Even Richard Nixon

Commenter Donald Newell posted something that really resonated for me personally:

 I wonder how my 14-year-old son processes all this. His view into America as he grows up is so wildly different from what mine was. When I describe to him my childhood from half a century ago, it really does sound like a different world.

I was 14 when Nixon resigned, and I have a vivid memory of reading a story in I believe Newsweek, although it might have been Time, about the events surrounding the resignation. Some writer or editorialist was going on about how proud we could be as a nation that there were no “tanks in the streets” — I remember that specific phrase — and that struck me as so strange. We’re giving ourselves credit for not being a banana republic was more or less my thought, although I probably didn’t know the phrase banana republic at the time.

But it seemed so obvious to 14-year-old me that we had a lawful system where if the president broke enough important rules he would be forced to quit, because if that wasn’t true then the system would be per se illegitimate. I’m reconstructing my mental state 51 years ago this August using anachronistic language and concepts, but that was how I was thinking. Basically: This is America, if the president is too much of a crook the government and the legal system will force him out of office, so of course there are no tanks in the streets. This isn’t Latin America.

All this was 16 years before the Spanish political scientist Juan Linz published “The Perils of Presidentialism,” which 35 years later is an almost uncannily prescient glimpse into how even the most durable presidential system — America’s — could eventually collapse. It’s true that Linz was predicting no such thing in the foreseeable future: he was instead pointing out that the basic structures of presidential systems made them more liable to political destabilization, all things being equal, than parliamentary systems.

I was teaching that essay yesterday to my class on the current crisis of the American legal system, and I was struck by the thought that Trumpland is their world, and has been since they were about 14 years old. “This” is more or less normal to them. And I thought: That is the ultimate disaster — that our political and legal cultures have gotten so degraded that the unspeakable corruption of Donald Trump and everything he touches is just the way things are, because . . . it’s just the way things are now.

There are no conditions to which a man cannot grow accustomed, especially if he sees that everyone around him lives in the same way.

Anna Karenina