdrop, the 1972–1974 Watergate Scandal, I would suggest was the very first elite political attempt, to try and destroy or at least beat back some of the ongoing 1960s and early 1970s “democratization” of the U.S. society and of the various important U.S. institutions as such, as Nixon, cynically used his racist law and order “Southern Strategy” to begin the ongoing political, policing, legal and judicial backlash against particularly the constantly protesting and also the tirelessly resisting African American people, he also used the CIA to go after his political enemies as well as the FBI to go after the Black Panthers in the form of COINTELPRO, which was just another different way to implement the ongoing “ideological and political policing” of the U.S. population, in which the FBI had been involved since its very inception, as well as many of Nixon’s political enemies (his “enemies list). This ongoing “ideological and political policing” of the increasingly diverse multi-ethnic and multicultural U.S. population has become much easier now as a direct ongoing result of the extreme concentration of the U.S. media in the hands of a few large conservative U.S. corporations and also of a few extreme wealthy U.S. individuals. In a real democracy or in a real and effectively functioning representational system of governance, this would have never been allowed to happen because this elite media concentration, would have been seen to be very detrimental for the ongoing further development of the deepening of democratic rule. Still, all of this illegal and criminal spying and going after his various political enemies, was an inherent part of Nixon’s ongoing massive Abuse of Power in many different ways while in office, and in so doing he laid the foundation for the ongoing present Abuse of Power as well as Obstruction of Justice and also Contempt of Congress on the part of many recent U.S. Presidents, who also continue to face little or no consequences for their various criminal and corrupt acts. President Nixon equally began putting much more conservative justices and judges, certainly, but still not as conservative as those judges and justices, who would eventually be appointed by Reagan, Bush I, Bush II and Trump, on the U.S. Supreme Court. Nixon could not have done so because there would not have politically been enough ideological backing for such extremely conservative judges and justices during his time in office in the late 1960s and early 1970s, but he, in essence, still began the political process nonetheless. Nixon certainly began the process of transforming the then still largely existing liberal Warren Court (1953–1969) into a much more conservative U.S. Supreme Court. As a result, the existing U.S. Supreme Court, is now overwhelmingly in the hands of extreme rightwing justices, who really do not in any way represent the overall judicial philosophy of the majority of the U.S. population. It is quite remarkable and it also tells us everything that we need to know now, about the real ongoing “crisis of democracy”, in which we all in different ways find ourselves increasingly trapped into, that there are no regular and ongoing massive protests by various U.S. liberal and radical groups of people and their respective social organizations and trade unions, in front of the existing and the highly unrepresentative reactionary U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, D.C. Their highly conservative judicial decisions have been increasingly costly and destructive to the ever more urgent socio-economic, environmental, and political interests of the overwhelming majority of the U.S. population (at least 80%), and they are mostly fundamentally in the socio-economic, financial, legal, judicial and political interests of the white U.S. elites. In many ways, what Lewis Powell had proposed in his 1971 Powell memo, has now become a troubling daily legal, judicial and political reality. All of this is a direct outcome of the ongoing U.S. organized rightwing elite ideological revolt and political backlash against New Deal capitalism as well as it is an instrumental part of the reactionary white U.S. elites tireless fight against “too much democracy” in the United States, in the late 1950s, the 1960s. and early 1970s., which was seen as increasingly endangering their longtime and their founding elite U.S. socio-economic and political dominance. The way obviously for the ever more highly conservative and reactionary anti-democratic U.S. elites to deal with this in their view existing “crisis in democracy” as well as with this urgent problem of “too much democracy”, in the United States of America, was for them to aggressively and to systematically start “shrinking U.S. democracy back down to a size”, which they then could once again largely control and constantly dominate. And, again, this is not to say anything about President Richard Nixon’s genocidal bombing campaigns also in Laos and Cambodia, which as a Swedish study showed, ended up delivering the broken and destroyed Cambodia, right into the hands of the monstrous and genocidal Khmer Rouge. Therefore, the full and unconditional pardoning of the former and the deeply disgraced criminal US President, Richard M. Nixon, clearly was not in keeping with these very important and at the very same time quite challenging words above the entrance to the U.S. Supreme Court of “Equal Justice Under Law.” Another critic of the decision to pardon Richard Nixon, was, Aryeh Neier, the executive director of the ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union), in those days, who pointed out that if the Ford’s principle had been in effect in Nuremberg (1945–1949) that the “Nazi leaders would have been let off while those who had carried out their orders and various murderous and genocidal schemes would have been tried.” In many ways, this is exactly what we have been seeing going and taking place more and more over the last 40+ years now in the United States where those lower down the ladder are regularly being held responsible for all types of acts while those on top, are able to oftentimes pay some type of a fine and subsequently, they are able to walk away, without even having to express any type of regret or apology whatsoever for their various monstrous illegal and corrupt acts. This has now become an inherent part of the increasingly reactionary hierarchical neoliberal and judicial legal system. What Aryeh Neier equally overlooks in his statement is the very fact that the United States has always held the rest of the world to other “standards and rules” than it holds itself and/or holds its very own political, military, national security and socio-economic rulers. This is because from very early on the United States has seen and it has considered itself to be “an exceptional and unique country.” We first clearly internationally see all of this playing out in the deeply racist imperialist 1823 Monroe Doctrine, which the US would start to impose on the rest of the Americas, starting out especially in Cuba and in Puerto Rico, at the very ending of the 19th century.

In the following, I will now continue to show as well as sum up a new and a fundamentally different way of looking at, analyzing and also of understanding the 1972–1974 Watergate Scandal and also the Nixon Presidency. I am briefly doing so here while equally at the very same time constantly trying to very much emphasize the fact that Richard Nixon with his corrupt, illegal and criminal Watergate actions in the early 1970s, was a little ahead of his time, in so doing. In the first place, it is very important to point out that the Nixon Presidency, which was the last truly New Deal Presidency, was also to a certain extent taking place at a time when the growing international economic competition from a rebuilt Westen Europe and Japan as well as the huge costs of the Vietnam War and the inflation and economic problems the United States was increasingly starting to have to confront in those days, forced Nixon to on August 15, 1971, opt out of the Gold Standard for the U.S. dollar, and as a result to begin the process of the ending of the post-WWII Bretton Woods System of tying other currencies to the U.S. dollar, which in turn was tied to gold. Nixon equally imposed wage/price controls for a certain amount of time in order to try and deal with inflation. In so doing, I would argue here that President Nixon, was, in essence, unbeknownst to himself and to his advisors, at that time, also starting to lay the early foundation and the necessary domestic U.S. room for the various socio-economic, financial and political maneuvers to come in order for the coming neoliberal capitalist system to quickly develop itself beginning in the late 1970s and early 1980s (something which would have ideologically been impossible to politically do in the 1960s and early 1970s), and under which we still continue to try and live together, no matter its constantly mounting endless problems and many internal contradictions as well as its horrific massive “anti-democratic” socio-economic costs to the large majority of the U.S. population, and also as its many inherent wealth and income injustices. Again, in so doing, Richard Nixon’s economic and financial measures, was somewhat ahead of his times. In this context, President Richard Nixon, was also involved in all types of corrupt tax and bribery problems as well as criminal campaign finance undertakings, including indirectly taking money from mafiosi-connected individuals in order to also deal with his important criminal Watergate problems, which the Watergate investigations and impeachment, did not go after ultimately, but once again, in so doing, it helped to lay down the foundation for the increasing corruption and the ongoing political criminalization of the way in which the powerful U.S. Presidency operates (24). Nixon was during this time equally involved in all types of criminal and racist “law and order” and “war on drugs” actions and activities, which many other U.S. Presidents, both Democrats and Republicans, would continue to build on and to adapt over time. Nonetheless, it is still equally very important to understand Nixon’s Watergate and illegal pre-Watergate actions directly leading into his criminal Watergate activities for the new phenomenon in all of its horror when it is new, and exactly what Milan Kundera was referring to. Nixon with his Watergate actions was, in essence, carrying out a unilateral pre-emptive mini-internal electoral coup, against the competing Democratic Party, whose candidate, he would have badly beaten even if he had done nothing whatsoever, but because his last Presidential victory, in 1968, was very close and given the deepening unpopularity of the Vietnam War, the growing economic crisis, and the continuing many different protests in and across the large and the ever more diverse North American country, he and his people, clearly did not want to take any 1972 Presidential election chances whatsoever. In this context, it is also important to point out that others, who believe that the 1972 Watergate break-in(s) had more to do with the gaining of sexual blackmail information on various Democratic politicians in those times, have also suggested that Mark Felt, in his dealings with Bob Woodard, was really only trying to hide all of the illegal, unconstitutional and criminal activities in which the FBI had been involved in, and he was therefore desperately trying to blame the CIA as well in this regard. Again, this changes nothing of what I am proposing here in regards to a new way of looking at and of understanding the 1972–1974 Watergate Scandal. All of these different viewpoints about what Watergate, was fundamentally all about, only underscores how deeply rotten and profoundly criminal the entire U.S. system of governance had become, in the wake of the protesting, demonstrating and sometimes even rebelling and intensely democratizing 1960s, and, therefore, in essence, which Watergate so fully illuminates. Still, it was a strange thing for him to do because after he had lost the 1960 Presidential elections against John F. Kennedy, many in the Republican Party, had called on him to criticize what they viewed as the “unfair election results”, which Nixon categorically refused to. This was because he did not want to damage the U.S. political system or delegitimize the U.S. Presidency in the process. In other words, we see here clearly with the illegal and criminal 1972 Watergate break-in(s), for the very first time among the Republican Presidential Office holders, the beginning sense of only loving U.S. Presidential elections when you can absolutely be sure to win them, which is really, in effect, the very beginning of the ending of representational governance as well as of whatever “electoral democratic rule” that may still exist as such. In effect, this is another consequence of the new phenomenon in all of its horror starting to emphatically raise its ugly head in those days. This is because if President Richard Nixon had done these very same things today with the existing and with the increasingly reactionary anti-democratic and also the ever more authoritarian Republican Party, in control of the U.S. Congress, what would have happened to him??? Would he have been threatened with impeachment in order to force him to resign from his high political office or would the Republicans, have just cynically said that what Nixon had done and was being accused of having done, was simply part of the rough and the tumble of political gamesmanship, being carried out by many other U.S. politicians in many different ways? Under President Trump, we have now seen the latest and the most destructive next anti-democratic step as well as the most corrupt anti-representative step being taken in terms of Presidential elections by him declaring that he won the elections, and they were stolen from him by various people in different places, and this was not even a very close Presidential election in 2020. Donald Trump was badly beaten by his Democratic political opponent, Joseph Biden. We have also seen President Donald J. Trump trying to incite a coup in order for him to remain in office, and while the violently murderous rightwing attack on the U.S. Congress was taking, President Donald Trump for a longtime doing whatsoever nothing to stop it, despite many urgent appeals on the part of many different politicians for him to do so, and with him up to now once again paying little or no legal and/or political consequences for his many illegal and criminal actions and grievously unconstitutionally corrupt conflict of interest activities. Once again, while at the very same time the many ordinary people, who have participated in the violent attack on the U.S. Capitol, on January 6, 2021, are being sentenced to significant amounts of time in prison. Many Republican Presidential candidates have already indicated that they would pardon ex-President Donald Trump, if they were elected to the White House, and again we see here the deeply troubling 1974 Watergate pardon, dangerously bleeding into the presently even much more destructively criminal and fraudulent political actions, undertaken by a very corrupt and a tirelessly criminal President Donald J. Trump, who used the Presidency, to mostly enrich himself and his various family members. And, again, all of these rampantly corrupt and fraudulent political activities took place constantly while also brazenly violating the emoluments clause with no legal or political consequences for him whatsoever. A somewhat wealthy and a not very intelligent man, Donald J. Trump, who had once run a deeply corrupt, largely fraudulent and a profoundly criminal business organization in and out of New York City, and which he financially incompetently regularly ran into the ground, only to be bailed out time and again, was also now increasingly running a Mafiosi-style Ponzi-scheme Presidency, in the still horrifically metastasizing corrupt and utterly criminal shadow of the Nixon Presidency. Trump fundamentally did not encounter any problems with his ongoing corrupt business practices as well as with his profoundly fraudulent politics while being President of the United States. This was because he was dealing with an already deeply and largely bought and paid for U.S. Congress, as a result of the U.S. Supreme Court decision, equating the spending of money on elections with free speech. In this context, it must be pointed out that that the ordinary people try and go and vote, and the ever more rightwing neoliberal authoritarian and anti-democratic U.S. elite classes, subsequently quickly and systematically largely nullify their votes and their political influence with their endless wealth and money, as well as with their paid-for elite-led ongoing effective lobbying activities in the existing U.S. neoliberal political system of governance (25). Still, anyone who knew anything about Donald Trump’s longstanding, highly problematic and highly incompetent fraudulent, corrupt as well as fundamentally criminal business practices, in and out of New York City, would certainly not be surprised by any of this (26). As, President, Donald J. Trump, continued to carry on in the criminal and corrupt way that he had always done with again little or no consequences. In essence, therefore to now lock up Donald Trump, was or would be to begin to condemn and to reject the existing and the problematic reigning neoliberal capitalism, as being nothing much more than an ongoing criminal hyper-plundering white male elite-led conspiracy against the majority of the increasingly both socio-economically and also financially suffering and constantly struggling U.S. population. At present, there is simply politically no way to that under the reigning existing ideological circumstances to politically do away with neoliberal capitalism or to radically reform it without mass ongoing protests and demonstrations demanding radical socio-economic and political changes. Still, the big problem in this regard, is that no political parties and/or politicians are at present offering any enticing socio-economic and political alternatives to the existing neoliberal capitalism. All of this ongoing lack of mass enticing and mass energizing political alternatives for the majority of the population, only underscores how profoundly ideologically dominant neoliberal capitalism has succeeded in becoming over the last 40plus years now. In many ways, Donald Trump, in New York City, was really among the very first celebrity neoliberal capitalist businessmen, of his times. Still all of this, only points to how really bad ideologically things in the United States have become since Watergate, institutionally, legally, morally and politically by now. We have also seen especially Republican office holders, but certainly not only Republicans, systematically gerrymandering, increasing numbers of voting districts in order to maintain their continually collapsing power in the U.S., and all of this is happening together with increasingly making voting much more uncertain and more difficult, and even in some places even much more “dangerous” for the various different growing minority groups to be able to vote and to go and vote. Again, this is part of an ongoing rightwing and increasingly anti-democratic and authoritarian shift in the Republican Party over the last thirty plus years, and also as a direct result of the ongoing shrinking of the U.S. white population, which mostly votes Republican, and has done so in every Presidential election since President Lyndon B. Johnson, was the last Democratic Presidential candidate, who would go on to win most of their votes in 1964, a year before he had signed the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which the hard rightwing U.S. Supreme Court, has recently largely gutted, and, in the process leading to increasing problems for many more minority voters to be able to vote and also for them to be able to obtain their requisite representation in the U.S. political system based on the dynamically changing demographic numbers as such, both on federal as well as on state and local levels of governance as well. All of this equally has to do with the fact that somewhere between 30–40% of the still politically dominant shrinking white U.S. population, has over the last thirty to forty years, increasingly opted out of the existing highly problematic “U.S. form of democratic and representational politics”, and they have ever more shifted into an authoritarian and anti-democratic direction, as a direct result of their ongoing growing fundamental disappointment and profound frustration with the existing neoliberal U.S. political system. Again, this rightwing shifting in the voting patterns of many whites, did not only take place in The United States of America, but it also occurred in Europe as well, as these various European societies, became over ever more multi-ethnic and multicultural, as well as a result of many more European and U.S. whites moving out of the working-class into the middle-class in the 1950s, 1960s and early 1970s, and some even moving into the upper-classes after WWII (27). In this context, ongoing political and ideological spying on U.S. citizens in many different ways, has been a longstanding reactionary elite U.S. economic, political, local policing and national security undertaking that goes hand in hand with the longstanding ongoing elite-led U.S. “ideological and political policing” of the changing U.S. population over time. Under Nixon and leading into the 1972–174 Watergate Scandal all of this was regularly criminally and illegally happening, and, in so doing, he was fundamentally laying down the early foundation for what was to come later on a much more massive scale under President George W. Bush. A huge ongoing ideological and political problem since even sometime before the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, in this context, is also the very fact that the various leftist and progressive political parties, have up to now offered no acceptable socio-economic and political alternatives to their various publics in regards to the still hyper-plundering and extremely alienating existing neoliberal economic system as such. What we have increasingly seen happening in many different ways since the 1972–1974 Watergate Scandal, is that the new phenomenon of the Presidential power actions and power-grabbing activities in all of its horror, have over time become ever more ideologically normalized and politically accepted under the various U.S. Presidents such as under President Ronald Reagan with the Iran-Contra Affair and under President George W. Bush with the illegal, brutal and criminal Iraq War as well as the massive ongoing legal and illegal spying on the U.S. population, which continued under President Obama, President Trump, and now in many different ways also under President Joe Biden as well, and which was especially but certainly not only being used against the U.S. Muslim population, a diverse group of people, who were overwhelmingly very wrongly being viewed by many, as a great potential dangerous domestic terrorist threat to the rest of the United States. Again, the various U.S. Muslims, was another “hated” and/or “disliked” U.S. minority group, whose crucial constitutional rights under such “emergency” circumstances can then simply be tossed aside in a contemptuous and cavalier fashion (28). The next ethnic minority group that can easily increasingly fall or slide into this national security and politically ethnic minority “hated” and/or “disliked” category going forward, if nothing is seriously done about this right now to stop it, are especially the Chinese Americans, but also many more of the various Asian Americans, if the military, economic and political tensions, continue to rise with an ever more economically, politically and militarily powerful China, in Asia and in the Pacific Ocean in the coming times. Nonetheless, oftentimes what we see happening nowadays is when the U.S. government is caught doing illegal and unconstitutional things, the U.S. Congress, simply passes a law ‘retroactively’ okaying all or many of these illegal and criminal actions, which makes going to courts to do something or anything whatsoever about all of these illegal, unconstitutional and criminal actions, if not completely impossible then nonetheless very difficult indeed. This is again another loudly screaming warning sign of the ongoing breaking down and dissolution of the “rule of law” and not of men in the U.S. body politic, which fundamentally began with the complete pardoning of a fundamentally criminal Richard Nixon by President Gerald Ford in 1974. At least, during the 1972–1974 Watergate Scandal, there were in those days, still loudly ringing out and intensely echoing with the many different protests in the 1960s and early 1970s, nevertheless enough members of an in those days rather completely different Republican Party, who felt that what Richard Nixon had done, was simply constitutionally and legally completely unacceptable and that he therefore had to be impeached for his various Watergate crimes, if he did not resign from his high and powerful elected federal post and office (29).

The Republican Party, although in those days already an increasingly conservative and a somewhat reactionary political party, still had some moderates and even some conservatives (e.g., Barry Goldwater) within it for whom what President Richard Nixon had done, especially after the White House tapes had been released, which had clearly pointed to his active involvement in the Watergate break-in cover-up, simply could no longer be politically accepted on their part. The big ideological challenge and therefore ultimately the huge ongoing political problem the United States faces at present, and really all of this has been building now for over the last three to four of the increasingly stark income and wealth divided decades, tied into to popular political mistrust and growing political disenchantment, is an increasingly anti-democratic and also an ever more authoritarian extremist Republican Party, that is solidly in the hands of the hard-rightwing wealthy elite and still mostly reactionary elite male U.S. whites, which is simply unwilling when it has the power or enough power in the U.S. Congress, as well as having a highly conservative Republican U.S. President, to carry out its very necessary and deeply crucial role of ‘checks and balances’ in relationship to the various direct and indirect actions being undertaken by the sitting Republican President (30). As a result, many of the reforms and the investigations that the U.S. Congress had undertaken during and after the 1972–1974 Watergate Scandal, and which pointed to the growing problems of corruption, illegality and criminality inherent in U.S. governance, and such as the War Powers Act, the early campaign finance laws, new ethic rules and codes for members of Congress and their staff, an independent prosecutor, the higher protection of people’s tax information held by the IRS against governmental abuse and misuse, as well as through the Church Committee investigating the many criminal wrongdoings of the CIA and the FBI among others, and this is just to name a few, and the important lessons learned from Watergate, have either not been regularly carried out and enforced by the changing U.S. Congresses over time or they have been weakened over time (31). Again, all of this only urgently underscores the fundamentally developing and the ongoing deepening of the real “crisis of democracy” increasingly facing the United States at present. And, all of this continuing and metastasizing U.S. “multidimensional democratic breakdown” is a direct and also an inevitable outcome of not only the massive ongoing cynically elite-led “demobilization of the U.S. population”, who have also constantly been encouraged to turn away from politics, and, to see as U.S. politics as something that is nasty and unbecoming, and, in so doing, strengthening the already dominant hand of the U.S. elites in the U.S. political system even more, as well as the ongoing weakening of trade unions, but also of the coordinated increase in strength and political influence of the much more anti-democratic forces (the big U.S. corporations, U.S. finance, the wealthy U.S. elites, the large landholding agricultural businesses) together with their “various highly conservative and at times even deeply reactionary think tanks”, the leading large law firms they have working for them and their various corporate owned media outlets and social media spreading mistrust, incredible conspiracies and lies to population, just to name a few, as Lewis Powell building on many others had at least partially earlier called for in his 1971 memo) in the United States over the last 50 years. On the other hand, the very same hard-rightwing Republican Party when it is in the opposition, constantly does everything within its Congressional power-domain to make the effective governing of the United States impossible or very difficult to do moving forward, and again the existing and mostly moderately conservative neoliberal Democratic Party, does not fiercely ideologically challenge them in any ongoing open and public political way about this metastasizing very dangerous anti-democratic attitude. This was emphatically made apparent to anyone paying any kind of attention to the U.S. political system during especially the last Presidential elections in 2020, when then President Donald J. Trump, had significantly lost the election, and he subsequently tried to violently overthrow the entire longstanding system and process of the peaceful transferring of Presidential power after the elections, claiming that the elections, had been stolen from him and that he had won, although in court case after court case (in more than 60 cases and even under various Republican appointed judges), his main argument(s) had been rejected time and again. The Republican Party once again overwhelmingly refused to impeach Trump for his criminal and illegal actions on January 6, 2021. An existing increasingly anti-democratic and an ever more authoritarian rightwing Republican Party that lives off and on various forms of discrimination, racism, sexism, conspiracy-theories, paranoia and distrust, transphobia and xenophobia in order to continually distract its more marginalized and especially its mostly more poorer white followers from the very fact that, they have nothing whatsoever politically and especially policy-wise meaningful to offer them, which again goes back to a deeply racist and anti-Semitic “law and order” Richard Nixon with his deeply troubling “Southern Strategy” politics, although the ongoing gutting of governmental social programs and social spending, the discrimination, racism and xenophobia, has only gotten much worse in United States as well as in the Republican Party since Nixon’s time in office, who was really the last New Deal U.S. President. This was something which the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests urgently underscored, and it is and was also an overwhelmingly peaceful anti-racist movement, which was equally very critical of the way in which the police regularly illegally and abusively dealt with blacks and with black and other minority communities in the United States, and against which the rightwing anti-democratic and hard “law and order” Trump administration regularly took many violent and illegal measures, and it also encouraged many others to do so as well (32). And, again right here, it is very important to point out that this very same racist and xenophobic thing, is not only happening in the United States of America, but it is also happening and intensifying all across an ever more multi-ethnic and multicultural Europe as well at present. All of this points to the deeper underlying longstanding cultural, ideological, political and philosophical problems in the North and West. Nonetheless, the existing as well as the increasingly anti-democratic and the ever more authoritarian rightwing Republican Party continually encourages with its many dangerous political actions, the fueling of the ongoing anti-democratic and increasingly authoritarian white supremacist drift of some 30–40% of its white backers everywhere across the large North American country. All of this cynically ideologically playing (e.g., “anti-busing”) into and politically playing with white racism (e.g., “law and order”) began under Richard Nixon, and it has now only gotten even much worse with the passage of time. In this context, we also see in especially many Republican-dominated states what the public-school teachers can teach about U.S. history increasingly being highly problematically rewritten and limited as well as what kinds of books kids can check out of various libraries. We also see many more states in which the Republican Party rules also increasingly limiting their citizens ability to protest and they are also ever more violently trying to stop immigrants from crossing their various borders. And, once again, all of this is continually happening in a developed northern and western country, which is extremely proud of its first amendment rights. Therefore, what we see happening here is an increasing open and also very brazen reactionary rightwing white supremacist Republican attack on both the U.S. Constitution as well as on “U.S. democracy” as such. Again, all of this corrupt and criminal multilayered rule breaking began especially under President Richard Nixon, and, which has now been picked up and further developed in many different ways by many different U.S. Presidents since then with little or no political consequences let alone criminal consequences for the various U.S. Presidents as such, and this is the case even after they have left office. Therefore, when it came time to impeach President Donald Trump, once again for his many blatantly criminal, his massive abuse and misuse of “executive privilege” (beginning under Nixon in relationship to Watergate), fraudulent, deeply corrupt (Richard Nixon was also very corrupt), illegal and unconstitutional acts, the existing increasingly rightwing and anti-democratic Republican Party, nearly categorically with a few exceptions here and there refused to do so. Since Nixon’s time all of this ongoing contemptuously corrupt rule breaking and criminal socio-economic and political activity has closely been tied to many different governmental policies in a still largely reactionary “elite-white dominated politics”, which overwhelmingly benefit the top 5–10% of the U.S. population, and especially the very top 1–3% of the U.S. population, whose anti-democratic wealth and income accumulation, have exploded even much more in the process over time, and in so doing, making many of them indeed the new and the very powerful anti-democratic and increasingly politically authoritarian “vile maxim” “masters of the very much still existing neoliberal universe.” In this context, President Ronald Reagan, is also very important in that he not only ideologically built on Nixon’s ongoing anti-democratic centralization of many more powers within the U.S. Presidency, and he also played into Nixon’s racist “law and order” as well as his racist “war on drugs” politics, which he coupled with and built on Nixon’s anti-democratic media tactics, but he also used the freedom that Nixon had created by moving the U.S. dollar away from the Gold Standard, in order to help start the process of systemically weakening the trade union movement in the United States with his firing of the striking air traffic controllers on August 5, 1981, and all of this intense anti-labor governmental activity, was also being tied to the high interest rates in order to gain control over ongoing inflation, which in the end helped to strengthen and to encourage the ongoing U.S. corporate and Big Business war on trade unions, that had already been going on for some time by the time a highly conservative Ronald Reagan fired the air traffic controllers. All of this led to a quick collapse of the amount of U.S. workers in trade unions as well as too a collapse in strike activity in and across the radically socio-economically and politically changing United States (33). In so doing, and together with his much more radically conservative deregulated free market neoliberal politics, President Ronald Reagan, therefore helped to exponentially over time increase the economic and the financial strength, at a huge ongoing cost to the U.S. workers, and as a result also the political influence, of the much less-democratically-oriented and much more hierarchically authoritarian Big Business, Big Finance and Corporate America. I believe it was the very wealthy Warren Buffet, who honestly and correctly confessed somewhere: “There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.” What Buffet is saying here is very much in keeping with the research done by Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page, on the way U.S. democracy is functioning and in whose fundamental socio-economic and political interests it is overwhelmingly and regularly doing so namely in the interest of the very wealthy U.S. elite classes. Again, this is also fundamentally the way in which the U.S. political system was originally designed to operate by the Founding Fathers, and we can see path-dependency at work here once again. Clearly, as a result, it should come as no surprise to anyone that if both the much less-democratically-oriented U.S. big business and Corporate America backed by the U.S. government, are going to go after the most democratic force in society namely the organized working-class in order to try and break its strong back, and, in the process to redistribute income, wealth and power upwards in society, that over time this process will inevitably lead to an ongoing hollowing out of democracy, and equally to a continuing emptying out of ongoing “democratic rule” in the United States, which is exactly what has happened with the weakening of the U.S. trade unions and also politically of the U.S. working-class over the last 40 years or more. In this context, and without a radical massive ongoing wealth and income redistribution in the United States, things in all probability are only going to get ideologically much worse politically moving forward. Still, all of this has taken place over the last 40 plus years with little or no serious and ongoing attempts on the part of the Democratic Party, which is also largely in the hands of the somewhat more moderate white elite neoliberal classes, in order to try and strengthen the position of trade unions and therefore of workers in the constantly quickly changing U.S. economy. Lately, we have begun to see much more labor organizing and many more strikes taking place, as a direct consequence of the ongoing stagnation of the wages for many U.S. workers in various sectors of the U.S. economy, based on the growing wealth and income divide, which is constantly ripping the U.S. apart. Still, I am convinced that all of this various labor organizing and these many different labor strikes, will only be able to go so far without the massive ongoing strong backing by an activated majority of the U.S. population. The deeply reactionary anti-democratic wealthy white U.S. elite classes, will not easily give up the dominant position they have once again come to politically occupy in the United States of America, without major and ongoing large demonstrations and protests, demanding radical changes to the existing illegitimate U.S. political and economic system as such. What has been happening over the last nearly 50 years now in the United States of America, is a growing highly authoritarian or really totalitarian socio-economic system, as the basic foundational structure, on which the rather quite fragile politically superstructure rests, and the basic structure has as a result increasingly turned the political system in an increasingly anti-democratic and ever more authoritarian direction. You cannot have a real and a vibrantly functioning democratic political system of representational governance without some continuing significant level of broad-based “economic democracy” with regularly elected worker-councils in businesses having significant ongoing input in the way those large businesses operate and equally in the way they are being run. There is simply no hope for this right now in the existing highly reactionary white elite-dominated hierarchical and deeply authoritarian and anti-democratic neoliberal economic system. And, again the way things are going right now in the United States of America, January 6, 2021, was equally only the first coup attempt on the part of the radical right, and the next time around, you would have to believe that they will be much better prepared to carry out very much the same thing, in a much more successful manner. Who will then dare to step in and to stop them? In so doing, the existing increasingly hard-rightwing authoritarian Republican Party, is therefore continually slowly and it is also very systematically multidimensionally strangling, whatever “little democracy and/or pretend-democratic rule” that may still barely exist, in the United States of America at present. In the present political configuration, the “ideologically terrorized” Democratic Party by the Republican Party, therefore continually refuses to openly and to eloquently ideologically aggressively confront them and also to highly-critically politically call them out on all of these various deeply-troubling actions as well as to point out the many great dangers inherent in all of this for many more in the U.S. population, in what the increasingly anti-democratic and authoritarian Republican Party, is constantly busily doing today. This is because eventually you will inevitably have a highly anti-democratic authoritarian and very rightwing Republican President, who also will, and, if he is very popular under the Republican voters, even maybe have the both of the Houses of Congress under Republican Party rule as well, and a hard rightwing Republican U.S. President, who wants to use his or her very powerful U.S. political position, to do fundamentally criminal, illegal and/or unconstitutional acts as well as various other fraudulent and corrupt things with nobody or only too few willing to ideologically stand up to him or her and to politically confront her or him. This is because they are very afraid that he will then wreak havoc on them and on their family and friends. At least, if, things, continue to systematically deteriorate ideologically, constitutionally and institutionally the way they have politically been doing now for nearly over fifty years, it is only a matter of time before this nightmarish anti-democratic ideological scenario, will eventually more and more start to ultimately become a very ugly political reality in the United States of America, indeed and/or in Europe. Especially, if the popular rightwing radicalized U.S. President, is claiming that he is doing all of this just in order to protect the “freedom, the peace and security of the people” in the United States, against “enemies and spies and treasonous illegal foreign people”, and as we have seen in U.S. history time and again, anyone or any ethnic minority group of people, can under the right ideological set of circumstances be wrongly politically turned into dangerous “enemies and potential spies” in the United States, but who are really nothing else but the U.S. President’s eloquently critical and also his influential political opponents. And, oftentimes this happens with the significant backing of the constantly “ideologically and politically policing” corporate media system with the active help of the elite political class leading to a “freaked-out” U.S. population. Donald J. Trump, who is now way ahead in the polls in order to once again become the Republican Presidential nominee, has just recently taken another dangerous step in this criminally infectious post-Watergate regard by openly saying that he would have to lock up his political opponents and enemies, which I suppose could or would be a broad category of people, in, I suppose, new concentration camps, if he regains Presidential power, in January 2025, and once again he says all of this without many U.S. activists and intellectuals eloquently and concretely speaking out against this deeply anti-democratic and utterly dictatorial notion (34). This is certainly a very sure way to insure “winning” even many more future elections by simply locking up and neutralizing your political opponents so that they cannot even run against you. Who will then under these horrific and brutally dictatorial U.S. Presidential conditions really want to massively stand up and who will even dare to fearlessly politically speak out, in defense of the fundamentally violated constitutional rights, of those then “unpopular detained people” in an increasingly anti-democratic, hierarchical white elite class-ridden, atomized, alienated, racist, sexist, xenophobic and anti-lgbtqia+ society as well as also in a constantly and in an ever more authoritarian and also white supremacist elite-dominated U.S. society and U.S. body politic? Therefore, the very urgent time to do so is now, today, and every day to come moving forward into the 2024 Presidential elections, by constantly calling for a much better representational U.S. national legislature (U.S. Senate and U.S. House of Representatives) and equally for a much better functioning U.S. system of real democratic governance as well as for a much more socially and economically just and equitable non-racist, non-xenophobic, non-sexist society, non-antigay and non-anti-lgbtqia+ broadly participatory democratic society. And, all of this with a very much-needed new U.S. Constitution, guaranteeing human dignity, broad and equally inclusive rights of fundamental participation, strong socio-economic and labor rights, broad and crucial environmental, political and cultural rights for all and in the very best of interests of all and also of a soon-to-be majority-minority United States going forward.

©Gregory Gilbert Gumbs

Notes:

1) See for much more about Watergate: Garrett M. Graff, Watergate: A New History (New York: Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster, 2022); See also: Stanley I. Kutler, The Wars of Watergate: The Last Crisis of Richard Nixon (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1990).

2) See for more about Richard Nixon, in: https://history.com/topics/us-presidents/richard-m-nixon (accessed 8/5/2023); See also for much more about the life, career and Watergate: Richard Nixon, in: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Richard-Nixon (accessed 8/5/2023), See for much more on Nixon working as a lawyer in New York City before he became President: Victor Li, Nixon in New York: How Wall Street Helped Richard Nixon Win The White House (Vancouver: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2018); See also for some more on the myriad and the many different types of protests in the 1960s and early 1970s: Speaking and Protesting in America, in: https://americanarchive.org/exhibits/first-amendment/protests-60s-70s (accessed 8/6/2023).

3) See for an example of this somewhat greater U.S. public influence on government policy: G. Calvin MacKenzie and Robert Weisbrot, The Liberal Hour: Washington and the politics of Change in the 1960s (New York: Penguin); See for more on the exclusion of black maids and black farm workers, who in those days made up the large majority of working blacks in the United States, from many of the new and important New Deal social programs because of the racist Southern Democrats: Ira Katznelson: When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2006).

4) See for more on the ongoing elite U.S. business ideological organizing and political resistance of New Deal capitalism and its social programs, which goes back to the 1930s, as well as the ongoing reactionary elite’s categorical resistance against what was happening in the 1960s and early 1970s: Kim Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands: The Businessmen’s Crusade Against the New Deal (New York: W.W. Norton, 2009), 115–184; See also: Nancy MacLean, Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of The Radical Right’s Stealth Plan For America (New York: Viking, 2017), 74–153.

5) See for more on how the widely revered U.S. Constitution, which was written by 55 rich white men in order to fundamentally protect their socio-economic and political interests in the U.S. going forward: Robert Ovetz, We The Elites: Why The U.S. Constitution Serves The Few (London: Pluto Press, 2022).

6) See for more on this evolving reactionary antidemocratic elite white academic and elite white businessmen’s notion of “too much democracy” already in the late 1950s, but increasingly picking up much more speed in the 1960s, against the backdrop of the many different spreading protests and socio-economic and political demands on the part of formerly highly marginalized and excluded voices as well as the various uprisings breaking out across the United States, and their ongoing organized elite attempts “to tame and to control democratic rule” in their own very best elite interests, and in which the hard rightwing Koch brothers, but certainly not they alone, played a very important funding, activist and organizational role and the surviving brother continues to play a very important role: Nancy MacLean, Democracy in Chains: The Deep History Of The Radical Right’s Stealth Plan For America (New York: Viking, 2017), xiv-xviii, 11, 22–23, 67–68, 70, 74, 80, 127–153; See also C. J. Polychroniou, Illegitimate Authority: Facing The Challenges Of our Time Noam Chomsky (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2023), 260–261; See also: Holly Sklar (ed.), Trilateralism: The Trilateral Commission and Elite Planning for World Management (Boston: South End Press, 1980), 35–52.

7) See for much more on the important 1971 Powell Memorandum: Nick Pahwa, Time to Fight: How the Powell memo convinced big business it was losing American hearts and minds, in https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2021/08/lewis-powell-memo-chamber-commerce.html. (accessed 8/16/2023); See also Nancy MacLean, Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of The Radical Right’s Stealth Plan For America (New York: Viking, 2017), 125–126; See for much more on the very important 1971 Powell Memorandum “Attack on American Free Enterprise System”, itself, in https://greenpeace.org/usa/democracy/the-lewis-powel-memo-a-corporate-blueprint-to-dominate-democracy/ (accessed 8/13/2023).

8) See for some more on the ultraconservative Barry Goldwater’s U.S. Presidential campaign: Nancy MacLean, Democracy In Chains: The Deep History Of The Radical Right’s Stealth Plan For America (New York: Viking, 2017), 88–92; See also: Suzanne McGee, How Barry Goldwater Brought the Far Right to Center Stage in the 1964 Presidential Race, in: https://www.history.com/news/barry-golwater-1964-campaign-right-wing-republican (accessed 8/13/2023).

9) See for much more on the profoundly negative view most U.S. adult citizens have of politics and of U.S. politicians: Americans’ Dismal Views of the Nation’s Politics, in: https://pewresearch.org/ politics/2023/09/19/americans-dismal-views-0f-the-nations-politics/ (accessed 9/26/2023).

10) See for more on the 47 trillion dollars going to the top 10% of the U.S. population between 1975 and 2018, in the horrifically increasing profoundly unjust, fundamentally unsustainable and deeply anti-democratic wealth and income in The U.S. at a huge cost to at least 90% of the U.S. population: Jon Schwarz, The Big Myth About “Free Markets” That Justified History’s Greatest Heist, in: https://www.theintercept.com/2023/08/04/big-myth-book--free-market-oreskes-conway/ (accessed 8/9/2023).

11) See for more on the significant possibility that the Watergate break-in was about gaining sexual blackmail information on Democratic politicians: Jim Hougan, Secret Agenda: Watergate, Deep Throat, and the CIA (New York: Random House, 1984).

12) See for more on Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein and their Watergate investigations as young and ambitious journalists for the Washington Post in the early 1970s: Alicia C. Shepard, Woodward and Bernstein: Life in the Shadow of Watergate (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons., Inc., 2007), 31–113.

13) See for much more on the 1798 Alien and Sedition Acts, which were passed under President John Adams: htttps://www.ushistory.org/19e.asp (accessed 8/31/2023), See also for more: https://www.britannica.com/event/Alien-and-Sedition-Acts (accessed 8/31/2023).

14) See for much more on the first Red Scare (1917–1920) in the U.S. under President Woodrow Wilson: https: www.history.com/topics/cold-war/red-scare (accessed 8/31/2023); See also: Marcie K. Cowley, Red Scare, in: https://www.mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/1063/red-scare (accessed 8/31/2023).

15) See for more on the House Un-American Activities Committee (1938–1975) in: David Schulz, House Un-American Activities Committee, in: https://www.mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article /815/house-un-American-activities-committee (accessed 9/2/2023); See also: HUAC-Definitions, Hearings & Investigations, in: https://www.history.com/topics/cold-war/huac (accessed 9/2/2023); See also: https://www.britannica.com/money/topic/House-Un-American-Activities-Committee (accessed 9/2/2023); See also for more on Truman’s highly problematic Executive Order 9835, given its clear first amendment rights violations inherent in its broad and its vague scope, in: https://www.trumanlibrary.gov/library/executive-orders/9835/executive-order-9835 (accessed 9/2/2023); See also for more on and about McCarthyism and The Red Scare: https://millercenter.org/the-presidency/educational-resources/age-of-eisenhower/mccarthyism-red-scare (accessed 9/1/2023).

16) See for much more about the Iran-Contra Affair (1985–1987), in: https:www.pbs.org/wgbh/American-experience/features/Reagan-iran (accessed 9/2/2023); See also: The Iran-Contra Affair, in; https://www,britannica.com/event/Iran-Contra-Affair (accessed 9/2/2023); See also for more on the Iran-Contra Affair, in: https://millercenter.org/issues-policy/foreign-policy/iran-contra-affair (accessed 9/2/2023). See for Bush and the Iraq War (2003–2011), in: https://www.britannica.com/event/Iraq-War (accessed 9/2/2023), See also in this regard Carroll Doherty and Jocelyn Killey, A Look Back at How Fear and False Beliefs Bolstered U.S. Public Support for War in Iraq, in: https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2023/ 03/14/a-look-back-at-how-fear-and-false-beliefs-bolstered -u-s-public-support-for-war-in-iraq/ (accessed 9/2/2023). See for much more about President Obama’s highly problematic droning campaigns during his presidency: Jessica Purkiss and Jack Serle, Obama’s Covert Drone War in Numbers: Ten Times more Strikes than Bush, in: https://www.thebureauinvestogates.com/ stories/2017–01–17/obamas-covert-drone-war-in-numbers-ten-times-more-strikes-than-Bush (accessed 9/3/2023); See also in this regard: Micah Zenko, Obama’s Final Drone Strike Data, in: https://www.cfr.org/blog/obamas-final-drone-strike-data (accessed 9/3/2023).

17) See for more on the three impeachment articles: President Richard Nixon and Impeachable Offenses, in: https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artII-S4-2-3-5/ALDE_00000695/ (accessed 8/2/2023); See here also for about one third of the Republican House Judiciary members voting in favor of the two articles of impeachment having to do with Obstruction of Justice and Abuse of Power: Paul von Hippel, Romney’s not really alone. Republican senators were ready to oust Nixon in 1974, in: https://washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/12/romneys-not really-alone-republican-senators-were-ready-oust-nixon-1974/ (accessed 8/8/2023).

18) See for more on the positioning of the U.S. Presidency within the consciously highly anti-democratic designed U.S. Constitutional system by the racist and sexist elite Framers in 1787, as well as the growing presidential power, which is oftentimes unchecked nor expressly balanced by the U.S. Congress and/or by the U.S. judiciary, over time within the trias politica: Robert Ovetz, We The Elites: Why The U.S. Constitution Serves the Few (London: Pluto Press, 2022), 98–115.

19) President Ford explains his pardon of Nixon to Congress, in: https://history.com/this-day-in-history/ford-explains-his-pardon-of-nixon-to-congress (accessed 8/3/2023); See also for more on the Ford’s pardoning of Nixon: Andrew Glass, President Ford pardons Nixon, Sept. 8, 1974, in: https://www.politico.com/story/2018/09/08/president-ford-pardons-richard-nixon-sept-8-1974-806451 (accessed 8/6/2023).

20) Was Nixon’s “when the President does it, that means that it is not illegal “technically correct”?, in: https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/78917/was-nixons-when-the-president-does-it-that-means-it-is-not-illegal-tech (accessed 8/14/2023).

21) See for the view that the U.S. President cannot be criminally prosecuted while in office that the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) came up with in 1973 during the Watergate crisis under President Richard Nixon: Jan Wolfe, Can a sitting U.S. President face criminal charges?, in: https://www. reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-russia-indictment-explainer/can-a-sitting-u-s-president-face-charges-idUSKCN1QF1D3 (accessed 9/11/2023); See also here: Mary M. Wood, Can Presidents Be Prosecuted, or Sued? Professor Explains Differing Visions of Immunity, in: https://law.virginia.edu/news/202301/can-presidents-be-prosecuted-or-sued-professor-explains-differing-visions-immunity (accessed 9/11/2023).

22) See for a brief history of the 1973 War Powers Act, in: https://www.britannica.com/topic/War-Powers-Act (accessed 9/12/2023).

23) White-collar crime was first brought up by Edwin Sutherland in 1939 and oftentimes white-collar criminals end up receiving less punishment that are being handed out for street crimes: See for more on all of this: Scott A. Bonn, Why White-Collar Criminals Are Rarely Punished, in: https://psychologytoday.com/au/blog/wicked-deeds/201704/why-white-collar-criminals-are-rarely-punished (accessed 8/3/2023), George Pierpont, Is white-collar crime treated more leniently in the US?, in: https://bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-47477754 (accessed 8/3/2023); See also for much more on white-collar crime: Gilbert Geiss, White Collar And Corporate Crime (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 1–33, 51, 61–63, 95.

24) See for more about President Nixon opting the U.S. Dollar out of the Gold Standard and therefore starting the process of putting an end to the post-WWII Bretton Woods system: Sandra Kollen Ghizoni, Nixon Ends Convertibility of U.S. Dollar to Gold and Announces Wage/Price Controls, in: https://federalreservehistory.org/essays/gold-convertability-ends (accessed 9/21/2023), See also: Lily Rothman, The U.S. Dollar Hasn’t Been Linked to Gold for 45 Years. Here’s Why, in: https://time.com/44444172/gold-standard-history/ (accessed 9/21/2023), See also: Robert Murphy, After the Gold Standard, we got bigger government and a smaller dollar, in: https://thehill.com/opinion/finance/56480-after-the-gold-standard-we-got-bigger-government-and-a-smaller-dollar (accessed 9/21/2023); See also: Nixon and the End of the Bretton Woods System, 1971–1973, in: https//history.state.gov/milestones/Nixon-shock (accessed 9/21/2023). See for more on Nixon’s various tax problems and on his corrupt finance campaign practices: Brian Faler, How Nixon’s tax trouble could influence quest for Trump’s returns, in: https://politico.com/story/2018/12/23/nixon-trump-tax--returns (accessed 9/21/2023), See for much more about Nixon’s wide-ranging corruption and criminality and his campaign finance misdeeds, which the U.S. Congress in the 1970s tried to take measures against and to pass laws against, but might now be impossible in a highly divided and deeply polarized U.S. Congress in: Stuart Streichler, Watergate Ironic Legacy, in: https://boston.review.net/articles/watergate-ironic-legacy/ (accessed 9/21/2023); See also: Sam Berger and Alex Tausanovitch, Lessons From Watergate, in: https://americanprogress.org/article/lessons-from-watergate (accessed 9/21/2023).

25) See for the lower-class U.S. citizens not having much influence on the U.S. political system as well as on U.S. policy when their views are in conflict with those of the U.S. elite classes: Martin Gilens, Affluence and Influence: Economic Inequality and Political Power in America (Princeton University Press, 2014); See also for the existing representational U.S. political system mostly and really fundamentally excessively representing the socio-economic and political interests of the U.S. elites: Martin Gilens and Bejamin Page, Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens, in: https: Cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-politics/testing-theories-of-american-politics-elites-interest-groups-and-average-citizens/ 62327F513959DOA304P4893B382B9921 (accessed 9/14/2023).

26) See for more on Trump’s criminal business practices in New York with the Trump Organization: David Cay Johnston, The Big Cheat: How Donald Trump Fleeced America and Enriched Himself and His Family (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2021); See for a very interesting book in this regard that ties the rise of Donald Trump in the 1980s to the ongoing burgeoning an increasingly autocratic U.S. as well as to the continuing degradation of the U.S. political system as a whole: Sarah Kendzior, Hiding In Plain Sight: The Invention of Donald Trump and The Erosion Of America (New York: Flatiron Books, 2020); See also here: Brian Faler, How Nixon’s tax trouble could influence quest for Trump’s returns, in: https://politico.com/story/12/23/nixon-trump-tax-returns (accessed 9/21/2023).

27) See for more about U.S. white voters voting in majority for Republican Presidential candidates since last doing so for Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964: Steve Phillips, What About White Voters?, in: https://www.americanprogress.org/article/what-about-white-voters/ (Accessed 9/3/2023); See also: Perry Bacon Jr., America’s problem is White people keep backing the Republican Party, in: https://washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/13/america-has-white-problem/ (accessed 9/3/2023).

28) See for more on the ongoing massive spying on the U.S. population: NSA Sying, in: https://eff.org/nsa-spying (accessed 9/4/2023); See also: Lawmakers allege ‘secret’ CIA spying on unwitting Americans, in: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-60351768 (accessed 9/4/2023); See also in this regard: https://www.eff.org/nsa-spying/how-it-works (accessed 9/4/2023); See also: Ed Pilkington, ‘Panic made us vulnerable’: how 9/11 made the US surveillance state and the Americans who fought back, in: https://theguardian.com/world/2021/ sep/04/surveillance-state-september-11-panic-made-us-vulnerable (accessed 9/4/2023).

29) Paul von Hippel, Romney’s not alone. Republican senators were ready to oust Nixon in 1974, in: https://washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/12/romneys-not-really-alone-republican-senators-were-ready-oust-nixon-1974/ (accessed 8/8/2023).

30) See for just one example: GOP Unlikely to Reprise Role it Played in Nixon’s 1974 Exit, in: https://voanews.com/a/usa_gop-unlikely-reprise-it-played-nixons-1974-exit/6177114.html (accessed 8/8/2023).

31) See for more on the reforms undertaken after Watergate by the U.S. Congress in an attempt to protect the various important rights of U.S. citizens as well as to try and rein a more and more run-away and increasingly powerful criminal U.S. Presidency under Richard Nixon and especially going forward: Sam Berger and Alex Tausanovitch, Lessons From Watergate, in: https://americanprogress.org/lessons-from-watergate (accessed 9/21/2023); See also in this context: Stuart Streichler, Watergate’s Ironic Legacy, in: https://bostonreview.net/articles/watergate-ironic-legacy/ (accessed 9/21/2023); See also Mark Stencel, Watergate Reforms, in: https://washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/longterm/ watergate.htm (accessed 9/24/2023).

32) Russ Bynam, At RNC, GOP echoes racial code of Nixon’s 1968 campaign, in: https://apnews,com/ article/virus-outbreak-election-2020-race-and-ethnicity-politics-ga-state-wire-fo9ab43bd4232894bOeO41f1a5d97f53 (accessed 9/15/2023); See for some more on the Black Lives Matter protests: Lauren-Whitney Gottbrath, In 2020, Black Lives Matter movement shook the world, in: https://aljazeera.com/features/2020/12/31/2020-the-year-black-lives-matter-shook-the-world (accessed 9/21/2023).

33) See for more on President Ronald Reagan’s firing of the striking air traffic controllers, who were striking for better wages and for much less hours of work than the very long hours they were being forced to work: Glenn Houlihan, The Legacy of the Crushed 1981 PATCO Strike, in: https://jacobin.com/2021/08/reagan-patco-1981-strike-legacy-air-traffic-controllers-union-public-sector-strkebreaking (accessed 9/16/2023; See also: Jon Schwartz, The Murder of the U.S. Middle Class Began 40 Years Ago This Week, in: https://theintercept.com/2021/08/06/middle-class-reagan-patco-strike (accessed 9/16/2023); See especially also in this very important regard: Vivek Chibber, Confronting Capitalism: How the World Works and How to Change It (London: Verso, 2022), 84–89.

34) See for more about Trump planning to imprison his political opponents and enemies if he regains the U.S. Presidency: Martin Pengelly, Donald Trump vows to lock up political enemies if returns to White House, in: Https://theguardian.com/us-news/2023/aug/30/trump-interview-jail-political-opponents-glen-beck (accessed 8/30/2023).