During Watergate we had a clearly definable nation; we had a much more Enlightenment-based economy and society which placed a higher premium on education, talent and factuality than today; we had a smaller fundamentalist population; there were much greater restrictions on the accumulation of power at the top end of both economy and the population; the national information infrastructure was democratically owned unlike today; society had formal rights of access into the national information infrastructure; we had a journalistic even if a considerably blindered press; and we had a lethal enemy empire that could incinerate us on half an hour's notice, a fact that kept a massive lid on runaway warfare among the nation's factions.

I'm hardly a scholar of the time but I lived through it as a young adult. My impression is that facts considerably milder than those confronting us today drove impeachment because all the factors above forced society to be much more reasonable and cautious than it is today.

There were dark forces within America in those times but informed people who paid attention largely knew what they were. Today, I don't think very many Americans know how this country operates or what it even consists of, and I suspecct we would all agree that there's no conceivable way for the general public to find out.

When people look back on 20th century Germany they always talk about "the" Nazis. But the fact is--based on countless reports from Germans including German Jews--Germans didn't appreciate at the time, as we can't help appreciating, what was brewing. They didn't see the Nazis of blitzkieg and Holocaust. Most everything they saw looked familiar even if some of it was extreme.

They didn't yet have a word for it.

Our problem is that we can't tell if our regime is teetering on collapse or preparing to break out of its cocoon and soar.

Even if it collapses, we don't even know what we'll actually have in our hands once we "take back" America. If the regime finishes conquering America, we can't tell from here if it will operate a new Gilded Age, some kind of science fiction futuristic feudalism, a Highland-style Clearance, or a grim Final Solution.

We don't have a word for it yet.