TERRY GROSS, HOST:
This is FRESH AIR. Donald Trump's pledge to be the law and order candidate revived a slogan that's associated with Richard Nixon's 1968 presidential campaign. Many people have heard that phrase as racially coded - then and now. But as our FRESH AIR linguist Geoff Nunberg notes, its resonances aren't quite the same as they were back then.
GEOFF NUNBERG, BYLINE: I am the law and order candidate. With that proclamation in his acceptance speech, Donald Trump made it official that he'd be recycling the themes and language of Richard Nixon's 1968 campaign. A lot of observers were quick to point out that 2016 is no 1968 and that Donald Trump is no Richard Nixon. But then, law and order isn't what it once was, either.
Law and order - it's an archaic expression from the Latin lex et ordo. Over the course of American history, it's the cry that people in charge have raised to confront the threat of violence bubbling up from below, whether it's popular insurrections, public disorders, radical agitators or gangs. It was the phrase invoked to condemn the striking auto workers in Flint in 1936 and the demonstrations organized by Martin Luther King in Birmingham in 1963.
But for most Americans of the Nixon era, law and order was saturated with the mythology of the Old West. Hollywood made at least five Western films with that very title, most with the same tried-and-true plot - a lawman reluctantly takes up his badge one last time to clear out the roughians (ph) who have been terrorizing the decent folks of Dodge or Tombstone. Ronald Reagan starred in the 1953 film of that name. Thirteen years later, he revived the role of the new sheriff in town to win the California governorship, running as a citizen-politician who could restore law and order in the wake of the Watts riots and the disorders at Berkeley.
By the time Nixon and George Wallace adopted the law and order slogan in 1968, the phrase was everywhere in the air. The social fabric seemed to be coming apart at the seams - the assassinations of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King, the urban riots, the Weathermen and the Panthers, the street protests and campus upheavals and a violent crime rate that had risen alarmingly over the course of the decade.
By August of 1968, voters saw law and order as the most important issue facing the nation, ahead even of the Vietnam War. Nixon publicly denied that the phrase was a code for racism. The very accusation implied a reverse racism, he said, as if the critics were suggesting that the Negroes didn't want law and order, too.
But the message was clear enough in Nixon's references to a city jungle that threatened to swallow the affluent suburbs. His TV ads showed a middle-aged white woman walking nervously down a city street at night where the assailants who might be lurking in the shadows presumably weren't Abbie Hoffman or Jerry Rubin.
This was a new maneuver in modern American political rhetoric. Even in the South, most Americans had repudiated explicit racism. Now, crude appeals to bias had to be replaced by phrases that obliquely brought racial images to mind. People often describe these phrases as racial dog whistles which send a signal that's only audible to one part of the audience. But the racial connections are usually pretty obvious to everyone. You don't need a Captain Midnight decoder ring to know that welfare queens or inner-city culture are references to minorities, no more than to know that Park Avenue was a reference to the rich.
Those phrases are less like dog whistles than like Pavlov's bells. All the dogs can hear them, but they only salivate if they've been conditioned to respond. The important thing is that they leave you room to deny the associations to yourself and to others. And they provide the opportunity for a kind of rhetorical jujitsu in response, where you turn the charge of racism against your critics. Somebody taxes you with racism for a remark about bans of use of hoodies and you indignantly point out that Mark Zuckerberg wears a hoodie, and they're the ones with race on the brain.
In the past, these racial bells have usually been abandoned when their associations became too obvious to be plausibly denied. The phrase states' rights is so tarnished by its association with segregation that nobody uses it now. If you want to object to federal control of some policy or program, you have to say the issue should be left to the states. Law and order lasted as a political slogan into the 1990s. Bill Clinton invoked it to justify both tougher penalties and community programs.
But by the turn of the century, the phrase was out of fashion other than as the punning title of a popular TV series about cops and prosecutors. That owes something to the dramatic decline in violent crime since then, even if public perceptions haven't entirely caught up with it. But the public attention had turned by then to other kinds of criminality - Enron and Madoff, cybercrime and mortgage scams.
Trump's single-handed effort to revive the slogan law and order is the key to creating the perception of a new crisis of crime and violence which weaves together the assaults by Muslim terrorists, inner-city thugs and illegal immigrants. The racial overtones of the phrase are harder to deny now than they were in the Nixon years when white radicals and students were part of the mix.
But deniability isn't as important as it used to be. In the new rhetorical climate, these phrases are mostly designed to troll the other side for its political correctness. Still, the phrase law and order itself sounds a little creaky now. It doesn't have the mythical resonance as it did 50 years ago. When Trump uses it, it makes people think of Richard Nixon. When Nixon used it, it made them think of Wyatt Earp. But they're not making those movies anymore.
GROSS: Geoff Nunberg is a linguist who teaches at the University of California, Berkeley School of Information. If you'd to catch up on FRESH AIR interviews you missed, like our interview with Michael K. Williams who co-starred in "The Wire" as Omar and is now in the HBO series "The Night Of," check out our podcast. FRESH AIR's executive producer is Danny Miller. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Amy Salit, Phyllis Myers and Ann Marie Baldonado, Sam Briger, Lauren Krenzel John Sheehan, Heidi Saman, Therese Madden and Thea Chaloner. I'm Terry Gross.
Copyright © 2016 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.