Law and Order

Addendum #49

Looking back at American politics from the vantage point of my age, seventy-seven, I am taken with a vision of how utterly pitiful it has been, how the phrase “law and order” that Richard Nixon put forward, a phrase that grew naturally from Nixon’s “soft on communism” Red-baiting, has pretty much set the tone for all political discourse (a too dignified word) in the United States. The phrase has gone through various permutations (see MAGA) but the basic note of demonizing those who supposedly threaten law and order—Blacks, hippies, cannabis users, leftists, immigrants, anti-nuke activists, environmentalists, heavy metal bands—has done yeoman duty as it puts fear and loathing under the protective blanket of security, safety, innocence, and whatever other code words come out of whatever sanctimonious mouth. Thus a growth industry during those years was building prisons while we now see a new industry—building detention centers—appear. When in doubt, lock them up, whoever they may be.

How many lives have been shattered and blighted by this ruinous outlook is hard to say. The consequences of decades of law and order are apparent in the militarization of the police and the shriller and shriller rhetoric that Donald Trump has embodied. Since the human cost tends to include those outside the gates of power and money and is not what the society considers to be “news,” we would have to look elsewhere, at film, TV, and literature, for instance, to tell those stories. (The Wire would be a prime example as would Clockers by Richard Price as would the movie Moonlight.) The basic inference, however, which is hardly surprising given the tenor of the rhetoric, is that those lives haven’t counted for anything, that those lives were (and are) dispensable. And, indeed, as far stoking the paranoia that seems to be lodged at the heart of the nation, they were (and are) dispensable.

Thus one party has a permanent platform, that now, since it is enshrined in one very mouthy person, doesn’t need to be noted as a platform because it is a given—permanent law and order at any cost (literal and figurative), including trampling on the law that law and order is supposed to uphold. The other party has been at a disadvantage since they can hardly be opposed to law and order. Thus all they can do is offer what Neil Young once called “a kinder gentler machine gun hand” and up the defense budget accordingly. At moments the populace has responded to the “soft” message since the hard message has had a tendency to run amok—the Contra wars, invasion of Iraq, debacle in Afghanistan, the “wars” on terror and drugs. Still, the hard message is more consoling than the soft message, since strength, however bogus, is preferable to weakness. This is ironic since there is no peace party in the United States, while the issue of nuclear disarmament is little more than an occasional political football that both parties are glad to punt endlessly, even though the arsenal keeps being updated, no doubt under the banner of “progress.”

Societies live and die in the grasp of manias. The delusion is that the society is in charge when, in truth, the mania is in charge and the society is acting out whatever psycho-drama—fear and loathing being a large one—speaks to the particular moment. Various professionally cynical actors—banks for instance—have been glad to go along since money is always there to be made when people are frightened and will do, seemingly, anything. Why the United States is particularly frightening is that it operates under the aegis of a sort of sordid virtue, a compound of self-interest and right-sounding rhetoric about democracy and freedom that meanwhile has seen fit to do as it pleases. The geographical blessing of the United States is clearly also a liability in the sense that other nations (even Canada and Mexico) do not exist for many Americans. For many Americans the feeling is that “Well, if they don’t have the sense to be Americans why bother with them?” In one more act of arrant hypocrisy this attitude is turned against immigrants who want to be Americans because they come from some elsewhere that many Americans would rather not know about, even as Americans pay taxes for their government to have military bases all over the planet.

Nixon, that strange compound of shrewdness, vulnerability, Cold War ideology, and lust for vengeance, knew what buttons to push. In 1972, poor McGovern, a representative of mere decency, did not stand a chance. Nixon dropped the ball with Watergate but his attitude got back in the saddle with Reagan and has remained there. Since the United States has no politics in the European sense, which is to say admitting that socialism can work and that the society need not be a total hostage to the forces of capital, what transpires in the United States is a playlet in which the two parties put forward their versions of Americanism. Since the Republicans have made a point of also having God on their team, they have a very potent sales pitch for many Americans who are, for one unhappy reason or another, uptight about whatever fear—secularism, illegal immigration, trans people, welfare cheats, Venezuelan gangs—is being broadcast at the moment. This spectacle that has gone on over the course of my lifetime feels unsurpassed for tawdriness but I wasn’t there during the first half of the nineteenth century in France.

Lyndon Johnson, a step-child as it were of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, heralded the prospect of a great (there is that word again) society. (Apparently Trump is not referring to Johnson.) Tethered to an unpopular war, that society by legislative edict never got out of the starting gate, though the tenor of Johnson’s vision was positive, which is more than can be said for the vision of the last forty or so years. Many an American writer has tried to come to terms with the smiling darkness that distinguishes this nation. At this moment, even the false smile is gone.