Astral Codex Ten

Watergate

6 min read

Watergate

Article

Watergate is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 6 times across 6 issues between July 12, 2021 and June 23, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “Everyone benefits from knowing about Watergate”; “turns out to be a huge advantage in the wake of Watergate”; “in the wake of Watergate”. It most often appears alongside civil rights movement, Congress, Richard Nixon.

Metadata

  • Category: Concepts
  • Mention count: 6
  • Issue count: 6
  • First seen: July 12, 2021
  • Last seen: June 23, 2025

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Use Prediction Markets To Fund Investigative Reporting
July 12, 2021 · Original source
I've been thinking about them recently because of the debate around funding investigative reporting. It goes something like: investigative reporting is a public good. Everyone benefits from knowing about Watergate. But it's hard for investigative reporters to capture the value they produce. Very few of the people who cared about Watergate bought subscriptions to the Washington Post. There's no reason to - you can let the Washington Post uncover Watergate at no cost to you, then hear about it for free on the nightly news. The traditional solution is bundled media. Newspapers have their profitable bread-and-butter in the form of easy things like commentary and sports, then do some unprofitable investigative reporting on the side to gain prestige.
Your Book Review: The Outlier
July 08, 2022 · Original source
When he first enters the 1976 Democratic primary, Carter is a complete unknown, and the general consensus is that he’s the longest of long shots. (“Jimmy who?” one opponent asks.) But two things go very, very right for him. First, he’s one of the few people who fully understands the changes to the Democratic primary process that were implemented after the chaos of the 1968 convention [1]. He stakes his campaign on the now-familiar strategy of winning the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary, which is groundbreaking at the time. More importantly, the fact that no one has ever heard of him turns out to be a huge advantage in the wake of Watergate, when voters are hungry for an outsider.
The charitable interpretation of these decisions is that, in the wake of Watergate, Carter wants to emphasize that he and his staff are servants of the American people. The uncharitable interpretation is that Carter is an obsessive egomaniac who believes there is no situation that won’t be improved by his personal involvement.
Although this analysis is about as sophisticated as the kind of thing a precocious 19-year-old would tell you over bong hits, Carter eats it all up. Two days after the summit, he delivers a prime-time address to the country in which he claims that the real crisis isn’t the poor economy, but the American crisis of confidence. He draws a line from the Kennedy and MLK assassinations through the traumas of Vietnam and Watergate and all the way to the current energy crisis. It is perhaps the most unusual speech ever delivered by an American president—a wide-ranging, almost religious homily about America’s many failings.
Your Book Review: Public Citizens
June 23, 2023 · Original source
Nader and his employees were pretty much all liberals. But they were a different kind of liberal than the ones who created the New Deal. The Vietnam War and the Civil Rights Movement (and, later, Watergate) had caused them to lose faith in government, and they were distrustful of so-called “experts” and of centralized power in general11. This distrust was why they operated through their own independent organizations, rather than by running for office or working with existing groups like the labor movement. Many of them were followers of the radical organizer Saul Alinsky, who emphasized an explanation for leadership failures that focused on structural issues, not individual choices. “Through experience,” he wrote, “you learn to see people not as sellouts and betrayers. [Morality is] largely a rationalization of the point you happen to occupy in the power pattern at a given time.”
Inline links: 11
Your Book Review: Safe Enough?
July 01, 2023 · Original source
By the early 1970s, after the civil rights movement and Vietnam and with Watergate in full swing, the public was becoming jaded with Big People waving away concerns with Big Promises on the basis of little more than self-proclaimed expertise. And thanks to the Freedom of Information Act, the public was close to accessing the details of what industry leaders actually knew. Big People recognized that this would not be an entirely good look.
"But" vs. "Yes, But"
June 12, 2025 · Original source
“Trump is too corrupt and scandal-ridden to be president! He was responsible for the Watergate break-in!”
Open Thread 387
June 23, 2025 · Original source
3: Thank you to everyone who voted for finalists in this year’s Nonbook Review Contest. All entries among the top ten best-ranked reviews became automatic finalists, and I also added two more from the 10-25 tier that voters or I especially liked. Honorable mentions were others from the 10-25 tier that I liked a lot. Finalists are Alpha School, Dementia, Islamic Geometric Patterns, Joan of Arc, Mashed Potatoes, Men, Ollantay, Phase I Research, Synaptic Plasticity, The ACX Commentariat, The Internet That Might Have Been, and The Russo-Ukrainian War. Honorable Mentions are at least Bishop's Castle, Bukele, Elon Musk's Algorithm, JFK Conspiracies, Martial Arts, Miniatur Wunderland, School (Review 1 by DK), and Watergate. I may promote some honorables to finalists depending on reader tolerance or unexpected opportunities. I will give you finer-grained score information after the contest ends. First finalist post is planned for this Friday.