Impeachment is too important to leave to Congress — it’s going to take mass mobilization

Watergate is the ur-text for how Americans imagine the defeat of a sitting president, but it shouldn’t be how to think about the impeachment of Donald Trump.

Watergate was a formative political experience for many of the older Democrats who run the House of Representatives these days. And the semi-fictionalized version of the scandal portrayed on film in All the President’s Men is an emotional and intellectual touchstone for many journalists. To this day, it’s conventional to denote the existence of a political scandal by appending “-gate” to a noun, as if “Watergate” had to with water rather than originating with a burglary at the Watergate Hotel.

1973 was a long time ago. The party system, the judiciary, and the media environment have evolved so much that there are no inferences to be applied to the present day — period.

American elites rarely seem to do this, but they should consider the lesson that toppled Mariano Rajoy’s corrupt right-wing government in Spain in 2018, Park Geun-hye’s corrupt right-wing government in South Korea in 2017, and Sigmundur Davíð Gunnlaugsson’s corrupt right-wing government in Iceland in 2016: Large-scale public protests work.

Elected officials in the Democratic Party, like established politicians everywhere, aren’t instinctively comfortable with the idea of popular resistance, but it’s not an entirely alien concept to them, either. In the extreme political emergency of 2017, they embraced protest politics. That started with emergency mass demonstrations at airports to block Trump’s initial travel ban, continued through the Women’s March, and was seen repeatedly on Capitol Hill and in congressional town halls as people came out en masse to oppose repealing the Affordable Care Act.

A lawless government cannot be constrained by the institutions of the law alone. It is popular mass resistance that creates a crisis point and forces action. And if Democrats want to beat Trump’s stonewalling tactics in 2019, they should consider doing it again.