The Soft on Crime Republicans
Matt Bernardini charts the stunning hypocrisy of the Republicans campaigning on law and order while making it easier for the rich to live by a different set of rules
One of Donald Trump’s top campaign strategies for the 2024 election is to hammer home the point that America is a lawless nation whose cities are riddled with crime. His campaign circle and media propagandists have flooded the airwaves every day with claims that the cities are out of control and have never been more dangerous. It’s all a complete fiction, but unfortunately some of the messaging appears to be resonating with voters.
Nearly six in ten adults believe that reducing crime should be a top priority according to a recent Pew Research Center poll. The majority of those are Republicans, who constantly seem to believe that crime is out of control even though it is at a fifty year low. After peaking in the early 1990s, violent crime has continued to fall, but this hasn’t prevented Republicans from making it a campaign issue.
The tactic goes back nearly 60 years, when Richard Nixon won the 1968 election on a platform of ‘law and order’. As Rick Perlstein’s excellent book Nixonland details, protests over civil rights and the Vietnam war were raging across the country, and Nixon was able to tap into the fears of suburban whites. Usually racially coded language, he vowed to restore order to the lawless cities.
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