Unexpectedly, the 2020 presidential campaign is drilling down on petty crime and homelessness, writes columnist Thomas Edsall in the New York Times. President Donald Trump and his allies are reviving law-and-order themes similar to those used effectively by Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew in the late 1960s and early 1970s to demonize racial minorities. Republicans want to discredit liberal law enforcement initiatives adopted by a new breed of Democratic prosecutors who are pursuing policies to decriminalize vagrancy, and eliminate cash bail, and are playing a key role in a politicized movement to curb mass incarceration and to roll back “the carceral state.”
Backers of the decarceration movement endorse ideas like eliminating prison for lower-level crimes, incentivizing states to decarcerate, ending bail and abolishing private prisons. The movement provides ammunition for a powerful counterattack from Trump, Attorney General William Barr and other law-and-order Republicans—effectively expanding the 50-year-old culture war into new territory for the 2020 election, says Edsall, Democrats seek to extend broader rights to those who have been stigmatized or marginalized and to provide more freedom to criminal defendants, the homeless, the mentally ill and people imprisoned through prosecutorial misconduct and judicial error. Republicans are betting that the Democratic presidential candidates have moved substantially farther to the left on issues of crime and punishment than the voting public.