The answer, I think, is epitomised in a single book. Written by Ben Wattenberg and Richard M. Scammon in 1970, The Real Majority: An Extraordinary Examination of the American Electorate charted the political centre in the new Nixonian age. Over half a century on, it still offers deep insights for navigating a society in flux, even as it shrewdly leavens its electoral insights with clear and evocative language. Especially with Donald Trump the new American leviathan, moreover, The Real Majority offers another enduring truth — if liberals fail to occupy the heartland of American politics, wily conservatives will rush to get there first.

After their defeat in the 1968 election, Democrats pondered the future. The loudest insurgents were the so-called New Politics liberals, progressive activists who sought to push their party Leftwards. This meant replacing the New Deal coalition, anchored by middle-income voters, with the so-called McGovern coalition: a heady blend of youth voters, African Americans, the poor, and the educated middle class. Activists believed this grouping comprised a majority that could push the country in a more progressive direction.

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Scammon and Wattenberg dismissed these ideas as arithmetically foolish — and therefore politically hopeless. Insatiable data hounds, they made psephology The Real Majority’s foundation. The authors knew all the relevant players across Capitol Hill, yet rejected cocktails with senators for slogs through the electoral weeds. As they put it: “It is voters, not insiders, who elect candidates.”

Not that any of this theorising is hard to unpick. On the contrary, The Real Majority makes its case with literary aplomb. “The great majority of the voters in America are unyoung, unpoor, and unblack,” is how the authors put it: “they are middle-aged, middle-class, and middle-minded.” A generation before algorithms micro-targeted soccer moms, Scammon and Wattenberg macro-targeted America’s archetypal Middle Voter. She wasn’t a peacenik anthropology major, but rather a 47-year-old housewife, married to a machinist in Ohio. Her concerns, not that of the activist class, comprised the real “center of American politics”.

Far more than a postmortem, then, The Real Majority offered Democrats a roadmap back to power, one obliging the party to abandon decades of ideological baggage. Since the Great Depression, after all, its power had rested on the issue of economic prosperity. Yet by the late Sixties, the glory days of the New Deal felt very far away. From violent anti-war protests to Black Power radicalism, the authors argued there was now a new core in American politics, one less focused on unions or wages, and more on social cleavages. In this unfamiliar new era, the duo therefore urged for New Deal activism in economics, but also toughness on these new-fangled cultural pressures. As the duo warned, if they failed to get serious on what they called the “Social Issue” then they could wave their electoral future goodbye.

This is hardly surprising. Through the Sixties, after all, rates of violent crime had doubled or even tripled. And yet like the 2020s, liberals responded by equating law-and-order with racism. In one memorable passage, the authors brilliantly evoked the bleating progressive activist, one depressingly resonant five decades on. “Lady, you’re not really afraid of being mugged; you’re a bigot.” On Vietnam, meanwhile, liberals hemmed and hawed before finally dismissing Americans as imperialists — when what they should have done was take charge and explained how they’d end the war.

These insights, so fresh then and so familiar now, didn’t come from nothing. On the contrary, The Real Majority’s intoxicating blend of clear-eyed policy prescription and psephological analysis can be traced straight back to its authors. For the former, we have Scammon to thank. Born in 1915, to upper-class parents in Minneapolis, the precocious youngster once organised the entire globe into voting precincts. The Second World War interrupted his doctoral work in political science. But soon enough, the young Captain Scammon was devising West Germany’s postwar elections. That prompted a stint in the State Department and a 1961 appointment to head the Census Bureau.

By the late Sixties, Scammon was the nation’s preeminent source on all things statistical: but still needed help translating his deep electoral insights into something more tangible. Enter Joseph Ben Zion Wattenberg. Born in 1933 to East European Jewish immigrants, he came of age in a Bronx hothouse of Leftwing Zionism. A writer and editor, he dabbled in children’s literature and trade journals, and failed in two runs for local office. By 1962, Wattenberg discovered Scammon’s Census Bureau and its decennial Statistical Abstract of the United States. Drawn to this compendium of numerical facts, Wattenberg interviewed and then befriended Scammon.

This partnership would soon spawn The Real Majority, a project aimed at saving liberals from themselves. Scammon’s data allowed them to see beyond the facile McGovern coalition, even as Wattenberg’s vivid penmanship turned mountains of data into a page turner. “To know that the lady in Dayton is afraid to walk the streets alone at night,” he evocatively explained, “to know that that her brother-in-law is a policeman, to know that she does not have the money to move if her new neighborhood deteriorates, to know that she is deeply distressed that her son is going to community junior college where LSD can be found on the campus — to know all this is the beginning of contemporary political wisdom.”

When the book was finally published, in the fall of 1970, it raced up the New York Times bestseller list. A restless political animal, Richard Nixon read pre-publication excerpts of The Real Majority with a mixture of interest and alarm. And no wonder: it was written by Democrats to defeat him, even as aides warned the book offered a “workable blueprint for our defeat”. A lengthy White House memo on the work soon circulated. “Republicans,” it cautioned, “cannot allow the Democrats to get back on the right side of the social issue.” Soon enough, this became official White House strategy for the midterms and beyond.

Nixon, in an act of political jujitsu, used The Real Majority’s blueprint to do the unthinkable: win blue-collar Democrats. Through the Social Issue, he built an enduring Republican majority, making liberals into allies of disorder. To achieve this, Nixon searched his bag of political tricks. After a rally in San Jose, California, the president’s advance team stalled his exit to coincide with the appearance of anti-war protesters. With his enemies moving in, Nixon muttered “this is what they hate to see” and leapt onto the hood of his limo, thrusting both arms upward into his trademark Double-V. The crowd howled obscenities and hurled stones, eggs, and vegetables. Finally, Nixon’s motorcade drove away through a hail of debris. Windows were smashed, aides frightened; but Tricky Dicky got the media images he wanted. The corpulent Donald Trump could only dream of such a stunt.

The San Jose stunt enabled Nixon to pillory his “thousand haters”. Aligning himself with the Dayton housewife, he called for an end to “appeasement” of the “thugs and hoodlums”. Decades later, you can still almost hear the Glendas of America nodding vigorously in agreement. Nor did The Real Majority’s influence end there. William Safire, a Nixon aide and amateur linguist, noticed a change in the national lexicon. “Elitism” and “permissiveness” — long relegated to academic jargon — entered the mainstream. Just as The Real Majority predicted, a backlash against disorder had taken root. This allowed Nixon to paint himself as the moderate defender of what he himself called the “silent majority”.

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It took liberals far longer to grasp these lessons. In November 1972, George McGovern, the star of American progressivism and eponymous hero of that much-vaunted coalition, was thrashed by Nixon. In fact, the result would be the greatest landslide ever won by a Republican presidential nominee, with Nixon securing over 60% of the vote. The South Dakota senator’s antiwar activism, dovetailed with his support for universal basic income, may have thrilled the Left. But McGovern was, in the words of a political ally, the candidate of “acid, amnesty, and abortion”. As one Middle American bluntly told a journalist: “McGovern? He’s for dope.”

And if Democratic failure in the early Seventies soon paved the way for Reagan, The Real Majority is far from a historical artefact. For if our current moment has deep echoes to the late Sixties, the book remains eerily applicable to the age of Trump. Even now, the “great majority” of American voters remain “middle-aged, middle-class, and middle-minded”. That’s clear enough from the election last month: middle-income and middle-aged GenXers broke hard for Trump. To these Americans, inflation and crime outweighed the boutique worries of the activist class.

One enduring lesson of The Real Majority, then, is this: whoever wins the centre wins elections. Here’s another: if Democrats ignore Wattenberg and Scammon, repeating the mistakes of the New Politics and focusing on trans rights and climate catastrophism over bread-and-butter basics, conservatives will continue to dominate the national conversation. Even then, progressives aren’t sure to absorb the book’s wisdom. As Wattenberg once cracked, The Real Majority alienated “most every liberal in America — except those it converted”. Yet the facts are stubborn, whatever the year.

At last, Nixon said, the war was over. At a cost of 58,000 American lives and some $140 billion, not to mention more than two million Vietnamese lives, the curtain was falling. The last US troops would be brought home. South Vietnam had won the right to determine its own future, while the Communist North had pledged to “build a peace of reconciliation”. Despite the high price, Nixon insisted Americans could be proud of “one of the most selfless enterprises in the history of nations”. He had not started the war, but it had dominated his presidency, earning him the undying enmity of those who thought the United States should just get out. But the struggle had been worth it to secure “the right kind of peace, so that those who died and those who suffered would not have died and suffered in vain”. He called it “peace with honour”.

Fifty years on, Nixon’s proclamation of peace with honour has a bitterly ironic ring. As we now know, much of what he said that night was misleading, disingenuous or simply untrue. South Vietnam was in no state to defend itself, and collapsed just two years later. The North Vietnamese had no intention of laying down their weapons, and resumed the offensive within weeks. And Nixon and Kissinger never seriously thought they had secured a lasting peace. They knew the Communists would carry on fighting, and fully intended to intervene with massive aerial power when they did. But then came Watergate. With Nixon crippled, Congress forbade further intervention and slashed funding to the government in Saigon. On 30 April 1975, North Vietnamese tanks crashed through the gates of the presidential palace, and it really was all over.

Half a century later, have the scars of Vietnam really healed? It remains not only America’s longest war but one of its most divisive, comparable only with the Civil War in its incendiary cultural and political impact. The fundamental narrative trajectory of the late Sixties — the turn from shiny space-age Technicolor optimism to strident, embittered, anti-technological gloom — would have been incomprehensible without the daily images of suffering and slaughter on the early evening news. It was Vietnam that destroyed trust in government, in institutions, in order and authority. In 1964, before Lyndon Johnson sent in combat troops after the Gulf of Tonkin incident, fully three-quarters of Americans trusted the federal government. By 1976, a year after the fall of Saigon, not even one in four did so.

It was in the crucible of Vietnam, too, that you can spot many of the tensions that now define American politics. Perhaps the most potent example came in May 1970, after Nixon invaded nominally neutral Cambodia to eliminate the North Vietnamese Army’s jungle sanctuaries. First, on 4 May, four students were shot and killed by the National Guard during a demonstration at Kent State University, Ohio. Then, on 8 May, hundreds more students picketed outside the New York Stock Exchange, only to be attacked by several hundred building workers waving American flags.

The “hard hat riot”, as it became known, was the perfect embodiment of patriotic populist outrage at what Nixon’s vice president, leading bribery enthusiast Spiro Agnew, called “the nattering nabobs of negativism…an effete corps of impudent snobs who characterise themselves as intellectuals”. Today it seems almost predictable, just another episode in the long-running culture wars. But at the time it seemed genuinely shocking. And with his brilliantly ruthless eye for a tactical advantage, Nixon saw its potential. When he invited the construction workers’ leaders to the White House two weeks later, he knew exactly what was doing. “The hard hat will stand as a symbol, along with our great flag,” he said, “for freedom and patriotism and our beloved country”.

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Even now, many Americans prefer to forget how the war ended. Yet even in that story, there are any number of hints of what was to come. Take what happened to the South Vietnamese — more than a million in total — who fled to the United States in the aftermath of defeat. At first, many were housed in air bases and army barracks. But polls showed that most of their new neighbours resented them and wanted them gone. In the inaptly named town of Niceville, Florida, where more than a thousand Vietnamese refugees were quarantined at Eglin Air Force Base, eight out of ten people said they wanted them out. “Gooks Go Home” read placards in Arkansas. “They can’t speak English,” said one Los Angeles carpenter, “and they will be on welfare before they get off the airplane. And who pays for that? We do.”

Perhaps it’s easy to understand why so many people resented the new arrivals. Times were hard, the American economy was in recession, and unlike previous waves of refugees, the South Vietnamese were symbols of defeat, reminders of a uniquely humiliating, agonising chapter in the nation’s recent history. Even on the Left, there was remarkably little sympathy for them.

Unbelievable as it may seem today, the bloody collapse of South Vietnam — which saw thousands of former American allies executed or imprisoned for years in Communist concentration camps — provoked an outpouring of joy among elements of the old peace movement. On 11 May 1975, not two weeks after Saigon’s fall, some 50,000 people gathered to celebrate in Central Park, for what one reporter called “a joyous all-day carnival of songs and speeches in the perfect sunshine”. Two Democratic congresswomen, Elizabeth Holtzman of Brooklyn and Bella Abzug of Manhattan, delivered rousing speeches, and there were songs from Pete Seeger, Joan Baez, Paul Simon and other veterans of the good old days. “There’s a lot of lumps in a lot of throats,” one onlooker told reporters. “It’s unbelievable. Today is the first day I really realise the war is over.” You would scarcely have believed that the Americans had lost. Or perhaps you would.

For most Americans, however, the overwhelming emotions were humiliation, sadness, and guilt. “I thought that we did a really miserable job for those people,” said Thomas Polgar, the CIA chief in Saigon, “and they would have been much better off if we had never gone there in the first place.” Indeed, some decided not only that American intervention in Vietnam had been a mistake, but that all interventions abroad must be illegitimate or misguided. American isolationism has a long history, but never has it enjoyed a bigger boost than it did in the early Seventies.

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Around the world, too, America’s image had taken a horrendous battering. Asked for their reactions to the defeat in Vietnam, the British historian Jack Plumb mourned “the diminution of America to human size”, the Dutch critic Rob Kroes thought the United States was “losing its magnetism”, and the French sociologist Michel Crozier declared that America was no longer “a touchstone for other societies”. And for perhaps the first time, even instinctively pro-American commentators began to wonder — as they still do today — whether the nations of Europe should prepare for life without the shield of their most powerful ally. “For 20 years we have enjoyed a golden age of security under the American umbrella,” said the Daily Mail. “Now we must start learning to take care of ourselves.” That was almost half a century ago. What’s changed?

The irony, of course, is that the war really had been all for nothing. Henry Kissinger always insisted that the struggle had been essential to stop the advance of Communism in south-east Asia. But the domino theory turned out to be nonsense. Vietnam and Cambodia both fell to Communism, but instead of the dominoes tumbling in rapid sequence, they promptly started fighting one another. Then the Chinese got stuck in, too. Today Vietnam is still ruled by the autocratic Communist Party; yet it’s also a rapidly growing globalised economy with high inequality, high corruption and an unhealthy dependence on Western tourism.

As for the United States, it takes more than 50 years for such a traumatic defeat to fade. The deepest scars, naturally, belong to those who suffered most. “I came home from the war with the curious feeling that I had grown older than my father, who was then 51,” writes Philip Caputo in the preface to his memoir A Rumor of War. “A man saw the heights and depths of human behaviour in Vietnam, all manner of violence and horrors so grotesque that they evoked more fascination than disgust. Once I had seen pigs eating napalm-charred corpses — a memorable sight, pigs eating roast people.”

But there’s a case, too, that the shock of defeat fundamentally distorted American politics. It’s a misconception that the “Vietnam syndrome” made the United States less likely to embark on foreign crusades. The truth is surely quite the reverse: successive presidents were desperate to wipe away the stain. Would Ronald Reagan have sent US troops into the sideshow of Grenada in 1983, had it not been for his eagerness to show that he could succeed where John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson and Nixon had failed? Would George Bush senior have gone into Panama? Would the younger Bush have been quite so quick to assert his nation’s virility in Afghanistan and Iraq, had he not spent his college years during the height of the Vietnam War, when every night brought new footage of America’s travails in the jungle? Perhaps the answer in each case is still yes, because intervention is an inevitable consequence of wealth and power. But it’s surely worth asking the questions.

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Even the most recent presidents have been haunted by Vietnam. Barack Obama once called the treatment of Vietnam veterans “a mistake that must never be repeated”, and it’s pretty obvious that he was talking about the wider war, too. Indeed, his foreign policy mantra — “Don’t do stupid shit” — could hardly be a better encapsulation of the post-Vietnam mindset, which explains his reluctance to get involved in Syria. Joe Biden, too, is a post-Vietnam politician: one of his first major votes as a young senator in 1975, for example was to cut off funding to South Vietnam just days before the fall of Saigon.

But there is, of course, an exception — a recent American president who didn’t serve in Vietnam because he avoided the draft five times, and never really wrestled with its moral and strategic dilemmas because he always knew it was a terrible idea. He never really understood why other young men bothered going, he once said. “What did they get out of it?” And perhaps Donald Trump can be forgiven for not taking Vietnam seriously, because he had bigger things to worry about. He never felt guilty about ducking the war, he told Howard Stern, because “we have our own Vietnam — it’s called the dating game”. Dating was genuinely perilous, he explained, because of the risk of sexually transmitted diseases. Indeed, women’s vaginas were “potential landmines…there’s some real danger there”.

Some people might consider this a remarkable analogy. But the 45th President felt blessed to have come through unscathed. “It’s amazing, I can’t even believe it,” he mused. “I’ve been so lucky… It is my personal Vietnam. I feel like a great and very brave soldier.”

You’ll never think of Apocalypse Now in the same way again.

Perhaps Scott Fitzgerald’s most famous apopthegm is his brisk declaration that “there is no second act in American lives”. It’s a brilliant line, but if we take it at face value (and assume he’s talking about a two-act rather than a three- or five-act play) it’s not only off-beam; it ignores that the second acts of American lives are in most cases more fascinating than the first ones.  

This is a physical image of Trump’s ego: it was inflated and distended by his tenure as one of the most important men in the world, but it was punctured by the 2020 election. His importance wheezed out of him and continues to do so, and the great vast balloon of his ego now hangs deflated in folds and swags. What is he to do with all that baggy drapery?

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The thing that I suspect will have pierced him is that the initial, rancorous version was greeted not with outrage and front-page coverage so much as the odd wry little smirk. “Jesus couldn’t have said it any better,” was the response of a writer for the New York Times. The libs are no longer triggered, still less owned. Trump is in the process of sliding gently from the news pages back to the diary columns or the “And finally…” section. 

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A series of ballots were held in states across the country on this issue — and the results demonstrate that the disastrous War on Drugs, launched half a century ago by a crooked Republican president and adopted enthusiastically across the planet, is rapidly coming to an end in the US. The most dramatic advances were in a pair of staunchly Democrat states, yet even in some of the most conservative corners of the country such as Mississippi, Montana and South Dakota voters strongly backed measures to liberalise drug laws, even as they supported another term of Trump.

In every state where a proposed drug reform was on the ballot — there were six plus DC — it won. British politicians, so scared of electoral and media backlash on this issue, should note how far and how fast the American electorate has moved in the wake of the terrible opioid epidemic that struck the country so hard. A poll last week found cannabis legalisation is now backed by 68% of Americans — a figure that has more than doubled in two decades to its highest level yet, with almost half of Republicans supporting the idea. “Voters kept on being told that legalisation would unleash chaos but they can see that has not happened so now things are shifting further,” said one Democrat drug reform advocate.

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Most striking was the passing of Measure 110 in Oregon. This western state was the first to decriminalise cannabis possession in 1973, just two years after Richard Nixon declared drugs “public enemy number one”, as his way of uniting Middle America against both African Americans demanding civil rights and hippies leading the anti-war movement. Now it has decriminalised possession for personal use of all drugs, while diverting funds from marijuana taxes into cash-starved harm reduction and treatment projects. People caught in possession of, say, heroin will be told to pay a $100 fine — but it is waived if they agree to enter recovery services.

Oregon’s bold move is “arguably the biggest blow to the war on drugs to date”, said Kassandra Frederique, executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance, which pushed the idea. The reason is simple: the American state, like others struggling with high rates of addiction, has seen that trying to defeat the drug industry by locking up users is a failure that backfires on society. Almost one in eight people in Oregon admits to use of illicit substances over the past month. This results in about two deaths each day and more than 10 people convicted daily on drug charges. So they have chosen to follow Portugal’s successful stance, which was, in 2001, to decriminalise drugs and invest in public health efforts to fight addiction. The number of heroin users and drug-related deaths there has plummeted.

Meanwhile, Washington DC followed four other liberal cities in three states by agreeing to decriminalise therapeutic use of psychedelic drugs. The initiative to sanction the use of ayahuasca, magic mushrooms and mescaline was supported by more than three-quarters of voters, following on from the furious national debate that has broken out over policing and a milder one over use of such drugs for treating mental health problems. The push came from Melissa Lavasani, a mother of two and city government official whose depression was cured by microdosing. “What are the moms at school going to say about this?” was her first thought at the idea of publicity. Now we can see their answer: what a sensible idea.

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Then there is cannabis. Four more states — Arizona, Montana, New Jersey and South Dakota — voted last week to legalise and regulate recreational adult markets for the drug. This means more than a third of Americans now live in one of the 15 states where adult citizens can buy, grow or consume cannabis without fear of the law. Mississippi, one of the deepest red states in the US, ignored its Republican governor’s warning about “stoners” and “pot shops everywhere”, to endorse medical cannabis, becoming the 38th state to sanction such use. Politicians who make such pronouncements seem like dinosaurs even in US conservative circles, given that some of the most die-hard Trump supporters such as Florida’s Republican congressman Matt Gaetz enthusiastically push reform.

As I have seen for myself covering this story, the rules on medical cannabis vary hugely from state to state. In some it is de facto decriminalisation and many ‘patients’ seem suspiciously young, while in other places, such as New York, there is strong focus on health. One of the biggest firms in the market is Columbia Care, which was co-founded by former London police officer Michael Abbott and is now a listed company worth almost $1bn. “We know politicians are trailing behind the voters,” said Adam Goers, the firm’s vice president for corporate affairs. “Reform is being driven by Republican mums whose kids have epilepsy in places such as Texas, Georgia and Virginia, not just hippies and social justice advocates.”

Yet last week’s ballots in Oregon and Washington show how the US drug debate is moving beyond cannabis into tougher terrain, with questions as to the best way for society to live with drugs, while curbing their potential for serious harm. It seems clear that punitive prohibition is both pointless and highly damaging. It fails to stop the flow, while fuelling the deaths, the destruction of families, the despoliation of communities and the dreadful violence of gangs fighting to control the lucrative trade bequeathed by Nixon. Never forget that Trump rose to power with the support of scores of small towns left battered by economic change and then shattered by an opioid epidemic causing more carnage among Americans than the Vietnam War at its peak.

Britain is now being left behind as the US joins more progressive nations in shifting from punishment towards harm reduction, although parts of our own nation have higher drug-related death rates. Most of our blinkered politicians seem impervious to the rising tide of these deaths of despair, which disproportionately hit the most deprived communities they claim to care about in their hollow speeches. They avert their gaze from Europe’s worst fatality rates, leaving any progress reliant on police chiefs infuriated over the squandering of their resources and ordinary citizens pushed to the limit. People such as Charlotte Caldwell, the battling mother of a boy with life-threatening epilepsy who forced the theoretical legalisation of medical cannabis, and Peter Krykant, a Glasgow outreach worker who defiantly set up a mobile drug-consumption unit after the government thwarted official plans.

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But just as in Britain — where five police forces tired of fighting an unwinnable war have stopped arresting users in favour of diversion into treatment — the legacy of haphazard liberalisation led by states in response to local initiatives is a legislative mess. Firms such as Columbia and scores like them can list on Canada’s stock exchange but not move products across state borders, and struggle to secure banking and insurance with prohibition at federal level. There are high street cannabis shops and clinics in some states — and in one state, all drugs are decriminalised — but in others, thousands of people are still being arrested. There are also people stuck for life behind bars without hope of parole having been caught with small amounts of cannabis after previous convictions.

This is an issue, like gay marriage, that shows how fast attitudes in society can shift. Joe Biden, the President-elect, is an old-school drug warrior who seems to have repented while his younger running mate Kamala Harris comes from California and clearly understands the emerging agenda. Decriminalisation is now endorsed by 31 United Nations agencies as well as many medical leaders in Britain. Yet how much better to have such important public health reforms led by politicians guiding policy in tandem with experts, as seen in countries such as Canada, Luxembourg and Uruguay, rather than a random process driven by families and activists, some of whom are industry-funded. There is always a danger that any political void will be filled by self-serving commercial interests.

Attempts to try to stop the supply and use of drugs are absurdly ineffective. Just look at the falling prices, rising potency, new synthetic products being created and the hideous number of overdose deaths. Stuffing people who use drugs in prison is cruel and destructive, especially if they are suffering from mental health problems. Given the shocking racial disparities in drug convictions, these issues are entwined closely with the explosive race debate. It is significant that one other US area where there is consensus across tribal divides is the allied issue of prison reform. But at least the US is moving towards more progressive policies on drugs. Slowly but surely, it is ending its long war while Britain fights on with self-harming futility.

In a follow-up piece, And Then the Breitbart Lynch Mob Came for Me, Brooks detailed the torrent of abuse that came her way after the piece was published. The alt-right had responded to her suggestions with howls of indignation, culminating in a death threat: ‘I AM GOING TO CUT YOUR HEAD OFF … BITCH!’

Four years later, and President Trump is refusing to commit to a peaceful transfer of power, is referring to mail-in ballots as a “big scam”, and declaring he wasn’t sure that the election could be “honest”. Shortly after his release from the Walter Reed Medical Center, Trump shows no signs of softening. He reiterated his contempt for the American electoral system in a frenzied tweet-storm:

Ari, THE MEDIA IS CORRUPT, JUST LIKE OUR DEMOCRAT RUN BALLOT SYSTEM IS CORRUPT! Look at what’s happening with Fake, Missing and Fraudulent Ballots all over the Country??? VOTE https://t.co/PaFBuskB19

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 7, 2020

Along with his recently expressed desire to invoke the 1807 Insurrection Act to send troops onto American streets during the protests which followed the killing of George Floyd, the President has spurred speculation that he might seek to use the US military to prolong his time in office. New York Times Columnist, Thomas Friedman, described Trump’s statements as “a six-alarm fire”, saying “I think it’s DEFCON 5;” and Timothy Snyder, author of On Tyranny, warned that Trump, protected from ongoing criminal investigations only so long as he is in power, is unashamedly putting the nation on notice that he is planning a coup d’état.

Leading Republicans have promised an “orderly transition” which has reportedly been insufficient to relieve deep anxieties shared by senior military and Defense Department officials that they may be given unlawful orders if deployed during protests after the vote. In public, officials have insisted that the US military will not play a role settling election disputes — but debate is said to be intensifying in private about its role should there be civil unrest.

And now, a group of lawyers is officially offering advice to worried military and National Guard members. In the US, the law requires service members not to obey “flagrantly unlawful” orders but those who refuse to obey orders take considerable risks as, under military law, disobeying an order is itself a criminal offence. The Orders Project, founded in response to the militarised use of force against protestors this summer, has compiled a legal sourcebook for military personnel as a guide to what a soldier’s legal position might be in situations where loyalties conflict.

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So, it turns out that Brooks anticipating that the military might refuse “to obey certain orders” wasn’t such an incendiary fantasy after all.

In fact, exactly this scenario — in which a president’s closest aides and military chiefs deliberately ignore or subvert orders from their Commander in Chief — has already played out in American history, under Richard Nixon. Such were his aggressive and impulsive outbursts that military and defence officials feared he might upset the fragile geopolitical order of the late 1960s/early 1970s. “If the President had his way,” Nixon’s National Security Adviser, Henry Kissinger, quipped on several occasions, “there would be a nuclear war each week.”

According to several members of Nixon’s inner circle, many of whom I met during the making of the documentary, The Secret World of Richard Nixon, there were a number of episodes in which the President’s staff thought it better to ignore his orders or to come up with explanations of why they couldn’t be carried out.

On 29 August 1969, for instance, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) hijacked a US passenger plane en route from Rome to Tel Aviv and forced it to land at Damascus International Airport. Nixon spent that evening with his friend Charles ‘Bebe’ Rebozo, a Florida businessman who also served as his personal financial adviser. At 3am, according to Leonard Garment, Nixon’s Special Assistant from 1969 to 1973, the President called Kissinger, and said: “Henry, I want you to set in motion plans for the bombing of Damascus. This is an order. This is not something for discussion.”

Kissinger told the President that he would do as he asked, but in fact did nothing. Syria, then as now, was a Russian ally, and such a move would have been highly confrontational, potentially sparking a larger conflict between the superpowers. Kissinger interpreted Nixon’s order as, in his words, “posturing for the people he was with that evening” and decided to take the matter into his own hands. No bombs were dropped on Damascus.

A year later, in the middle of September 1970, terrorists from the same organisation hijacked several aeroplanes and forced them to land in the Jordanian desert. Nixon again responded by ordering bombing raids on PFLP positions in Jordan, which this time would have provoked both Syria and Iraq, the PFLP’s Russian-backed sponsors, and complicated Jordan’s position as a US ally.

After consultation with Kissinger, Nixon’s then Secretary of Defense, Melvin Laird, told the President that cloud cover made such a raid impossible. ‘Conveniently,’ Laird said later, ‘there was bad weather.’ (Jordan’s deserts in summer aren’t known for their heavy rainfall.) ‘I’ve always tried to carry out the orders of the Commander in Chief’ said Laird, ‘but on some occasions it was better to protect him.’

Towards the end of Nixon’s presidency, as Watergate took its toll on his mental equilibrium, some of his staff went further.

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The Republican Party's descent into darkness

By Ian birrell

In the spring of 1974, Joseph Laitin, a public affairs officer at the Bureau of the Budget, was walking up a stairway in the West Wing of the White House when someone ran down the other way, bowled into him, and took off with a number of other men in pursuit. ‘My God,’ Laitin thought. ‘That was the President of the United States running away from six Secret Service agents.’ The look in Nixon’s eye, he said later, ‘was one of desperation. And that bothered me.’

James Schlesinger, then Secretary of Defense, felt similarly. He was concerned about Nixon’s access to the nuclear codes. At a meeting of the Joint Chiefs attended by Laitin, the chairman General George S. Brown the told the gathered company that Defense Secretary Schlesinger ‘wanted an agreement from the Joint Chiefs that nobody would take any action, or execute orders on the use of nuclear weapons, without all of them agreeing to it.’ According to Laitin, ‘they were shocked, but they all agreed.’

Schlesinger was also concerned about the possibility of the President trying to sidestep impeachment by surrounding the White House with troops loyal to the presidency – in the same way that Pentagon officials are now worried about Trump potentially refusing to leave the White House and ordering troops onto the streets to quell any civil unrest should he contest the election result.

Fearing the ‘bloody mess’ that might ensue if two sets of US troops found themselves facing each other outside the White House, Schlesinger issued another unorthodox order. “I told the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,” he disclosed in an interview 26 years after the event, “that every order that would come from the White House had to come to me, directly, immediately upon receipt. There were not to be any extraordinary military measures that would be taken at anyone’s behest.”

A former head of the CIA, Schlesinger was not a liberal by any definition. Reportedly, his first words on taking office there were: “I’m here to make sure you don’t screw Richard Nixon.” By the spring of 1974, however, he believed that the President was no longer capable of controlling his emotions. Some – such as Nixon’s press secretary, Ronald Ziegler – maintained that it was inappropriate for Schlesinger to issue such orders. But Schlesinger, who died in 2014, remained adamant that he had done the right thing. “The President was the duly elected man in office,” he explained, “and it is not the responsibility of his cabinet officers to question whether or not he is balanced – save when there is clear evidence that he is no longer capable of the job.”

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Interviewing members of the Nixon Administration about this period, a picture emerged of individuals constantly improvising in the untidy grey area of conflicting loyalties to the Constitution and Commander-in-Chief. Their responses altered from day to day with Nixon’s changing mental condition as well as rapidly evolving political events.

In the end, facing the near-certainty of impeachment, Nixon resigned peacefully on the 8^th of August 1974. No ‘extraordinary military measures’ were taken. Ultimately politics and personality decided the day. Evidence of Nixon’s complicity in the cover up surrounding the Watergate burglary had eroded his remaining political support and, in the face of overwhelming opposition, his rage and paranoia gave way to defeat. These factors and the presence of certain key individuals around him ensured that the system was respected.

Of course Trump is not Nixon. And, although Trump’s political support may wane should he lose the election, his grandiose narcissism may elicit a different response, as might the guidance of those around him. In an interview last month, former political consultant to the Trump campaign and convicted felon, Roger Stone, told InfoWars’s Alex Jones that Trump should impose ‘martial law’ in the event of ‘election fraud’. And in June, when Trump decided to put on a show of strength and give a speech outside a church that had been damaged during protests close to the White House in D.C.’s Lafayette Square, the military provided assistance – armed members of the National Guard were present while military helicopters circled above. And, as he walked across the square, the president was flanked by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Milley, wearing military fatigues, and Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper.

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Both Milley and Esper faced a barrage of criticism for taking part in the event. Milley publicly apologised. “I should not have been there,” he said in a video address soon afterwards. Esper also broke with the president, saying that active duty troops should not be sent to control protests. “I don’t support invoking the Insurrection Act” he told reporters gathered at the Pentagon.

If Trump fails to agree to a peaceful transfer or questions the election result, it will be another ‘stress-test’ for a political system, which has already been pushed to new extremes under this presidency. For now, at least, the military has made its position clear, stating that it will play no role in the transition of power after the election. In his closing remarks during a virtual town hall at the end of September, General Milley encouraged US troops to remain neutral: “Stay apolitical,” he said “and keep the Constitution close to your heart.”

Milley’s words contained an echo of President Gerald Ford’s speech given at his swearing-in ceremony after Nixon’s resignation. “My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over,” said Ford. “Our Constitution works. Our great Republic is a government of laws and not of men. Here the people rule.”

Let’s hope that, whatever the result, the same is true after November.