Law and order. The Rethugs are trying to turn back the clock to 1966,
when Ronald Reagan won his first campaign for California governor on a law and order campaign, against Pat Brown, who ran as a strong liberal.
Except this time brown people, rather than black people, are the primary Rethug target.
That's why immigration has become their top issue, and why they're talking about walls and drones on the border. We've seen the Rethugs do this time after time and they're doing it again. Rather than addressing the nation's real problems, they're returning to their winning formula: FEAR.
http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/d/dallek-right.html
Reagan and Brown clashed on every issue, major and minor, of the day. Understanding the collapse of the liberal order and the rise of the conservative movement requires understanding how Reagan and Brown, during the several years leading up to 1966, came to embrace such bitterly opposed visions of government and society.
Reagan was a card-carrying conservative, Brown a proud liberal. For Reagan, opposing communism was paramount. For Brown, anticommunism was but one issue in foreign affairs and a nonissue at home. Reagan saw the welfare-state policies of recent decades as a slippery slope toward socialism. Brown viewed governmental programs as the best way to achieve a "great society." Reagan denounced moral decline on campus; Brown thanked God for the spectacle of students protesting. Brown seized an opportunity to lead the civil rights movement into the new frontier of fair housing; Reagan believed that even the 1964 Civil Rights Act was unconstitutional. Faced with urban riots, Brown looked to government to help eradicate poverty; Reagan vowed zero tolerance for criminals.
Prior to 1966, Reagan's views on all of these questions were considered extreme, not least by Brown and his followers. In 1962, Reagan was indeed part of a marginal movement; in 1964, Barry Goldwater led the movement in a national election, but suffered a stinging defeat. Reagan could not possibly have beaten Brown prior to 1966; only civil rights, Berkeley, Watts, and Vietnam made it possible. It was Reagan's promise to arrest moral decline that won him a million-vote victory over the popular incumbent, who had beaten Richard Nixon in 1962 and seemed destined to usher in California's progressive future.
SNIP
In 1966 these two titans faced off in a battle of worldviews. Law and order was the hinge on which an era turned, yet the particular strategies involved were crucial. For the first time, the conservative movement was able to distance itself from the anticommunist fringe. For the first time, the conservatives learned how to push the right buttons on key issues, from race and riots to war and crime. Reagan successfully linked the liberal social programs of the '60s with disorder in the streets, and offered an alternative vision of what government should and should not do. The Reagan revolution would prove so lasting because the formulas developed in the heat of the moment — pro-social order, pro-individual liberty, anti-government meddling — had a lasting appeal. Americans, like most people, crave peace and prosperity. The Reagan revolution has come to be associated with the free market. Yet at its origins, and perhaps still today, it is equally about social order.
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