There are few things that chill the blood more than a politician who proudly describes himself as a “Law and Order Candidate.”

Well, we can actually make an exception to that. The late Fred Dalton Thompson spent a year playing the D.A. on LAW & ORDER. He also ran for President.

I have no problem calling him the LAW & ORDER candidate, because that’s geeky and painful.

But when any other candidate calls himself the Law and Order candidate, it speaks volumes. And this is why:

Nobody sane is against law and order.

Nobody thinks it would be great if we had more child molesters or rapists.

Nobody thinks home break-ins are just swell.

Everybody worth listening to thinks that when bad guys do bad things, they need to be arrested and tried.

So every candidate who’s not a total bull-goose loony is a law and order candidate.

But the candidates who sell themselves as Law and Order Candidates?

Are always in the business of telling you that the streets are worse than ever, that criminals are worse than ever, that your family is in worse danger than ever, and that the only solution is to vote for them and make things tougher, more repressive and crueler; to roll back any protections possessed by the accused; to sneer at any attempt to address the causes of community crime at a social level in favor of stepped-up efforts to keep the animals caged.

The most frightening thing about Law and Order Candidates is that they know any retreat, even in the face of situations where law enforcement is wrong, makes them look too nuanced and weak, and so they double down in the face of atrocity. Some cop shoots a kid who has his hands up? If you condemn that, you’re against Law and Order! Another cop brutalizes teens at a neighborhood pool party? They were misbehaving! If you condemn that, you’re against Law and Order! Some guy is on Death Row after having a confession coerced out of him, and says a simple DNA test will set him free? Fight until your very last breath! You can’t get these criminals get away with anything! Besides, freeing even an innocent man will weaken the Death Penalty, which is an absolute good!

Donald Trump is the epitome of a Law & Order candidate. And this is why that’s a bad thing.

In New York we had the tragic case of the Central Park Five, a group of mostly black (and one Hispanic) teenagers who were accused and convicted of a savage assault on a female jogger. If you didn’t live in or around New York at the time, you have no idea how deeply and completely demonized these young men were. Why not? There was no doubt that they had done something beyond evil. But the rhetoric in the newspapers, on the radios, and from the mouths of our Law and Order candidates was that they were something like Orcs, creatures of unrelenting undiluted corruption whose eyes were as devoid of soul as the eyes of sharks pulled from the sea. We were told again and again that we shouldn’t even consider them human.

Even before their conviction, there was evidence, if only anybody had the wit to see it, that they had been railroaded, and were in fact innocent. It ultimately came out, years later, that they were.

These boys – and I call them boys because that’s what they were – had their childhoods ruined, their lives forever blighted, their features paraded before the public as the faces of evil, because cops could not be bothered to look at the spot where that poor jogger was brutalized and acknowledge that the crime had been committed by one person, not five.

The City of New York eventually settled with those boys — now men —  and gave each of them one million dollars for every year he had spent in prison, totaling forty million in all.

And here we get the behavior of the Law and Order candidate; Donald Trump attacked this as stupid and outrageous. According to him, these boys were no angels! If they were not guilty of that, they were guilty of something else! Besides, think of the awfulness of the crime! Bringing it back to the horror of which they were fully innocent. Because if you think of the horror, your heart will explode with rage, and he can prosper by telling you where to put it.

Law and Order candidates don’t want you think about justice; they don’t want you to think about nuance. They don’t want you thinking about innocence or guilt. They don’t want you thinking about what’s right or wrong. They want you to think about how there are evil people out there and how the only way to fight them is to be tougher, angrier, less open to appeals, always moving in that direction, never ever stopping to think that we might have gone too far.

Getting you to agree that there are some people who really do need to be beaten without restraint, or shot without consequences, or imprisoned without reprieve, or executed even if there’s exonerating evidence that some Judge out there really does need to see, is easier and more comforting than imagining that some social problems might have more complicated solutions.

A Law and Order candidate has the easiest job in the world. All he has to do is show you whatever awful horror story crime has occurred last, and make you angry. Better yet, he can excoriate any opposing candidate who wants to talk about anything else, for “ignoring” that issue. How wonderful! You can attack somebody for simply being able to think about more than one issue at a time!

This is the benefit of being a Law and Order candidate. You can get the constituency that doesn’t like to think.

Now, I concede that not all Law and Order candidates are bad people. Some simply have a tough view of law enforcement, and bill themselves that way. There honestly is no problem with that, in moderation. The problem is that among so many, the scorn for moderation is the problem.

Nobody’s comparing all Law and Order candidates to Hitler.

But I am asking you to remember that Hitler was a Law and Order candidate.

 

Tags: Adolf Hitler, Assholes, Donald Trump, Fred Dalton Thompson, Law & Order, Politics, Race, Republicans | Category Commentary, Politics