Murder, We Wrote

 The past 18 months has seen a stark reversal in the falling homicide rate in America. The reasons why are very hard to pin down. The analysis in the article notes that it is likely an overlapping of many different trends, but ones that include stressors to communities brought on by the pandemic, protests against the police that led to reduced police presence in many neighborhoods, an even wider proliferation of guns and the reluctance of courts to place pre-trial offenders in jail during a pandemic. 

In many ways, we have a problem when it comes to assessing crime, because we don't have very good date on crime. We won't know whether this reversal was a unique product of a unique year or a trend until next year at some point.

The other issue is that we have a real and measurable increase in crime and overall lawless behavior - people seem to be driving like fucking maniacs more than usual. While police reform is absolutely necessary, the fundamental bedrock of American governance is not "democracy" but "rule of law." Without rule of law, democracy is simply mob rule. Binding the powerful as well as the poor by the same laws is critical for democratic governance to have any legitimacy. 

Trump and Trumpism eroded the sanctity of law in this country. His crimes - past and present - were so manifest, why would anyone think that laws still had legitimacy? That coupled with anger at police abuses created and then added on to opposition - largely emanating from Trump - to public health measures created a broad sense of the loosening of the social contract.

There is also going to be another factor in all this. The breakdown of civic order in the late 1960s and '70s was also created by a loss of legitimacy in the rule of law. Vietnam, civil rights protests, Watergate, a youth culture that curdled into anger...all of these created a sense within the broad middle of America that things were spiraling out of control.  

This leaves opening for cynical asshats like JD Vance to build on Trump's American Carnage themes. Nixon - up until Trump the avatar of presidential lawlessness - used the idea of "law and order" to break the New Deal Coalition that had dominated American politics since 1932. He used coded (and not so coded) appeals to racism to peel off the White working class voters that now form the bedrock of the Republican Party.

There is no doubt that Republicans will desperately want to run on a breakdown of law and order. My guess - and it's barely an educated guess - is that the economy will be thriving in 2022 for the midterms. Biden has pretty good approval ratings and I am hopeful that the new Democratic tilt in White College graduates will translate into good midterm turnout. (I also think that the talk of voter suppression is overblown, but could be helpful in getting some voters to the polls.) 

Republicans are losing the culture wars. "Law and order" might be their last chance at leveraging an area where they still enjoy some legitimacy. Casting Biden as a Socialist is only working on their base, not the wide swath of the polity. Casting the Democrats as the party of Antifa and Rioters might work, but only if Democrats let it happen.