26 / CHRONICLESnobserves in the Iliad, “The fool only believes what hasnhappened.”nIn the first effort to topple an American President, thenaverage man seemed right: It failed. But the impeachmentnof Andrew Johnson failed by only one vote; the Presidentnwon only the right to dismiss those whom he appointed,nwithout asking the permission of the Senate. Had he lostnthat right, the presidency would have been immeasurablynweakened in 1867, and the Abolitionist Congress wouldnhave pressed for larger gains, greater territory.nAs it was, Congress gained from the struggle. ThenAbolitionist program to occupy and govern the South in thenname of universal rights was enacted; the FourteenthnAmendment was pushed into law in the absence of 11nstates; the program for which Thaddeus Stevens, CharlesnSumner, and others had argued was realized. In thenprocess, the seeds of racial discord were sown deep, andnmany crops continue to be gathered.nThe revolutionary tide moved to other parts of the world.nAuthoritarian socialism, a substitute for religion in thenname of antireligion, appeared among our intellectuals andnin Europe. Nietzsche carried Emerson’s Essays with himneverywhere; the Higher Law of the New England Transcendentalistsnreappeared as the Ubermensch; European anarchistsndecided to imitate the example of the widely applaudednJohn Brown and to kill innocent bystanders to makenpolitical points.nThese cultural-political tides crested in Russia, wherenrevolution had been bruited for at least two generations.nThe Social Democrats achieved legislative power in 1905,nin the wake of the Russo-Japanese War, in the Duma, andnin a reduction of the complete authority of the tsar. In 1917nthe issue of executive authority reappeared when Russia’snlosses became immense. The tsar was persuaded to abdicate,nand the Duma created committees to rule the nationn”provisionally.” The plan was to change the constitutionnand to hold plebecites and elections—as the books onndemocracy recommend. At that juncture the GermannGeneral staff, led by Ludendorff, who had become wartimendictator of Germany, intervened.nCreating subversion behind enemy lines, an honorednwartime practice since before the days of Sun Tsu, appealednto Ludendorff’s conspiratorial mind. Berlin had, the yearnbefore, financed the efforts of Roger Casement and othersnin Ireland but saw the Easter Uprising fail. Berlin had hopesnthat its agents inside the French Chamber of Deputies andnvarious French newspapers—and especially in the Frenchnarmy, which was on the verge of mutiny—would persuadenFrance to stop fighting.nActing on the recommendation of Parvus (Helphand), anwell-connected financier, Ludendorff decided to provide ancredit of 50 million gold marks to Lenin & Co. to create annew government that would pull Russia out of the war.nLenin, according to Trotsky and others later, first used thenmoney to buy 47 Russian newspapers, then guns, and thennhired men to use the guns. His coup took place in Octobern(in the new calendar, in early November) 1917, and Russianbecame captive to an oriental-style despotism that operatednwithout law, without rights, and without religion.nLenin’s triumph sent a thrill of hope throughout thenrevolutionary ranks everywhere. The speed of his rise fromnnnnowhere was proof that revolution can reward the mostnobscure. Where the French revolutionaries of the late 18thncentury had required three years from the first meeting ofnthe Estates General in 1789 to the guillotines in 1791, thenRussian revolution reached the dictatorship stage in onlynnine months after the tsar’s abdication.nEqually obvious but less often noted in both the Frenchnand Russian examples is that the office of chief executive—nking and tsar—was held by weaklings: men incapable ofnresisting heavy or dangerous pressure. In both instances,nhowever, the revolution succeeded from within the offices ofngovernment, from men situated inside the legislature.nLegislatures, it seems, in addition to containing “representatives”nof the people, can also be seedbeds of revolution.nThis overall pattern was repeated in the German revolutionnwhich, like its predecessors, proceeded in stages. Firstnthe Kaiser abdicated without a struggle. Then Germany,nwith no really strong executive power, governed through anReichstag dominated by Social Democrats—as often bynemergency decree as by constitutional rules. In time,ndisorders escalated and violence became embedded innGerman politics. Nazis vied with Communists to winnelections over the Social Democrats. In 1933 they achievedna third of the vote, and an electoral deadlock was endednwhen the senile Hindenburg was persuaded to name HitiernChancellor. From that high governmental office, legallynachieved, with his party dominant in the Reichstag, in eightnweeks the Nazi revolutionary and his party received completenauthority over every human being and all property innGermany from the Reichstag. Once again, the revolutionntriumphed—from inside the government.nIt is in that context that present trends inside thenAmerican government should be reviewed. As in France,nRussia, Germany, and other countries, the preceding,nbuild-up stages, spearheaded by alienated and deracinatednintellectuals, took a long time—in the instance of thenFrench, from at least 1715 to 1789; in Russia, from then1840’s to 1917; in Germany, from the I870’s to 1933. Innthe United States, the intellectuals turned against ourngovernment in the 1870’s and 1880’s, against Christianneducation in the period from 1890 to 1900.nDuring the New Deal radicals lumped Roosevelt with allnother capitalist rulers and joined the national consensusnonly when America joined hands with Josef Stalin in thenname of antidictatorship. Meanwhile, the New Deal resumednthe centralization of government that had markednWoodrow Wilson’s administration in World War I. Inn1933, in his First Inaugural, FDR asked Congress forn”wartime powers in peacetime”—and received them. Hisnadministrations were marked by single party control of bothnCongress and the presidency and enormous expansions ofngovernmental authority in the name of charity, equality,nand war.nBut assaults on the presidency as such did not reallynresume until the Vietnam War. This adventure, initiallynundertaken by a Democratic President, John Kennedy,ndisordered the campaign of 1964. Expanded by PresidentnJohnson, the radical barrage, conducted through the medianand complicated by a “civil rights” campaign marked bynriots, murders, parades, demonstrations, and orations reminiscentnof Abolitionist times, led to Johnson’s decision notn