CAN TRUMP CONTINUE TO GET THE BETTER OF THE DEEP STATE AND THE FAKE-NEWS MEDIA?

AuthorMarini, John
PositionPOLITICAL LANDSCAPE

THE GREAT DIFFICULTY of interpreting political scandals was summarized by a newspaper editor in the Western film, "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance." Deciding not to publish the truth of an explosive political story, the editor justifies it by saying, "When the legend becomes fact, print the legend." We certainly have had many legends regarding political scandals foisted on us, especially since Watergate.

Nearly every political administration has potential scandal lying just below the surface. There always are those in government who seek to profit privately from public service, and there always are those who will abuse their power. All governments provide the occasion for scoundrels of both kinds, but the scandals they precipitate rarely erupt into fullblown crises of the political order. What differentiates the scandals that do?

To understand a political scandal fully, one must take into account all of the interests of those involved. The problem is that these interests rarely are revealed--which precisely is why it is so tempting for partisans, particularly if they are at a political disadvantage, to resort to scandal to attack their opponents. Many great scandals arise not as a means of exposing corruption, but as a means of attacking political foes while obscuring the political differences that are at issue.

This especially is likely to occur in the aftermath of elections that threaten the authority of an established order. In such circumstances, scandal provides a way for defenders of the status quo to undermine the legitimacy of those who have been elected on a platform of challenging the status quo--diluting, as a consequence, the authority of the electorate.

The key to understanding how this works is to see that most political scandals, sooner or later, are transformed into legal dramas. As legal dramas, scandals become understood in nonpartisan terms. The way in which they are resolved can have decisive political impacts, but those in charge of resolving them are the "neutral" prosecutors, judges, and bureaucrats who make up the permanent (and unelected) government, not the people's elected representatives. To resort to scandal in this way thus is a tacit admission that the scandalmongers no longer believe they are able to win politically. To paraphrase Prussian general and military strategist Carl von Clausewitz, scandal provides the occasion for politics by other means.

Richard Nixon won a landslide electoral victory in 1972 and was removed from office less than two years later. The Watergate scandal then became the model for subsequent political scandals, down to the current day. How and why did Watergate come about and what did it mean?

After the election of 1964, our two elected branches of government, each controlled by Democrats, worked together to expand power in Washington by centralizing administrative authority in the executive bureaucracy. This dramatic centralization of power created a political reaction in the electorate that began pushing back against the Great Society policies of the time.

The Republican Party, under...

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