There is no question that Richard Nixon is a problem. He is a liar who has caused the slaughter of millions of Asians. He has tried to deceive the American people, he has tried to ignore their laws, he has tried to subvert their rights and he has attempted to gather the power of their government into his office.

Richard Nixon is definitely a problem, but he is not the problem.

THE attempt to centralize power in the executive and the use of illegal and quasi-legal means to achieve that centralization is not unprecedented. The process has been an on-going one since the 1930s. Nixon is quite right to point out the extensive use of wiretaps in the Kennedy administration; by the same token he could defend his phoney military alert by saying that Kennedy pulled a similar trick during the Cuban missile crisis to make his failure at the Bay of Pigs look excusable.

As power increasingly becomes the property of the executive, Americans become increasingly alienated and isolated from their government. They feel that government is out of their hands, and quite rightly they conclude that it doesn't matter a damn what they think or do about the course of American politics.

Now at least they can write to their congressmen and say that Nixon should be thrown out of office. Chances are that Nixon won't be thrown out, but even if he is they will feel no closer to the political structure. For the millions of Americans who voted for Nixon a year ago, his impeachment and conviction will only mean the replacement of one bad man by another who may or may not be less bad.

The government in Washington can not survive under these circumstances, and under these circumstances, and under these circumstances the government should not survive. Still there is the question of what will go in its place.

AMERICA'S low tolerance for turmoil and its self-generated alienation from politics may well cause the trend towards one-man rule to accelerate so that executive rule becomes accepted in name as well as deed. One cannot afford to overlook the possibility that the illusion of republicanism will be dispensed with and that the United States will set out on the road of dictatorship and autocracy. It is not an enviable possibility, but a real possibility nevertheless.

Frighteningly enough, the other possibilities are harder to imagine. Can we manage another constitutional convention? Can we manage to reformulate our government so that it respects our civil rights and responds to our wishes?

The notion of a new constitutional convention is an intriguing one. After 200 years, why not redraft the charter? These who wrote the first document were not gods, but men. They could not forsee the course that the country would take and they did not expect the republic to produce men like Nixon. From our new perspective, we might write a constitution more conducive to republicanism in the last half of the twentieth century.

But constitution-writing is a reflective affair, and we may not have the stuff to do it well. But unless we do something quick, we won't be able to do anything at all.

The way things stand in Washington, the government of republican illusions is about to fall. America will be governed in any case, but the question is by whom. If not by the people, then by a strong executive. These are revolutionary times, and we must decide now whom we want to win the revolution.