Democrats Reject Law and Order

 The American Spectator; Chicago awash in crime.

"And oh yes. The governor is telling his citizens not only to live with crime, but if they are going to monitor anything, it should not be criminals, but ICE agents. Really."

Calvin Coolidge was not amused. 

 It was 1919, and the Republican governor of Massachusetts, Calvin Coolidge by name, had had it with a lawless “police strike” in Boston.

"Almost 100 years later, in 2018, The Washington Post would note:

"The phrase ‘law and order’ was used as the title of a 1919 speech given by Calvin Coolidge in response to a police strike in Boston. Coolidge, then governor of Massachusetts, had called in the National Guard to quell a weekend of lawlessness when the department attempted to unionize. The Boston papers characterized the cops as Bolsheviks who set out to destroy civil society.

"“There are strident voices, urging resistance to law in the name of freedom,” Coolidge said. “They are not seeking freedom for themselves; they have it. They are seeking to enslave others. Their works are evil. They know it. They must be resisted.”

"The future president added harshly, “Laws are not manufactured. They are not imposed. They are rules of action existing from everlasting to everlasting. He who resists them, resists himself. He commits suicide. … To obey is life. To disobey is death.”

"By 1968, GOP presidential nominee Richard Nixon had revived the Coolidge phrase and campaigned across the country for a return to law and order.

"Nixon’s campaign slogan resonated — with reason. In 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King and Democratic presidential candidate Senator Robert F. Kennedy (father of HHS Secretary RFK Jr.) had both been assassinated. During the last four years of Democrat President Lyndon Johnson’s presidency, riots had broken out in major American cities.

"The riots had begun in New York’s Harlem in 1964, moving on to the Los Angeles Watts section in 1965 and, in massive fashion, to Detroit and Newark in 1967. History records that following the assassination of Dr. King, there were disturbances in over 100 urban areas around the country.

"In Chicago specifically, the riot there — per Wikipedia — “left 11 Chicago citizens dead, 48 wounded by police gunfire, 90 policemen injured, and 2,150 people arrested.”

"Chicago has a history of facing crime on its streets. And right this minute, Chicago’s crime problems are making headlines again. Take this headline from the Chicago Sun-Times: “9 killed, 52 wounded over Labor Day weekend, most violent holiday weekend of summer,” with the subtitle, “As President Donald Trump threatens to send the National Guard into Chicago to quell violence, violence surged, with 16 people wounded over the weekend in three mass shootings. Other attacks left 9 dead.” . . .  More...