But such errors need not be committed. We can examine the connections between Watergate and the rest of Nixonism. We can plot out the effects of Nixon's presidency on U.S. political development. If we do so, a pattern emerges.

Watergate indicates the debut of a new stage in the relation between capital and the State, between the U.S. and other countries, and between branches of the government. Nixon's setbacks represent not a "triumph of the system," but the persistence of New Deal ideology and legal norms in the post-New Deal United States.

Optimists may hope that fascism can be averted by impeaching the offending president now. But Nixon, for all his crimes--including 1 million deaths and inestimable destruction--will not be impeached, probably not even censured. If only Nixon's departure will save the U.S. from fascism, American political democracy is already doomed.

II

THE MOST SUCCESSFUL U.S. presidents share two complementary traits: an unswerving committment to overall goals--to U.S. economic growth, in particular--and a general willingness to experiment with almost any means to attain their ends.

For example, Franklin Roosevelt is remembered as a liberal reformer. But the consequences of his programs were unquestionably conservative. Resorting first to welfare programs and industrial self-regulation, then to government regulation and finally to war, Roosevelt tried everything short of socialism to preserve U.S. capitalism intact. His rhetoric, meanwhile, labeled him the common man's champion.

Roosevelt's was a particularly instructive case for "crisis presidents."

His example reveals the conditions behind major political crises and illustrates the measures that a crisis president must take.

For the last two centuries, the U.S. has faced a major shift in economic organization about every 36 years. These result from shifts in the regional concentration of economic power, in the leading sectors of economic growth, or in the forms of business organization most profitable in major industries or agriculture.

In several cases, these have been accompanied by shifts in the composition of economic elites. New groups of businessmen and politicians have risen to the top. At other turning points, the same people retained control of the economy but entered new kinds of profit-making activity.

Periodically, these economic reorganizations-which were necessary to advance the interests of either new elites or the "leading sectors"--radically altered the relationship between individuals or certain social groups and the economic system. The new elites naturally worked to restructure or gain control of political and cultural institutions. Part of the task of redirecting society must always be generating changes in laws and popular values compatible with the ruling class's new economic activities.

But not all structural changes occur smoothly. Growing out of changes in, and reshaping both social structure and technology, the process itself occasionally leads to squabbling among elites and, even more dangerously, to economic depressions.

The Depression of the thirties posed the gravest American economic and political crisis since the Civil War. It threatened not only the corporate giants which had grown since the end of World War I--the future of all capitalism, including its political and cultural institutions, looked dismal.

Roosevelt faced the three conditions which create a crisis presidency:

* The economy's sectors were in drastic economic trouble, requiring a redefinition of business's relation to government.