The Republican Party made it clear in its national convention that it intends to make restoring “law and order” central to this fall’s presidential campaign.
As he did when he first ran in 2016, President Donald Trump highlighted law and order in his 2020 acceptance speech.
“Your vote,” Trump said, “will decide whether we protect law-abiding Americans and whether … we will defend the American way of life or allow a radical movement to completely dismantle and destroy it.”
For a student of the politics of law and order, the president’s rhetoric is familiar. It builds on, and borrows from, a strand of thinking running back to the early years of the republic.
The first stirrings of law-and-order politics in the US occurred in the 1830s in response to agitation for expansion of the vote. At the time, only whites who owned property could vote. Reformers wanted to extend the franchise to all white men.
In 1840 Samuel Ward King, the governor of Rhode Island, formed the Law and Order Party to oppose such proposals. Troubled by an influx of immigrants, his party wanted to preserve the state charter that disenfranchised the 60 percent of the state’s white, male residents who did not own property.
But the tide of reform proved to be too strong, and in 1843 the charter was changed, extending suffrage to any native-born adult male, regardless of race, who could pay a poll tax of $1. This change led to the demise of Rhode Island’s Law and Order Party.
Toward the end of the 19th century, law-and-order rhetoric played a key role in the Prohibition movement to ban alcohol. This movement was led by rural Protestants whose political power was being challenged by a growing population of urban, Irish-Catholic immigrants.
As Frances Willard, a prominent leader of that cause, said, “There is a war in America … between the rum shops and religion. They stand over against each other, insurmountable and unalterable foes.”
The politics of law and order remained animated by resistance of social change during the 20th century. While it did not have much political purchase during the early part of the century, the phrase “law and order” was used by Republican Governor Calvin Coolidge of Massachusetts in a 1920 speech to rally opposition to labor union organizers.
As crime rates rose and urban disorder intensified in the 1960s, the attraction of law and order as a campaign issue grew as well.
In 1964, Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater took up the law-and-order banner in his campaign against President Lyndon Johnson.
In 1968, both Republican Richard Nixon and George Wallace, a former governor of Alabama running as an independent, seized on the law-and-order issue in the presidential campaign. Nixon promised, “The wave of crime is not going to be the wave of the future in the United States of America. We shall reestablish freedom in America.”
Nixon made law and order, which some scholars said was a coded racial appeal, a key part of a “Southern strategy” that sought to get Southern Democrats to switch their allegiance to Republican Party.
It was a devastating line of attack, and Bush won the election.
Four years later, Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton, the Democratic candidate for president, tried to make law and order a pro-Democratic issue. He argued that Bush had not kept his promise to control crime and said, “We cannot take our country back until we take our neighborhoods back.”
But Clinton also took the unprecedented step of connecting law and order and the promotion of civil rights.
“I want to be tough on crime and good for civil rights,” Clinton said. “You can’t have civil justice without order and safety.”
Clinton won the election.
Many accounts of President Trump’s law-and-order campaign trace its roots back to Nixon’s 1968 campaign. But I believe it has an older pedigree, running much deeper into America’s past.
In another sense, he is inverting modern law-and-order politics. To date, it has been used by challengers in campaigns designed to appeal to people who believe that they are losing ground as society changes.
In 2016, Trump ran just such a campaign. He cited rampant lawlessness and “race riots in our streets on a monthly basis” as reasons to “change our leadership immediately.”
He is again warning of lawlessness and rioting, but this time as a central reason not to change the nation’s leadership.
(This is an opinion piece and the views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for the same. This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article here.)
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