Pat Buchanan: The return of 'Law and Order' in New York

Last week, Brooklyn Borough President and former police captain Eric Adams took the lead in the New York mayoral race with 32% of the Democratic primary vote, 10 points more than progressive Maya Wiley, who had the endorsement of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Adams’ anti-crime and pro-cop campaign carried four of New York City’s five boroughs, including Ocasio-Cortez’s congressional district in Queens. He lost only Manhattan; though, under the ranked-voting system New York uses, his victory is not yet confirmed.

Last Wednesday, President Biden went before a White House podium to outline his program for dealing with the plague of shootings, killings and murders that have marked and marred the five months of his presidency.

What does all this tell us?

“Law and order,” the issue that arose in the ’60s to tear apart President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal Coalition, is back. And the emotional anti-cop wave after the George Floyd killing in Minneapolis a year ago, manifest in the “defund the police!” demand of Black Lives Matter, has receded.

America is saying: We don’t want rogue cops, but we do want more cops in our neighborhoods and our communities to stop the shootings that are terrorizing, wounding, maiming and killing us.

Biden recognizes the political danger. He is old enough to recall what the law-and-order issue did to his party in 1968.

That year, George Wallace, running as a third-party candidate, took 13% of the presidential vote. Four years later, in 1972, the year Biden was elected senator, the Alabama governor was the front-runner for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination when he was shot by a would-be assassin in a Laurel, Md., shopping center.

The Democratic nominee that year, Sen. George McGovern, a man of the progressive left, lost 49 states to President Richard Nixon.

Sen. Joe Biden helped to write the crime bill of 1994, which many liberals now fault for contributing to a massive increase in incarcerations. But today, as president, Biden is facing a similar and serious crime crisis and cannot be unaware of its political potency.

The Democratic Party’s dilemma: Its progressive wing believes defunding and reimagining police work to protect people of color from abuse by rogue cops is the first priority.

Adams’ vote in liberal New York, however, suggests that a higher priority for Blacks and Hispanics is public safety and the disarming and removal of the armed thugs and the street gangs who imperil it.

To secure the safety of poor communities, several elements always have been needed: police to prevent crimes and arrest the criminals who commit them, prosecutors who will put them away, and prison cells to house them.

In the early 1960s, like today, the elite and our major media declared “law and order” to be a “code word” for racism.

But the departure of millions of working-class voters from the Democratic Party of Roosevelt, Harry Truman and John F. Kennedy, and its move to the party of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, testified that Middle Americans believed in safe streets and would reward leaders who would keep them safe — with more cops.

Biden spoke last week as though the inner-city menace was the guns with which people are being shot, not the criminals using them.

But some of the folks helping to produce record gun sales today are Black folks who know who and what the threats to their families really are. Gun control is not crime control, and it is crime that is the enemy.