Asymmetrical Information

I'm confused -- how does an increase in crime create support for Republican presidents? Mayors and governors and maybe even congressmen I could see, but this doesn't explain the Reagan revolution by a long shot.

This seems to be a pretty nonsensical attack on liberals. Both Giuliani and Bloomberg would be considered left of center in most of the country. Is the argument that Newt brought the crime rate down?

I've never been to New York City (been to Boston, DC, etc.), but it seems like there's an entire genre of NYer commentary about how the seedy Times Square was so much better than the current touristy post-Giuliani one.

That seems to feed into Douthat's theories about upper-middle-class indifference to crime.

Don't forget the immense popularity of the Dirty Harry and Death Wish movie series during that time. The public was so fed up with the government's inability to control crime that movies about rogue cops who killed criminals instead of arresting them were hugely successful. It truly was an insecure time.

Heck, I'm just impressed by the proper and appropriate use of the word "irruption".

No, seriously, I am. I'm, uh, something of a word and language geek.

Beyond that, I actually agree with his thesis, at least in part. I've been a registered (Democratic) voter for 35 years, and "law and order" has been a persistent theme in Republican presidential campaigns really up until GWB -- when, frankly, it was no longer much of an issue. Or doesn't the name "Willy Horton" ring a bell? ..bruce..

It doesn't explain it, by itself, and the more textbook recession, inflation, and Iran answers all probably play a bigger role. But the War on Drugs was certainly a big part of both the Reagan and Nixon campaigns. And the Reagan/Meese years were a steady procession of new federal crime measures -- mandatory minimums, three strikes and you're out, the death penalty for drug kingpins, the death penalty for cop-killers, huge federal prisons programs, bloc grants for states and cities that added police, the Victims of Crime Act, on and on.

But don't take my word for it, read the man's own words:

http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=40135

I'm sure the 'law and order' component played a role in shifting the electorate rightward in the 1970s and 1980s, but I think the lefts embrace of civil rights in the 1960s did quite a bit of damage to its majority as well.

Not only did the the Civil Rights act lose the south for a generation (or more), as Johnson said, but the perception that social policies enacted by Democrats were more inclined to help people of color pushed quite a few whites from the D to R column.

Steve P,
Keep thinking it's all spin and that Giuliani was no better at controlling crime than his hapless predecessor (remember Dinkins?). And keep characterizing arguments as nonsensical instead of actually addressing them. I think you are Exhibit A for what Jane was talking about.

Wallster:

Unless I mis-remember it, much of the civil rights legislation, at least the early bits, was passed by Republicans over the objections of Southern Democrats. Republicans lost the South during the Civil War and only got it back when the Left in this country went soft on EVERYTHING.

It wasn't just being soft on crime.
It wasn't just being soft on communism.
It wasn't just blaming America.
It wasn't just over the top and down your throat feminism etc.

It was that the left was soft on crime, soft on communism, blaming America and shoving over the top Feminism down our throats &&etc.

By the time Jimmah the loser Carta took office Inflation was in the double digits, crime was way up, teen pregnancies were way up, unions were shipping cars that were horridly bad, education was starting its death spiral (helped along by said fool when he created a federal agency to kill it).

On, and Nixon wasn't a right winger. He was just right of the Left Wing.

Unless I mis-remember it, much of the civil rights legislation, at least the early bits, was passed by Republicans over the objections of Southern Democrats.

No you remember correctly. Also the South didn’t start to go Republican until the 1990’s which puts it about thirty years (an entire generation) after the civil rights issue had been settled. If Democrats lost the South on cultural issues, it wasn’t race (southern Republicans have generally been very liberal on racial issues as we’ve seen with Bush 43’s support for a guest worker program and lukewarm support for affirmative action), it has to do with a perception that since the 1970’s Democrats are the party that was seen as soft on crime, more likely to blame the United States for the problems in the world, and were embarrassed by or even hostile towards mainstream organized religion.

Umm... Doesn't this theory predict that those places with the greater breakdown of public order would have turned more conservative than the other places? And wasn't the crime increase mostly in cities? And aren't cities the Democratic strongholds today?

Speaking more broadly, since 1960, the Northeast and the coastal West have turned more Democratic and liberal while the South has turned more Republican and conservative. On net, this has translated into a larger gain for Republicans because the South started out as nearly 100% Democratic (though not liberal, of course). To first order, this is the difference between then and now. This can in no way be explained as the effect of a crime wave, can it?

Alex F,

You might be making the assumption that people are immobile and don't move. That has been one explanation for the South becoming Republican -- them damn Yankees moved down in droves (to escape the crime and the ineffectual policies of the Liberal politicians in power).

I don't have any sort of Census data in front of me, and of course it's true that one of the greatest demographic shifts of the past half century has been the South- and West-ward migration. Still, I'd put this as only a second-order political effect that has had more to do with the relative power of regions rather than the actual politics of the particular regions. And I think the burden of proof would be on you to convince me that law-and-order concerns were the primary drivers of the migrations and the political swings. I am defending the conventional wisdom here.

I think there's a lot to be said for the idea that, locally, crime drives the Republicans (white, middle class) to the suburbs or "exurbs" while the Democrats (minority, poor) stay in the city, but that just begs the question in regards to the current debate. Why are the white middle class people Republicans and the poor minorities Democrats?

My point, I guess, isn't that this story is wildly implausible. It's just that it seems to make some very strong empirical predictions which can fairly easily be tested. Like, for instance, people in areas that turned Republican have experienced more crime (whether it's in those areas, or perhaps they moved away). Before I give up on the conventional wisdom, I'd like to see some hard data that proves me wrong and you all right.

And on the subject of data, this seems like exactly the kind of question that political scientists have been studying very seriously for years and years -- what's their consensus?

Alex F,

Perhaps when you're poorer, crackdowns involve random searches, police harrassment or false arrests etc. Perhaps this causes different economic classes or racial groups to view police differently?

Opinions on the OJ Simpson trial broke strongly along racial lines (which correlate strongly with economic status.) What does that say?

Ryan,
I think there's something to what you're saying. It makes sense that people who view themselves primarily as potential victims of crimes would be in favor of "tougher" rules, while the people who are seen by others as potential criminals (and who are more likely to know criminals personally) would be in favor of "softer" rules.

And yet, we're arguing about "the actual irruption of lawlessness that made Nixon and Reagan so appealing to the working-class Americans who actually had to live in failing neighborhoods and unsafe streets", right? I'm sure that "toughness on crime" was a winning issue for those two politicians, but I would still imagine that Nixon and Reagan had the most appeal for those far away from failing neighborhoods and unsafe streets.

I guess there are a few issues that need to be sorted out. Are we talking about,
1) Why were Nixon and Reagan elected, and why were they for the most part popular while they were in office?
2) Why did the country's politics shift from a more liberal consensus (Ike, JFK, LBJ) to a more conservative one (Reagan, Clinton, Bush II)?
3) Why did control of Congress shift from Democratic to Republican?
4) Why did the political geography (red/blue states) shift from whatever it was in 1960 to whatever it is now?

I would guess that 1) has mostly to do with economics with crime as a very small part, 2) might have to do with crime, 3) & 4) have to do more with cultural and racial issues and are almost entirely independent of crime, and in particular the realignment of the south from conservative but Democratic to conservative and Republican. (Some contingencies, too!)

I guess the argument right here is about issue #2, and honestly I'm not sure how "explainable" it is in terms of fundamental forces. Everything affects everything, sure, but would we be having this debate if there hadn't been a butterfly ballot in 2000? After all, the parties have more or less switched off Presidencies, and Congress has only been Republican for a decade and might not be that way for much longer.

So yeah, in conclusion: What are we talking about, again?

Sorry, just to make that clear, I think the realignment of the South *was* crucially important to #'s 3 & 4.

Is there any empirical evidence that these issues have significant effects on elections? Ray Fair has an interesting election model that predicts election outcomes based on the economy, term in office (incumbents have advantage unless same party has stayed in office too long), and war (which favors the incumbent in his model). It has provided good forecasts in decades of testing, and if correct it would seem that ideological voters balance each other out and swing voters vote their pocketbook.

http://fairmodel.econ.yale.edu

In sorting through the political geography of it all , it's important to separate the specific issue of crime in the Reagan era from the much broader issue of 30-40 year conservative shift.

Crime was most pressing as an issue in what we now think of as the "blue states." However, it is important to remember that, unlike GWB, Reagan WON those same states. California, Oregon, Washington, Wisconsin, Illinois, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Delaware, New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Vermont, and Maine all voted against George W. Bush in both 2000 and 2004, and yet they all voted FOR Ronald Reagan in 1980 and 1984.

"how does an increase in crime create support for Republican presidents?" The same reason that the failure of the New Orleans city government and Louisiana state governments to handle the Katrina evacuation was blamed on the President - because public schools and FDR liberalism have left most Americans hopelessly confused about the proper roles of the various levels of government.

I was in NYC in the 1980s (Koch-Dinkins terms), with drugs, prostitutes, gangs and squeegee men as far as the eye could see. Two of my most seared, seared memories from that time: I was propositioned by a beautiful prostitute in fur and italian boots outside the Waldorf Astoria; and, I was driving in heavy traffic down 9th Av in Hell's Kitchen as saw another beautiful prostitute walking down the avenue, stark naked.

The Giuliani-Bloomberg chapter of the city is amazingly different. Property values have nearly quadrupled since 1993. Markets, QED.

Back in the 1970s the neighborhood you grew up in Jane was not a middle class neighborhood. There were NINE SRO hotels within a one block radius from where you grew up. The building you grew up in was middle class, the neighborhood was crap.

I also find the general argument specious. I mean if you recall, Koch was strongly credited with cleaning up the city (Guilanni sanatized it). You want to talk about real estate markets? Think about what your parents paid for their apartment in 1972 (or whenever it was they bought it) and look at what it was worth by the end of the Koch administration. I suspect the value of the apartment went up 1,500%. Now, look at how much it's worth now vs. what it was worth in 1989. I bet it's gone up another 400%...same time frame (17 years) but are we then to say that obviously Koch was a better mayor than Guilianni and Bloomberg because look at what happened to RE markets? Obviously not. The point is I think the agrument you site above has very little merit.

Besides, pretty much anywhere else, both Guilliani and Bloomberg are moderate Democrats...oh wait, until he decided to run for mayor Bloomberg WAS a moderate Democrat.

"The same reason that the failure of the New Orleans city government and Louisiana state governments to handle the Katrina evacuation was blamed on the President - because public schools and FDR liberalism have left most Americans hopelessly confused about the proper roles of the various levels of government."

I suggest that perhaps you lack the understanding about the proper roles in government. FEMA exists because often local governments are overwhelmed by catastrophes of this size. Furthermore it's apparent the the President is a poor manager and not nearly proactive in dealing with issues. This was demonstrated by the poor response to Katrina (not only a local government failure but a federal one as well) it's also apparent on a whole host of other issues (Medicaid drug benefit expansion, border security etc)

The president isn't a middle manager at a McDonalds who follows a manual on how to do everything. His job is an extremely difficult which requires constant learning and flexible of thought. The president's utter disdain of learning is problematic in the position he's in.

The Sixties in general were a terrible period. People remember the Summer of Love, but forget all of the horrors.

Here's an essay: The 1960's: you can have them

The shock to the civil society took in the 60s was pretty rough. Society went through a large number of changes. Rob's piece is pretty good at capturing the upheaval. I for am glad we went through the changes but I rather like America's slight rightward turn after a left detour. The left detour means that the Republican Southern strategy isn't that viable any more as the electorate just isn't as racist as it once was. When things are in turmoil, people look to stabilty and security - two things Republican candidates seem to have locked down.

Kate:

I could not find value history from the NYC Dept of Finance, but this appraisal based on Miller Samuel historical data states that Manhattan home prices increased about 325% from 1977 to 2004 (p.11). It also shows that prices tripled from 1994-2004 (p.16).

So, if you can point me to some better data or discredit the report I cite, I will allow for your view. Otherwise, consider your claims on a 1500% value appreciation during Koch's mayoral terms discredited.

http://www.millersamuel.com/pdf-tank/1096034424rIMRe.pdf

caveatBettor:

Jane and I grew up in the same building and I know the value of the apartments in that building specifically. It was not meant to be a general comment, but very specific to the apartments and the locations of said apartments. I know, for a fact, the value of the apartments in that building and that neighborhood. My point was only that tying the numbers to Democrats or Republicans is stupid...which it is. The whole conversation here is Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc.

Oh, and Caveat, if you want to poke a hole in my argument, point out that the rate of inflation was HUGE in the 1970s which accounts for much of the price increase in the apartment from 1972-1980...of course so does the Yuppie revolution, but there you go.

I think people are forgetting that the Repubs are also the party of tax cuts and the Democrats are the party of tax increases.

Right...'cause Bloomberg didn't raise taxes when he got into off...oh, wait, nevermind.

>Why did control of Congress shift from Democratic
>to Republican?

Just a thought; with the rise of globalization of labor markets, unions took a huge hit. Strikes aren't as effective if your company has 30% extra capacity and can transfer operations to another country and fire you in response to your strike. Democrats had had an alliance with the unions. If one of the pillars in your power base (in terms of fundraising) is taken out, you're going to stumble.

The 'Blue Dogs' may have been trying to correct for this, I think, by switching alliances from unions to larger businesses.

The problem with our system is that Americans live with at least three and even four levels of government. We have federal, state, and local government. (On the local level, some people live with county government and then the government of their city, town, or village.)

This type of system doesn't really exist in Europe, where wishful thinkers continue to salivate over European countries' health care systems, pensions, and other social programs. (Of course, the U.S. was responsible for defending them during the Cold War, so they naturally they all spent less on defense.)

My point is our system makes accountability difficult. Who in all levels of government is responsible for what?

Consider the homeless. In the 1980s, homelessness suddenly became a federal issue. Why? Reagan was president, and liberals could allege that his policies increased the number of homeless and thus were bad. In New York, why weren't Gov. Mario Cuomo, a Democrat, Mayor Ed Koch, a Democrat, or the five borough presidents, who were all Democrats, responsible for the homeless? Of course, they were Democrats and "cared." They could always pass the buck among themselves or to Reagan.

In his book, "Bias," Bernard Goldberg notes that when Bill Clinton was elected, all the homeless disappeared from the airwaves. Yet I still saw many in NYC's subways and on the streets. (Maybe they were Newt Gingrich's and Rudy Giuliani's fault.)

Maybe everyone can finally divide up responsibilities:

The federal government takes care of the elderly.

The state governments take care of the sick.

The local governments take care of the poor.

Programs are abolished. The federal government gets out of the Medicare business. States get rid of anti-poverty programs.

This would be a start. Our taxes would probably go down.

But I don't see it happening. As P.J. O'Rourke once wrote, people are greedy for benefits.

D--: I know what you mean. I thought it was funny how Jesse Jackson & co. started protesting the US millitary activity in Vieques Island, Puerto Rico as soon as his buddy Clinton was out of office.
Like Clinton had nothing to do with the whole deal.

Subtle, he ain't.

I think people are forgetting that the Repubs are also the party of tax cuts and the Democrats are the party of tax increases.

The Republicans seem to be forgetting too. It doesn't mean much if you cut taxes and increase spending.

Kate,
I guess this is what happens when we use labels too much.
It's true that Koch was a democrat, but he's pretty far from what you consider to be your typical liberal of today. In fact, I have a hard time thinking of any democrat right now who is remotely like him. Even Republicans liked him. No doubt he restored a sense of pride in being a New Yorker.
There's also little doubt that crime cleaned up under Giuliani.
I hope we can also agree that Bloomberg is not really a republican, but flies that flag of convenience.
As for Dinkins, that's a man that many democrats would identify with. He wouldn't stand up to bad guys (remember the threats followed by the killing of the Korean store owner by an angry black mob on his watch?). He also sat by while the Australian Jew was murdered by a black mob in Brooklyn in retaliation for a car accident.
Sorry I can't be more specific, but anybody that lived there (as I did) through the Koch,Dinkins/Giuliani administrations can well remember the differences.

Ryan,

P.J. O'Rourke once said that the Republicans are the party that says government doesn't work and get elected and prove it.

Don't forget the immense popularity of the Dirty Harry and Death Wish movie series during that time. The public was so fed up with the government's inability to control crime that movies about rogue cops who killed criminals instead of arresting them were hugely successful.

The protagonist of "Death Wish" was an ex-liberal and vigilante, not a cop. The Dirty Harry character was a "rogue" in the sense that he had no patience for pro-criminal politicians, but he was not portrayed in the films as "killing criminals instead of arresting them" as a general policy -- indeed, in the second Dirty Harry film, Magnum Force, the *villains* were a police execution squad.

The Dirty Harry films became popular because the hero was pro-victim and anti-criminal and made no apologies for it; it was a good antidote to the "the police ARE the criminals" mentality of late 60s/early 70s pop culture.

I'm probably a classical liberal. I rarely vote, but the times I voted that weren't just local elections, I voted for a republican (Bush) and last election I voted against every democrat on the ballot.

I definitely fall into the paper's liberal group. I have no "ingroup". I disdain hierarchal organization. And, I have no idea what purity is.

What do you think Bush's appeal to me was? (Hint: In 2000, in my mind, we were clearly headed for a recession and interest rates were low. In 2002, I supported the war in Iraq, and I suspected that Saddam did not have stores of WMD before the ground invasion.)

Kate writes: "I mean if you recall, Koch was strongly credited with cleaning up the city (Guilanni sanatized it)."

Excuse me, but didn't much of the crack crime epidemic in NYC happen on Koch's watch? The city's recovery was impressive only in relative terms, from the burnt-out disaster zone of the 70s. And how exactly do America's political labels fit will with those of New York City? I'm not sure I understand what Kate is arguing.

Alex F: Thanks for the intelligent posts. You may well be right in your basic point but political shifts in response to crime wouldn't just occur due to absolute levels of crime, but due to relative shifts. Put another way:

If you were a moderate voter who lived in a suburban area where front doors were routinely left unlocked in 1960 and, by 1980, doors were always kept locked due to a break-in and assault that happened in 1973 (I'm creating a hypothetical situation here), I could see how that would propel a voter towards a law-and-order stance that would spill over into political orientation. How do you respond?

Isn't it interesting that the fall in crime coincides so nicely with the development of computers, dna fingerprinting, the use of databases and networks in law enforcement?

Maybe that had more of an impact than any conservative/liberal policies on the fall of crime.

Why do conservatives win elections?

Because they give away free ringtones?

One of the biggest myths floating out there is that Guiliani cut crime in New york. He didn't. The decline in crime in New York began in the early 1990s , before he was elected and had a chance to implement any policies. This was part of a nation trend,when crime plummeted to historic lows. Crime also fell in cities where Guiliani was not mayor. Crime also fell in places like Boston, Bridgport, LA and Detroit. I'll give him credit for taking actions consistent with the trend, and think he was a pretty good mayor, but he did not cause this drop in crime all by himself.

Very interesting discussion, folks. Expecially the ringtone hypothesis.

My one contribution - any analysis of Repub/Dem voting response would have to be based upon their contemporaneous perception of crime, not based upon actual crime statistics or personal experience of victimhood. Very hard to isolate. Bleeds/Ledes has been journalistic practice for decades, at least since Viet Nam, and movies became bloodier at roughly the same time.

Isn't it interesting that the fall in crime coincides so nicely with the development of computers, dna fingerprinting, the use of databases and networks in law enforcement? Maybe that had more of an impact than any conservative/liberal policies on the fall of crime

Except that the very notion that law enforcement can lead to a drop in crime is, itself, a conservative idea that 60s/70s liberals disdained. If, in 1970, you said something like "the best way to reduce crime is to do a better job of catching criminals and locking them up", most of the leading Democratic intellectuals would have disagreed with you, while most of the leading Republican intellectuals would have agreed.

Keep in mind how close some of these elections were. For example, the election in 1968 was neck and neck until Nixon's attemped sabotage of the Vietnam peace talks took effect.

Now having read the entire paper, I have a tad more to say.

Clearly, the liberal intellectual position - that only two of the five types of morality can be admitted or acted upon, the others being anathema - does not really hold even with liberals. The current situation with Lieberman is a blatant exercise of ingroup/outgroup morality and hierarchy morality.

For example, note the loud cries of "how dare Lieberman say bad things about President Clinton, the leader of our party?" on the Democratic websites.

Good article. Fortunate, even, if you'd like to have two rational parties. Me, I'd settle for one.

I think it was a double cause. The conservatives cut their mental health budgets and let out the loonies who were promptly arrested and put in jail, displacing criminals, and the conservatives started enforcing drug laws and put junkies in jail, displacing criminals.
Now that we've built three times as many prisons per capita in the high crime demographic categories, criminals are actually going to jail again and that is naturally bringing down crime rates to fifties levels by incapacitating them like we did in the fifties.

I think it was a double cause. The conservatives cut their mental health budgets and let out the loonies who were promptly arrested and put in jail, displacing criminals, and the conservatives started enforcing drug laws and put junkies in jail, displacing criminals.
Now that we've built three times as many prisons per capita in the high crime demographic categories, criminals are actually going to jail again and that is naturally bringing down crime rates to fifties levels by incapacitating them like we did in the fifties.

I think it was a double cause.

And to prove it, you made a double post! ;)

"Why are the white middle class people Republicans and the poor minorities Democrats?"

Because Democrats play the anti-white race card at least as well as the Republicans play the anti-black race card. Since there are many more whites than blacks, this has been a losing strategy for Democrats.

"It's just that it seems to make some very strong empirical predictions which can fairly easily be tested."

Indeed it does. It predicts that people will move away from high crime areas (i.e. Democrats)

Demographers point out that the drop in the crime rate came 16 years after Roe v. Wade. Unwanted children are being killed as fetii rather than being born, raised badly and negligently, and becoming criminals. Every chile a wanted chile.

In case anybody's interested, I'm trying to duplicate (on an uncontrolled basis) the results of the first paper Jane links to. Granted, the cat is out of the bag, but I suspect it might still produce interesting results: Basis of Morals Survey at Tacitus.org

Jult52 writes: If you were a moderate voter who lived in a suburban area where front doors were routinely left unlocked in 1960 and, by 1980, doors were always kept locked due to a break-in and assault that happened in 1973 (I'm creating a hypothetical situation here), I could see how that would propel a voter towards a law-and-order stance that would spill over into political orientation.

Till00 writes: Any analysis of Repub/Dem voting response would have to be based upon their contemporaneous perception of crime, not based upon actual crime statistics or personal experience of victimhood.

Anything is possible. People are motivated by lots of things that may or may not make sense to others (or to themselves), and on an individual level any event can have virtually any psychological effect. But at some point, you have to ask what you really mean by an "explanation".

When I look for root causes, I want to see something that yields genuine predictions, not something that merely fits a just-so retroactive story. A situation that can only be explained in retrospect by "this occured, and this is how people happened to respond en masse" is a situation that I would say has been *described* rather than *explained*. If perceptions are all that matter, and perceptions are molded by propaganda and framing more than by real events, I think you have to say that the events then were not the fundamental root cause but rather a step in a chain of unpredictable events. (Mixed metaphor, sorry).

There is plenty in the world that is in fact contingent and is not truly explainable. Steven Gould used to write that if you "rewound" evolution and let it play forward again, you wouldn't come up with anything like the species we have today. I think the same is more or less true of human history -- there are lots of events that could have unfolded in any number of ways, and the one we got really was just chance.

So: did a nationwide crime wave truly cause people to become more conservative, or did conservatives happen to better exploit people's latent fears against the background of a crime wave? Or was crime just another issue on which conservatives took one side, liberals another, and now seems important in retrospect because the nation happens to have shifted towards what was the conservative point of view?

I would also add that being in the avant garde on an issue does not necessarily win you votes -- you want to be where voters currently are, not where they will be. See Republicans on race in 1870, Democrats on race in 1968, or if I may offer a prediction, Democrats on gay marriage today.

Think of newspaper owners as sensible people. They know that newspapers are going to die in the next few years. Why not just "burn the patch" in terms of credibility by supporting the Republicans and spinning the news that way? What's to lose?

Population shifts towards the South and West have been mentioned, but not, I think, the shift from urban to suburban. Suburbs are more about "me" than urban areas are, simply because there is less interaction. The Republican message is consistently more focused on the individual rather than on the group. The Democrats need to either (a) learn to frame their message so that individual suburbanites see an individual benefit, or (b) convice the suburbs to see themselves as part of a larger community rather than just a collection of individuals.

"I think it was a double cause. The conservatives cut their mental health budgets and let out the loonies who were promptly arrested and put in jail, displacing criminals, and the conservatives started enforcing drug laws and put junkies in jail, displacing criminals."

wkwillis, what put loonies on the streets wasn't conservative budget-cutting, but liberals getting the notion that the loonies would be better off wandering around free than locked up. It worked out about as well as other liberal notions of that era, like paying poor women to have children with no man "in the house", and fighting a little war with an undersized force of poorly-trained draftees while calling for no sacrifices at all from the rest of the Americans.

As for the war on drugs, it has received unquestioning support from nearly every elected conservative and liberal. It began under FDR (liberal Dem), and was greatly expanded under LBJ (liberal Dem) and Nixon (Republican, but no conservative), and every President since has added to the problem. The last really liberal Republican in the 60's and 70's was Nelson Rockefeller - and he gave New York state the most draconian drug laws in the country. I only recall one prominent voice against drug laws in those days - William F. Buckley.

The idea that government can and should force a change in behavior on people is part of the leftist/progressive/liberal agenda, not part of American conservatism - but too many conservatives forgot their principles and supported drug laws because they hated "jazz musicians", Mexican pot-smokers, hippies, gangbangers, etc... And, when they win elections, supposed conservatives have proven just as likely to get power-drunk as liberals.

As a conservative, I believe in self-sufficiency. When I had a suitable handset, I edited my own midi files and downloaded them to my phone as ringtones. I also see myself as an individual even while residing in the inner city.

"When I look for root causes, I want to see something that yields genuine predictions, not something that merely fits a just-so retroactive story"

To test the theory, we would need a parallel universe where Great Society style programs were not implemented. The theory would predict the absence of a rightward shift in the absence of these programs. There is no alternate universe but there are other countries. Unfortunately, much of the anglophone world was in thrall to the same sort of ideas at about the same time.

But it is likely I have overlooked a valid counterexample.

what put loonies on the streets wasn't conservative budget-cutting, but liberals getting the notion that the loonies would be better off wandering around free than locked up

Um, no. During Reagan's stint as govenor of California, and later as President, he systematicly gutted the mental health systems, dumping many people from state facilities onto the street.

Oh, and one other thing. It's not just rising rates of crime. When you are victimised you are permanently converted to another political polarisation.
After the bank collapses wiped out one fifth of the American people in the twenties and thirties, they permanently voted liberal on an economic basis. It wasn't until the Republicans under Eisenhower made it plain that they would not seek to roll back the economic changes the Roosevelt had made that they were allowed back into political life. That was why "Mr. Republican" Taft losing to Eisenhower was so important.

wkw,

"That was why "Mr. Republican" Taft losing to Eisenhower was so important."

Important for whom?

Um, no. During Reagan's stint as govenor of California, and later as President, he systematicly gutted the mental health systems, dumping many people from state facilities onto the street.

Pfft, I *wish* the California governor had the power to dictate what the state spends its money on. We wouldn't have a deficit, and a whole lot of Democratic-voting leeches would lose their government jobs and have to find real work.

But sadly, in reality it is the state legislature which passes the budget and determines, among other things, how much money is spent on mental health care. And the California legislature is, and was, controlled by Democrats.

Another thing to note -- Reagan also signed a law legalizing abortion. Just because a conservative politician does something doesn't mean the action he takes is a conservative one. California is a liberal state, and any governor, liberal or conservative, must pay some respects to liberal policies if he wants to get anything done.

Re: mental health policy and the idiocy of deinstitutionalizing the mentally ill, it was a confluence of both liberal and conservative foolishness. The mentality of liberals during the sixties and seventies was that mental hospitals were cold, impersonal oppressive places a la "One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest," and when pharmaceutical control of mental illness started to show promise, liberals were primed to fire Nurse Ratchet. Conservatives, for their part, were only too happy to reduce government expenditure on mental health services, and so everybody happily joined hands and closed the hospitals.

Problem is, lunatics don't take their meds unless someone's there to make sure. So we got the homeless problem and all that. A perfect storm, resulting from the merging unwisdom of the natural tendencies of each political ideology.

Yes, there was clearly a wrongheaded alliance between the left (which believed that mental health clients deserved dignity that they cannot receive in a mental institution) and the right (which believed that deinstitutionalization would save money) in passing the laws that mainstreamed clients who would formerly have been institutionalized.

Since the resulting society has visible problems, each side wants to blame the problems on the other. Great example of ingroup/outgroup thinking. It's a great example of the irony that liberals pretend to not allow "ingroup" as a valid moral basis, even though they use it quite frequently.

and the right (which believed that deinstitutionalization would save money)

You should substitute "politicians" for "the right". The notion that getting rid of an unpopular government program would save money was in no way confined to the Right. The right/left difference lay in what the politicians wanted to do with the money saved (e.g., tax cuts vs. new government programs).

In any case, the problem of mentally ill homeless people isn't caused by a lack of public facilities, but a lack of legal support for locking up people who are (a) mentally ill but (b) not yet guilty of any crime that would merit a long term of forced isolation from society. Even if the states had shiny new mental health facilities ready to receive patients, you *still* wouldn't be allowed to force the guy who stands on the street corner screaming at invisible people to actually get treatment in one.

Personally, I can't imagine that the seventies were any worse than any previous time period based on crime.

From the nineteen twenties until now, more and more crimes have gone from the lists of unreported, undelt with by authority to incidents that police are called in to deal with.

The reporting rate on rape, for instance. Fifty years ago that crime hardly ever was reported, let alone investigated.

Many comments focused on New York and somewhat on California. But it seems to me it's the red states that changed the most since 1970. IN the South, the change was not due to influence of migrating "Yankees", as someone above suggested.

Race was always a divisive factor in the South. But one particular issue drove moderates over to the conservative side. Forced busing of schoolchildren in the 70's ended our romance with liberalism forever. Though we feared rising crime somewhat, parents - including mine - were terrified of seeing their kids shipped across town to predominantly black schools.

Prior to busing, migration to suburbs was primarily an economic response: land was so much cheaper there. Once busing started, migration became, at least in our parents' minds, a survival issue.

Some may call "white flight" a race-based action. I don't see it that way at all. It was simply fear of having children taken out of safe and known neighborhoods.

Michael Cain: "Suburbs are more about "me" than urban areas are, simply because there is less interaction."

Do you live in the suburbs? In what state?

I've lived in suburbs in California, Tennessee, Missouri, and Texas. I've observed great interaction. Churches are important uniters in the suburbs. So are youth activities such as cub scouts, baseball, soccer, and dance classes. Local politics in the suburbs is just as vibrant as that in the big cities.

I think my wife and I are typical suburbanites. We know all our neighbors, except for the several Indian immigrant families who choose to remain socially segregated, despite our best efforts to involve them. We've hosted block parties for 100 people, and attended smaller parties of our neighbors. We've campaigned door-to-door on tax and zoning issues. We see other friends at the town-sponsored 4th of July picnics and Christmas parades.

Do you have reason to believe our experience is not normal for suburbanites?

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