Even Richard Nixon “would be horrified”

John Dean on the 50th anniversary of the Nixon resignation

Fifty years ago today, Richard M. Nixon resigned the presidency. 

There’s a clear contrast in how our democracy responded to that period of crisis — a tumultuous but ultimately transformative moment that brought down a popular president and led to the bipartisan post-Watergate reforms — compared to this current one. Now, a former president was removed from power by the voters, sought to overturn a free and fair election, and now runs unencumbered for a second term. 

That half-century is a lot of history to grapple with. (Who would have thought that Watergate would come to feel like the good-old-days?) 

So we called on one of our advisors — John Dean (yes that John Dean) — to help explain the last half century of constraints on presidential power. Some of what he had to say took us by surprise.

John, tell us: What would Richard Nixon think about the U.S. in 2024? 

Politically, I think he would be horrified. 

Richard Nixon was an establishmentarian. He believed in America’s institutions. He didn't think the institutions of our nation were perfect, but he certainly thought they worked, and that the system was well designed. He was interested in constantly adjusting things. He thought that the presidency wasn’t as strong as it should be. 

One of the things that didn’t happen because of his resignation was a reorganization of the executive branch which would have considerably strengthened presidential powers. But he understood, as someone who started in the House of Representatives and had been in the U.S. Senate, that the peoples’ Congress certainly had a place in the system. 

I think he would be horrified today by the refusal to honor the norms of government. Not every part of our democracy is in a statute or in the Constitution. For example, Trump’s refusal to transfer power peacefully, to attend his successor's inauguration, and his effort to overturn the election even before the inauguration is well beyond anything Nixon would have attempted or tolerated.

Also, Nixon would have been absolutely shocked that a Supreme Court would create an immunity from criminal conduct for the president of the United States, particularly outside the area of national security. Nixon believed had he not been pardoned — and there is no evidence he requested Ford do so, and he didn’t know a pardon was coming — so Nixon joked about going to jail. He said Gandhi did some of his best writing in prison. He thought that would be his fate. 

I remember when I first told him about obstruction of justice — until Watergate almost no one had ever heard of obstruction of justice unless they were a federal prosecutor. When I explained the obstruction statue to him, he had no idea of obstruction of justice. He asked, “What all could be included?” I said, “As broad as the imagination of man.” And it is. That surprised him. 

I suspect Nixon would have reacted to the Supreme Court’s presidential immunity decision with the total disbelief that all of us share — for it is nowhere to be found in history, nowhere to be found in the Constitution, nowhere in any kind of precedent.

How did the post-Watergate efforts to constrain the president collapse like this?

It didn’t happen all at once. It began as the conservative movement moved from Burkean conservatism to the growing radicalism of the Tea Party and then the Freedom Caucus that became even more radical. Conservatism evolved to have less and less respect for the rules. Either because they didn’t know them or didn't care to understand them. 

Nixon’s conduct for a long time was the standard of unacceptable behavior for a president — so-called Nixonian conduct. What the U.S. Supreme Court all but said in the immunity ruling is that Nixonian conduct is acceptable now, or what Nixon told British journalist David Frost when talking about national security: “When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.” 

But the High Court did not limit it to national security.

How did it get there? I first started noticing it when I did a book called, Worse than Watergate, published in 2004. President Bush and Vice President Cheney had embraced a level of secrecy way beyond Nixon’s secrecy. And what sealed Worse than Watergate title for me was when they authorized the use of torture. Nixon served in the Navy in WWII, in the South Pacific; I’m sure he was aware of torture being employed against Americans and I cannot imagine Nixon even on his darkest day saying that’s OK. 

The constraints on the presidency have changed because of authoritarianism. In the Nixon White House, I had all of the colleagues who would click their heels and salute and go do whatever they were asked to do. If someone said to me go break into the Brookings Institution by firebombing the place and then send in thieves, I would have said, “You’re f*#king nuts.” And when I learned they were planning to do just that, I put a stop to it. 

In 2007, I wrote a book about authoritarianism titled, “Conservatives Without Conscience.” There I explained how these people think and operate. Trump gave these people permission to come out from under the rock. It is authoritarianism that wants the president to be a king — more bluntly: a dictator.

What do we need to do to reverse this trend towards unaccountable presidential power? 

Well it’s quite clear. I’m a little disappointed that social scientists who study authoritarianism are not speaking out more boldly. There are hundreds of scholars who study this subject, but they are largely silent. I suspect it is because they are concerned about retribution; that if they write about Trump they will be attacked by Trump or by his followers. 

How do we deal with authoritarians? All populations have a significant number of authoritarians. In the past we have voted to keep them out of power. So the answer is to vote them out of power and make their behavior unacceptable for democracy; they must go back under their rocks. That has become increasingly difficult because the Republican Party is becoming — very openly — an authoritarian party. But there are more non-authoritarians who must take control. 

To say the obvious: We are immensely grateful for John’s insights. And for all that he has done to shine a light on threats to our democracy. (In many ways, he set the standard for White House staff putting country before party, a through line that continues all the way to former Trump staffers testifying before the January 6th Select Committee.)

A lot of what he talks about — fear of retribution in the face of eroding norms — it is all explained by one simple term… 

“Anticipatory obedience.”

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“Anticipatory obedience” explains how authoritarians win

Coined by Timothy Snyder, the historian of Central and Eastern European history and author of the highly-influential On Tyranny, anticipatory obedience is pretty simple: it’s the tendency to respond to the prospect of authoritarian abuses by avoiding anything that might provoke retribution. To obey in advance. 

(Look around, you’ve probably spotted media and business leaders in this country flirting with obeying in advance — or at least hedging their bets.)

The thing is, this instinct — human as it is — is a key part of how autocrats take over. They create an aura of power and inevitability that convinces powerful actors in the media, civil society, and the private sector that they can’t be stopped. And that it’s best to acquiesce before they are targeted. Which, in turn, makes it more likely that the checks on power will fail. 

That way the authoritarian doesn’t actually need broad-based support to gain power. Instead, they effectively divide and conquer. 

In a new piece, Shanna Singh Hughey explores how we can all overcome the instinct to obey in advance: Reversing the vicious cycle of “anticipatory obedience.

When targets of autocratic attacks fight back — and when a broad coalition of civil society has their backs — other potential targets are less likely to engage in anticipatory obedience by taking themselves off the field. Then, in turn, the institutions of democracy are better able to function as checks on abuses of power and disrupt the autocrat’s consolidation of power.

In other words, it’s a common defense principle. Like NATO’s Article V, when the majority who isn’t targeted stands up for the minority who is, the aggressor backs off quickly. 

That’s how the vicious cycle of anticipatory obedience is reversed. 

Shanna details a perfect case study of how this can work: El Paso’s Annunciation House, a Catholic charity that’s been aggressively targeted by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton in a possible precursor of some of the civil society crackdowns we could expect nationally: 

Paxton has made it his mission to shut down Annunciation House, a migrant shelter in El Paso. In February, he sent a team of lawyers to Annunciation House — to literally knock on its doors. He purported to give its staff one day to turn over records dating back half a century and demanded that it identify individual residents, including names, dates of birth, medical information, and the identity of the residents' family members. When Annunciation House refused and asked a state court to intervene to block the subpoena (with the the help of Texas RioGrande Legal Aid), Paxton countersued to have the shelter shut down altogether. He referred to the shelter as a “stash house” that was engaged in “human smuggling.” Paxton’s aggressive rhetoric and abusive tactics prompted the Pope himself to weigh in, calling the investigation “sheer madness.”

In addition to the Pope, more than 430 faith-based organizations and individuals, along with a broad swath of El Paso community leaders, expressed solidarity with Annunciation House and decried the attempted criminalization of their faith-based work. 

Then during an initial hearing in March, a state court judge described the attorney general’s demands as “unprofessional” and made with “ulterior political motive.” 

And on July 1st, the court issued a pair of rulings denying Paxton’s requests for an injunction and penalties and granting summary judgment in favor of Annunciation House. 

It’s a heartening story. Read the whole thing here. 

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What else we’re tracking: 

• The Texas “Trump Train” case is now headed to trial after the court denied the defendant’s motion to end the case. Our plaintiffs, Biden-Harris campaign supporters aboard a campaign bus that was ambushed by a self-described “Trump Train” on a Texas Highway in the lead up to the 2020 election, will now get their day in court to make their voices heard. Read more here.

• An excellent new paper from Lee Drutman and Rob Oldham on what Congress would look like with more than two parties: Governing the House with Multiple Parties.

• Expect lots of talk about the proper and improper roles of the National Guard (especially now that one of the VP nominees is a retired guardsman). Edison Forman and Rebecca Lullo explain how “deciding whether to deploy the National Guard on U.S. soil presents unique considerations that policymakers should always weigh judiciously, especially in an election year.”

• Trump’s January 6th prosecution now goes back to the trial court. Jesse Wegman explains how Judge Tanya Chutkan has to ”clean up the mess” created by the immunity ruling. 

• An interesting report from our friends at More in Common: “How France beat back the threat of the authoritarian far-right (for now) and what the US can learn from a crisis averted.” 

• I appreciated this article in The Bulwark on “What People Still Don’t Understand About JD Vance’s Misogyny” on service, who deserves a vote and a voice, and the “deeply rooted cynicism about why people vote.”

• So much for the “demise” of Project 2025. AP reports that Russ Vought, one of the key architects of the 900-page plan — plus Trump’s former OMB director and possible future chief of staff — is in charge of “a so-far secret ‘180-Day Transition Playbook’ to speed the plan’s implementation to avoid a repeat of the chaotic start that dogged Trump’s first term.”

• “How our democracy survives the 2024 election” - Emily Rodriguez and Jessica Marsden explain how our election system is “arguably more prepared than it has been for any presidential election ever.”