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American people. In a sense, they were right, insofar as many Amer–
icans automatically respond to certain accepted notions of patriotism,
national security, and American politics. It has been argued, with some
persuasion, that the blurring of party lines and of political issues gen–
erally has served to contain political extremes and to keep the country
in a state of democratic chaos that passes for stability. But in certain
situations, as in the post-Watergate crisis, the blurring of political dis–
tinctions has muddled the national consciousness. It is particularly strik–
ing that up to now (at the time of writing) not a single leader of the
Democratic Party has made any public statement about the full meaning
of Watergate; nor is there any radical grouping or leadership that has
produced more than dissenting noises. Except for a few outstanding
journalists, like Reston and Wicker, the whole intellectual community
appears to be in a state of shock, or stupor. One wonders how long a
democratic society can be maintained while so large a part of the pop–
ulation remains politically illiterate and gullible.
• Watergate has made it even clearer than before that the sectar–
ianism and the craziness of left groupings in this country have served to
justify the secret power moves of the White House conspirators.
If
any
further proof of this lesson is needed, it is evident once again that stupid–
ity always plays into the hands of one's opponents. Clearly, Nixon won
so handily because the country thought that a vote for McGovern was a
vote for anarchy, for crime, for student revolt, for hippies. And what–
ever support Nixon still has comes largely from the belief, which the
Democrats have allowed to persist, that the alternative to Nixon would
be worse than Watergate. How else explain that a majority of the peo–
ple think Nixon is implicated in Watergate, but only a minority want
him ousted.
• Watergate has altered one's sense of the possible.
If
politics, as
Bismarck said, is the art of the possible, then Watergate must be seen
as an effort to extend the limits by underground methods.
In the past we had assumed that large conspiratorial acts and
frame-ups by agencies of the government, with the connivance of the
FBI, were impossible in this country. For one thing, it seemed that too
many people would have to be involved in the plot, and with newspaper–
men and liberal crusaders on the prowl for a scandal - or just a story–
secrets of this kind couldn't be kept very long. We had assumed that only
the paranoia of the dispossessed assigned unlimited power to the govern–
ment. And the alarmist idea that fascism - or some more conventional
plot to seize power - was always just around the corner was what one
came to expect from a sectarian and doctrinaire left.
But after hearing the conspiratorial stories coming out of the White
House, fantasy moved closer to reality. Politics in this country is so fluid
and formless that one still can't say what might have happened if the
break-in at Watergate had not been bungled - perhaps nothing but a
few political adventurers playing with power. But the whole thing is
scary, not only because it leads one to wonder what is possible but be–
cause it also makes one question one's sense of the country. There have
