As Nixon spoke, the war in Vietnam was in its deadliest phase, protests against it larger and more militant than ever, Martin Luther King was dead, black power was ascendant, and riots continued to rage from coast to coast. Nixon assured the delegates and the voters watching at home that “the wave of crime is not going to be the wave of the future in the United States of America.”
“Tonight,” Nixon said, “it is time for some honest talk about the problem of order in the United States.” He spoke amid an unfolding rights revolution in the nation’s courts, with the U.S. Supreme Court, under Chief Justice Earl Warren, strengthening the rights of criminal defendants as never before, most famously in its 1966 Miranda decision. Nixon argued that things had gotten out of whack. “Let us always respect, as I do, our courts and those who serve on them. But let us also recognize that some of our courts in their decisions have gone too far in weakening the peace forces as against the criminal forces in this country and we must act to restore that balance.”
Today liberals tend to think of Nixon’s 1968 campaign as fueled primarily by potent racial backlash. But Nixon understood that the majority of Americans viewed themselves as fair and freedom-loving and would reject rhetoric that sounded too overtly authoritarian. He recognized that his best bet was to cultivate white resentment with coded appeals, wrapped in gracious displays of equanimity and high-minded rhetoric about equality. He even went out of his way to address his critics who accused him of using dog whistles. “To those who say law and order is the code word for racism,” he said, “there and here is a reply: Our goal is justice for every American. If we are to have respect for law in America, we must have laws that deserve respect.”
Nixon’s genius in 1968 was to reach back to the Founders and somehow find in that revolutionary generation a call for order. “The American Revolution was and is dedicated to progress, but our founders recognized that the first requisite of progress is order,” he said. “Now, there is no quarrel between progress and order—because neither can exist without the other.” In fact, “the first civil right of every American is to be free from domestic violence, and that right must be guaranteed in this country.”
This rhetoric and framing would become the template to justify forty years of escalating incarceration: Order is necessary for liberty to flourish. If we do not have order, we can have no other rights. It would dominate the politics of both parties over the next three decades, as crime continued to climb. Fear for one’s own body against a violent predator, for the sanctity and safety of one’s hearth against incursions by the depraved—these kinds of political issues operate far below the frontal cortex, deep beneath the dry talk of policy or tax rates. They are primal and primary. And in America, when the state cultivates such fear among relatively empowered white voters, it is enriching uranium for a political nuclear weapon.
It was Ferguson, Missouri, that made me understand the sheer seductive magnetism of this simple idea. On the Thursday in August 2014 after Michael Brown was shot and killed, I was sitting in a car trying to pull out of a parking lot onto the town’s main thoroughfare and having no luck. The street was knotted with cars, lights blinking and horns honking. Young people sat on top of SUVs waving signs and blasting music. The scene wasn’t a protest so much as an impromptu street festival, a victory parade. Just two nights earlier about a hundred protesters had been met by dozens of heavily armed police from the surrounding areas, aiming assault weapons from their tactical vehicles. The ensuing events—seen through the lens of a smartphone—had had the air of warfare, or, more perniciously, the brutality of a third world dictatorship. Images like the instantly iconic photo of a young black man in dreads, hands raised in surrender in the face of six cops in camouflage and gas masks pointing their rifles at him, had so embarrassed the political class of Missouri that Governor Jay Nixon had ordered a black state trooper named Captain Ron Johnson to take over. His response was to massively scale back police presence, leading to this triumphant festival atmosphere.
The scene before me was peaceful and, by and large, lawful: some weed here and there, but for the most part people were just partying. But if it was mostly lawful, it was not at all orderly. Traffic was snarled, horns and music were blaring, and people drank from open containers, as crowds threaded through the standstill traffic. Some deep, neurotic part of me took in the scene with unease, and I recalled the hostile questions Governor Nixon had faced from local reporters earlier that day at his press conference. While most of the national and international press corps had grilled Nixon on the garish spectacle of police officers equipped for war against a few dozen nonviolent protesters, the local press was attacking him from the other direction. Was the governor just going to abandon the streets to the thugs? Was he going to let Ferguson burn, as it had that first night after Brown’s death? Wasn’t he going to maintain order?