Deja vu.

 "That's the sound of the USA going down the toilet"

       Archie Bunker to Edith

A friend told me I could chill out by watching old shows of "All in the Family" free on Amazon Prime. "It's just like now," the friend said. "Archie says the same things people say now. You can watch it at bedtime because it is soothing. It is history and long past."

Only it isn't past. It is MAGA, Make America Great Again, part one. On my own I stumbled onto "Slow Burn" a multipart history of Nixon and Watergate, free on EPIX streaming service. Watergate isn't past, either.

The opening song is MAGA, a return to an imagined happier economic and cultural era:

Boy the way Glenn Miller played,
Songs that made the hit parade.
Guys like us, we had it made
Those were the days.

And you knew where you were then
Girls were girls, and men were men
Mister, we could use a man like Herbert Hoover again
Didn't need no welfare state
Everybody pulled his weight.

Boy our old LaSalle ran great.
Those were the days.

Slow Burn, the story of Watergate, shows journalist Gail Sheehy today, looking back to describe her interviews 40 years ago in the Astoria neighborhood of Queens, the home of fictional Archie Bunker. The blue-collar workers there loved Nixon and Archie Bunker both, as she wrote then and repeated for this documentary. She said men would say that "they aren't Archie Bunker" but then go on and say exactly what Archie would say.

Nixon had figured out a winning electoral strategy. He combined a "Southern Strategy" of coded racial resentment with populist anti-elitism and that won over blue collar workers in the North. Nixon made wedge issues out of abortion, gender roles, public benefits, and patriotism. He said he would change the liberal Supreme Court. He got the "hardhat," vote. He called liberals "communists." Before there were Trump- Democrats there were Reagan-Democrats, and before that there were Nixon Democrats. 

Slow Burn describes a phenomenon Sheehy found among Nixon's populist defenders. They did not mind that Nixon fought dirty. Trump's supporters, like Nixon's, dismiss mis-behavior because of the larger context of a record they like. Trump, like Nixon, is fighting their enemies.

Over the course of a week Sheehy found them to be angry and demoralized and disconcertingly comfortable with the idea of a police state run by Richard Nixon.

Nixon and Trump said they were bringing "law and order" to bear against dangerous violence in the cities. The anti-war protesters and Black Panthers of the 1970s have their analog in BLM protesters and Antifa. They serve the same political purpose.

Protester being arrested

Then, as now, there is a Congressional Committee to investigate wrongdoing.

Then, as now, they request information from the president on crimes in office.

Then, as now, the president refuses, claiming he is doing it for the good of the country.

Republicans in the Congress defended Nixon until he became an embarrassment for his "expletive deleted" language in the Oval Office and the revelation of undeniable lies about obstructing justice. Trump understands better than Nixon did that his supporters don't care about flouting process or lying, so he does both openly and proudly. They care about getting policies they want. They like that he is a fighter. They like his contempt for his enemies and theirs. 

Trump will be brought down, if ever, not by a group of Republican senators telling him he misbehaved. They know he misbehaves. That is his brand. He will succumb to a younger, better, more cut-throat version of himself, someone who humiliates rivals even better than he does.

Tomorrow: a look at Tucker Carlson.