Professors of history hold out the promise to students that learning about the past will help them to make sense of the present. But when I asked my students how it felt to be role-playing the Watergate Crisis during the present critical moment in U.S. history, they told me that living through the present was giving them a deeper understanding of the past.
For about a decade, I have used “Reacting to the Past” (RTTP), a role-playing game pedagogy, to engage my students in the study of history. RTTP games typically focus on “turning points” in world history, such as the Council of Nicaea or the July Crisis of 1914. Students are assigned roles as historic figures—some actual, some archetypal—and they study both primary and secondary sources before engaging in a series of structured debates. Mechanisms such as secret agendas, bribery, conspiracy, assassination, and dice-roles gamify the re-enactments and keep students highly motivated, as does the teamwork aspect, as students work together with members of their faction to achieve victory. Their characters’ clear goals give the students a strong sense of direction when reading sources. Students also report to me that the games expand their empathy for others’ points of view, as they step into the shoes of people who were often dramatically unlike themselves. Out of all the class styles I teach, I have had by far the best attendance and most engaged use of primary sources in my reacting classes.
This semester, in my “Role Playing Modern History Class” at the University of Victoria, I am teaching “Watergate, 1973-1974,” a game about the aftermath of the Watergate break-in. The experience has been unlike any prior experience I’ve had with the pedagogy. For the first time, the students report that their present experience of living through a historic crisis is giving them a greater understanding of the past, rather than vice versa.
The Watergate game begins in July 1973. The existence of President Nixon’s secret Oval Office tapes has just been revealed. Game play soon arrives at debates over whether the President can withhold the White House tapes that have been subpoenaed by Special Counsel Archibald Cox, whether the President can fire Cox, and whether the President’s resistance to the subpoena and his firing of Cox are precipitating a constitutional crisis.
To prepare my students for these debates, I lectured on how the Constitution separated and shared powers among the branches of federal government, how republican fears of executive tyranny influenced the U.S. Constitution, how the Constitution’s framing of executive authority in Article 2 is ambiguous in places, and how the executive branch had gained in power over time to the point that by 1973 writers like Tom Wicker and Arthur Schlesinger were referring to it as the “imperial presidency.” Schlesinger argued that when the presidency came to dominate the other two branches of government, the constitutional system lacked legitimacy. Senator Fulbright went even further, warning that the Imperial Presidency had become an “elected, executive dictatorship.”
In the past, Watergate served as a warning to students about the potential for the abuse of executive power. Watergate signified a worst-case scenario where a corrupt leader threatened the constitutional order and exposed its vulnerability, but the political order stepped up at the last moment and righted the ship of state. In this current moment, my students look at Watergate and see the overreaching of the executive branch under Nixon as a pale shadow of what’s going at present, and they struggle for evidence at this time of a political will to rein in “executive dictatorship.” Watergate no longer feels extreme and unrelatable to my students. In light of the present moment, it is entirely relatable and almost enviable.
In fact, my students and I have been forced to tangle with the question of whether the current executive can even be correctly described as the president, and whether the United States can be said to be operating as a constitutional democracy at all. Before my lecture on the separation of powers I read a recent essay by early American historian Johann Neem, titled “Donald Trump Is No Longer President of the United States,” where he draws from Locke’s Second Treatise on Government to argue that “Donald Trump’s disregard for law and norms means that we are undergoing a coup.” Neem quotes Locke’s argument that “Where-ever law ends, tyranny begins.” He extends this logic to the present moment, arguing that “from this perspective, Trump is just another highway brigand, not the President of the United States.”
Neem is not alone in arguing that the magnification of executive power beyond any limitations means the end of democracy itself. To prepare for teaching Watergate, I also read the work of two constitutional scholars, Charles M. Lamb and Jacob R. Neiheisel, who argue that “democracy arguably does not exist in a political system in which executive power has increased to the point at which one political figure – the US president—has far more power than the other branches of government, where that power continues to grow on a regular basis, where on occasion the chief executive appears to be above the law, and where the primary focus of the public, the media, and the remainder of the world is on that one individual.” This passage was published in 2021, but, like my students, I understand it better in the present circumstances then I would have just four years ago. As another constitutional scholar, Claire Wofford, wrote recently: “Whether the current American president has become a king, particularly after the sweeping grant of immunity in 2024 by the Supreme Court and the seeming acquiescence by Congress to Trump’s latest directives, remains up for debate.”
Role-playing Watergate during a crisis when all limits on executive power in the United States have evaporated has not offered my students any comfort about the future. Quite the opposite, the experience of living through this moment in history while role-playing the previous worst crisis in US constitutional governance has deepened our collective despair about the present. That said, I couldn’t imagine a pedagogy better suited for the present moment. Having the opportunity to argue over the limits of executive power and to re-enact the political response to a previous constitutional crisis (if a more minor one) feels vital in ways that I could not have predicted. I think the students and I all come to class knowing that we’re living through history with our eyes wide open, however painful what we see.
Rachel Hope Cleves is professor of history at the University of Victoria. Her new book is Lustful Appetites: An Intimate History of Good Food and Wicked Sex (Polity, 2025). She is also the author of Unspeakable (2020), Charity and Sylvia (2014), and The Reign of Terror in America (2009).