It’s not about “politics.”

I have been here before. Most of the U.S. population today — about 80 percent — has no living memory of Watergate. They don’t know that it was a scandal that resulted in the first-time resignation of a president. They don’t know that it was about a failed burglary of the headquarters of the opposing political party.

They don’t know that the office of the president worked very hard to cover up its involvement.

And there’s one thing that most people in America don’t know about Watergate and the resignation of Richard Nixon that’s even more important than all the other gaps in the public’s knowledge.

It wasn’t about “politics.” It was about the executive branch of the government attempting to thwart the electoral system and rob the people of their votes.

It was about subverting democracy.

Now we are there again. While the parallels between Watergate and the indictment of a former president are striking, what’s even more striking is the fact that our culture has changed so much over the decades that a big chunk of the population doesn’t care.

When a gaggle of presidential hopefuls engaged in a debate on television recently, they were asked to raise their hands if they would support this indicted former president if he were convicted. Nearly every hand went up.

We aren’t just talking about “politics” in all its nasty and disgusting glory.

Back in 1950, Time magazine reported that Florida politician George Smathers put it on his opponent, Claude Pepper, with a trowel. “Are you aware that Claude Pepper is known all over Washington as a shameless extrovert? Not only that, but this man is reliably reported to practice nepotism with his sister-in-law, and he has a sister who was once a thespian in wicked New York. Worst of all, it is an established fact that Mr. Pepper before his marriage habitually practiced celibacy.”

Some say the tale is apocryphal. Smathers himself denied ever having given such a speech. But the story took on a life of its own; and in that place and time, words like “extrovert, nepotism, thespian and celibacy” weren’t in the vocabulary of many rural Floridians, who helped Smathers defeat Pepper.

Cynical political lies aren’t new, of course. I recall, as a schoolgirl in central Louisiana, regularly passing a billboard showing a picture of a young Martin Luther King Jr. sitting in a classroom. The caption read, “Martin Luther King at Communist Training School.”

Big daily papers like the ones that investigated and broke up Nixon’s attempts to hijack the presidency are becoming a thing of the past. Thank goodness both the Washington Post and New York Times remain in business, although most of us read them on our iPhones now.

They’re just two of the thousands of “news outlets” out there. While they are dependable, many of the others aren’t. When everyone with a computer and an internet connection is a publisher, lies are easy to spread and hard to debunk.

Even in the days before electric lights, much less the internet, we knew that a “lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting its shoes on.” It would be a lie to attribute that quote to Mark Twain; we don’t really know who first said it.

The truth is just that hard to find. Our light-speed communication makes it even harder.

It’s always good politics to tell lies and to traffic on the ignorance of the voter. People will believe just about anything. If you don’t think so, remember that Adolf Hitler took over Europe based on what historians call his “Big Lie.” Then, as now, lies are a powerful tool of propaganda.

However, even Watergate and the political dirty tricks that populate American history pale next to what’s happening now.

Our former president — whose followers stormed the seat of the legislative branch of our government — wants to win re-election in order to escape criminal punishment for attempting to overthrow the 2020 election.

This isn’t about “politics.” It’s about the end of democracy.

Watergate was a secret break-in gone wrong. Still, it wasn’t about “politics.” It was about subverting the electoral process.

Not one candidate in the recent presidential debate had the courage to simply say, “Look, we’re afraid of this guy, OK? We think if we don’t support him, we can’t get elected. We know what he did was wrong and criminal. We know electing him will put a dictator in place. We just lack the guts to say so.”

What a powerful statement that would have been if one of them had been that courageous.

In fact, it would’ve been that rarest thing in politics: a statement of unvarnished and unspun fact.

Frances Coleman is a former editorial page editor of the Mobile Press-Register. Email her at [email protected] and “like” her on Facebook at www.facebook.com/prfrances.