end in sight) the American public has been numbed by a torrent of explosive revelations concering the political behaviour of President Nixon and his associates.
The bulk of the left press, unable to compete with the muckraking scoops of papers like the Washington Post, has descended to populist we-told-you-so moralising about how corrupt the American system is. While this is certainly true, it doesn't explain the crisis, which is much more than a momentary tempest in a teapot dome.
Watergate is the outer face of a thoroughgoing crisis of the entire American political system Its continuing traums for the ruling class is that it won't go away. This is because Watergate caught Nixon and his cohorts in the midst of a major ovechaul of the executive branch of the state. Minus the authority of the old struc tures, and with new ones not yet in place, the crisas testers on centre stage as a rotting corpse in the absence of any political force capable of dragging it off.
Impeachment, which is by now a popular remedy, appears to be the only way to dispense with the mess, but at present Congress lacks the muscle and stomach for dethroning King Richard. I Congress is forced to make a serions attempt at impeachment, and Nixon subverts their effort or refuses to go, an unprecedented political stalemate could develop. Bourgeois democracies indeed are never as stable as they appeat.
HISTORICAL ORIGINS American politics have been complicated historically by the size and socio-economic diversity of the United States and by its peculiar historical ongins as a federation of local political units, some bused on commercial and industrial capitalism, some on petty-bourgeois agricultural production, and some on chattel-slave plantation agriculture This compixity has been reinforced since the Civil War by the hlack question, the presence of a large Chicano nationality in the Southwest, and the ethnic differentiation of the urban populabon resulting from the successive waves of European land more recently Latin American) immigration.
The majur consequence of these factors for the bourge ois political system is the historical ahsence of disciplined and politically homopenous and military power duing World War Il and the extended post-war economic prosperity this formula was a successful one for a third of century. The Democrats have controlled Congress for decades, and the only Republican Presadent between 1932 and 1968 was The material basis for the internal political equilibrium of the US begun to disintegrate during the 1960's, however. The two immediate causes were the inability of US imperialism to crush the Vietnamese revolution and the revolt of the oppressed black population. These coincided during the late 1960's with a progressive deterioration of American predominance in the world economy Under these centrifugal forces, the Democratic coalition began to break up. The attempis of the Kennedy and Johnson antinistrations to defuse black radicalism through civil rights and welfare legislation provoked a nift between the bourgeois-liberal Democratic leadership and the Dixiecrats, and did not eliminate the black problem. The black struggles and the war provoked a serious ideological crisis throughout American society, and led to ass radicalisation among white youth and sections of the petty bourgeoisie. As well, there was considerable hostility to the war within the working class, while a broad layer of white suburban middle Americans, reacting against this mass dissent, drifted right.
CRISIS FOR DEMOCRATS The sum total of these factors was a serious crisis in the Democratic Parly An insurgent radical-liberal current, largely based in the youth and the blacks, polarsed around McCarthy and Bobby Kennedy. Johnson was forced to step down. Wallace, capitalising on the gulf which had opened between Southern reaction and Democratic liberalism, posed the threat of a mass third party of petty-bourgeois reaction. In the end, Hubert Humphrey, a mediocre and unattractive renant from the 1950's received the Democratic presidential nomination only because of a vigorous inter vention on his behalf by the AFL-CIO trade union leadership.
Nixor was able to win the 1968 election largely because of the disintegration of the Democratic coalition rather than any coherent Republican campaign was based on an overt appeal to the most reactionary sentiments of the white middle class and sections of the working class, For the first time since 1932, the Republicans were able to penetrate the South electorally. Wallace primarily took soles away trom the Democrats rather than the Republicans.
NEW POLICIES Between 1968 and 1972 Nixon evolved an entirely new political orientation for US capitalism, both at home and abroad. His foreign policy was based on a recognition of the new reality America's absolute dominance over the capitalist world was at an end. Thus the U5's military profile in the neo-colonial world was lowered, ground troops were withdrawn from Vietnam, and increasingly sub-imperialist powens and mercenary armies were propped up in cach of the world's hot spot (Brazil, India, Portuguese Africa, Israel, S. E. Asia) as a preferable substitute for direct American intervention.
On the diplomatic front Nixon (vin Kissinger) moved to implement a detente with the Soviet Union and recognise China, while taking a tough slance with the imperialist allies to force them to foot more of the bill for the collective preservation of their mutual world system. Domestically, Nixon recognised the unfavour able realities of the US's coomony, resulting from the massive and inflationary expenditures of the Vietnam War and the new rise of Japan and the EEC to competitive equality in world markets, In the face of this, he cut social expen diture by liquidating the Great Society prog Tames of the Johnson era, in favour of a heavier state regulation of wages and prices via his New Economic Policy inaugurated in 1971.
BROAD REGROUPMENT The general goals of Nixon's domestic and foreigit policy were geared to making the best of American capitalism's rocky condition at home and its diminished position intemational ly. As a result, he managed to effect a broad political regroupment around his progrummes sufficient to give him the largest electoral majonty in the history of the nation. He broke the Southern reaction away from the Democratic Party nationally by being sufficiently tough on law and order to prevent a third party of the right from arising. He thereby neutralised the threat posed by Wallace to his Southern strategy.
By wooing Fitzsimmons of the Teamsters' union outside the AFL-CIO, and installing Brennan (a key meriber of Meany's AFL-CIO leadership) as Secretary of Labour, Nixon succeeded in splitting the trade union bureauc racy from the Democratic Party for the first time in decades. This enabled him to strengthen his electoral base in the white working class. Perhaps most importantly of all, Nixon won the begrudging support of all major sectors of the big bourgeoisie in the face of the Democratic Party's selection of George McGover as its presidential candidate. McGovern's nomination became the focus for the wanting political energies of the late