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      We Are Living in Richard Nixon’s America. Escaping It Won’t Be Easy.

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      It seems so naïve now, that moment in 2020 when Democratic insiders started to talk of Joe Biden as a transformational figure. But there were reasons to believe. To hold off a pandemic-induced collapse, the federal government had injected $2.2 trillion into the economy, much of it in New Deal-style relief. The summer’s protests altered the public’s perception of race’s role in the criminal justice system. And analyses were pointing to Republican losses large enough to clear the way for the biggest burst of progressive legislation since the 1960s.Two years on, the truth is easier to see. We aren’t living in Franklin Roosevelt’s America, or Lyndon Johnson’s, or Donald Trump’s, or even Joe Biden’s. We’re living in Richard Nixon’s.Not the America of Nixon’s last years, though there are dim echoes of it in the Jan. 6 hearings, but the nation he built before Watergate brought him down, where progressive possibilities would be choked off by law and order’s toxic politics and a Supreme Court he’d helped to shape.He already had his core message set in the early days of his 1968 campaign. In a February speech in New Hampshire, he said: “When a nation with the greatest tradition of the rule of law is torn apart by lawlessness,” he said, “when a nation which has been the symbol of equality of opportunity is torn apart by racial strife … then I say it’s time for new leadership in the United States of America.”There it is — the fusion of crime, race and fear that Nixon believed would carry him to the presidency.Over the course of that year, he gave his pitch a populist twist by saying that he was running to defend all those hard-working, law-abiding Americans who occupied “the silent center.”A month later, after a major Supreme Court ruling on school integration, he quietly told key supporters that if he were elected, he would nominate only justices who would oppose the court’s progressivism. And on the August night he accepted the Republican nomination, he gave it all a colorblind sheen. “To those who say that law and order is the code word for racism, there and here is a reply,” he said. “Our goal is justice for every American.”In practice it didn’t work that way. Within two years of his election, Nixon had passed two major crime bills laced with provisions targeting poor Black communities. One laid the groundwork for a racialized war on drugs. The other turned the criminal code of Washington, D.C., into a model for states to follow by authorizing the district’s judges to issue no-knock warrants, allowing them to detain suspects they deemed dangerous and requiring them to impose mandatory minimum sentences on those convicted of violent crimes.And the nation’s police would have all the help they needed to restore law and order. Lyndon Johnson had sent about $20 million in aid to police departments and prison systems in his last two years in office. Nixon sent $3 billion. Up went departments’ purchases of military-grade weapons, their use of heavily armed tactical patrols, the number of officers they put on the streets. And up went the nation’s prison population, by 16 percent, while the Black share of the newly incarcerated reached its highest level in 50 years.Nixon’s new order reached into the Supreme Court, too, just as he said it would. His predecessors had made their first nominations to the court by the fluid standards presidents tended to apply to the process: Dwight Eisenhower wanted a moderate Republican who seemed like a statesman, John Kennedy someone with the vigor of a New Frontiersman, Johnson an old Washington hand who understood where his loyalties lay. For his first appointment, in May 1969, Nixon chose a little-known federal judge, Warren Burger, with an extensive record supporting prosecutorial and police power over the rights of the accused.When a second seat opened a few months later, he followed the same pattern, twice nominating judges who had at one point either expressed opposition to the integration of the races or whose rulings were regarded as favoring segregation. Only when the Senate rejected both of them did Nixon fall back on Harry Blackmun, the sort of centrist Ike would have loved.Two more justices stepped down in September 1971. Again Nixon picked nominees who he knew would be tough on crime and soft on civil rights — and by then, he had a more expansive agenda in mind. It included an aversion to government regulation of the private sector — and so one pick was the courtly corporate lawyer Lewis Powell, who had written an influential memo that year to the director of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce advocating a robust corporate defense of the free enterprise system. Another item on Nixon’s agenda was to devolve federal power down to the states. William Rehnquist, an assistant attorney general committed to that view, was his other pick. The two foundational principles of an increasingly energized conservatism were set into the court by Nixon’s determination to select his nominees through a precisely defined litmus test previous presidents hadn’t imagined applying.Our view of the Burger court may be skewed in part because Nixon’s test didn’t include abortion. By 1971, abortion politics had become furiously contested, but the divisions followed demography as well as political affiliation: In polling then (which wasn’t as representative as it is today), among whites, men were slightly more likely than women to support the right to choose, the non-Catholic college-educated more likely than those without college degrees, non-Catholics far more likely than Catholics, who anchored the opposition. So it wasn’t surprising that after oral arguments, three of the four white Protestant men Nixon had put on the court voted for Roe, and that one of them wrote the majority opinion.Justice Blackmun was still drafting the court’s decision in May 1972 when Nixon sent a letter to New York’s Catholic cardinal, offering his “admiration, sympathy and support” for the church stepping in as “defenders of the right to life of the unborn.” The Republican assemblywoman who had led New York’s decriminalization of abortion denounced his intervention as “a patent pitch for the Catholic vote.” That it was. In November, Nixon carried the Catholic vote, thanks to a move that gave the abortion wars a partisan alignment they hadn’t had before.Nixon’s version of law and order has endured, through Ronald Reagan’s war on drugs, George H. W. Bush’s Crime Control Act of 1990 and Bill Clinton’s crime bill to broken windows, stop-and-frisk and the inexorable rise in mass incarceration. The ideological vetting of justices has increased in intensity and in precision.Mr. Trump’s term entrenched a party beholden to the configurations of politics and power that Nixon had shaped half a century ago. The possibility of progressive change that seemed to open in 2020 has now been shut down. The court’s supermajority handed down the first of what could be at least a decade of rulings eviscerating liberal precedents.Crime and gun violence now outstrip race as one of the electorates’ major concerns.Mr. Trump, in a speech on Tuesday, made it clear that he would continue to hammer the theme as he considers a 2024 run: “If we don’t have safety, we don’t have freedom,” he said, adding that “America First must mean safety first” and “we need an all-out effort to defeat violent crime in America and strongly defeat it. And be tough. And be nasty and be mean if we have to.”An order so firmly entrenched won’t easily be undone. It’s tempting to talk about expanding the court or imposing age limits. But court reform has no plausible path through the Senate. Even if it did, the results might not be progressive: Republicans are as likely as Democrats to pack a court once they control Congress, and age limits wouldn’t affect some of the most conservative justices for at least another 13 years. The truth is the court will be remade as it always has been, a justice at a time.The court will undoubtedly limit progressive policies, too, as it has already done on corporate regulation and gun control. But it’s also opened up the possibility of undoing some of the partisan alignments that Nixon put into place, on abortion most of all. Now that Roe is gone, the Democrats have the chance to reclaim that portion of anti-abortion voters who support the government interventions — like prenatal and early child care — that a post-Roe nation desperately needs and the Republican Party almost certainly won’t provide.Nothing matters more, though, than shattering Nixon’s fusion of race, crime and fear. To do that, liberals must take up violent crime as a defining issue, something they have been reluctant to do, and then to relentlessly rework it, to try to break the power of its racial dynamic by telling the public an all-too-obvious truth: The United States is harassed by violent crime because it’s awash in guns, because it has no effective approach to treating mental illness and the epidemic of drug addiction, because it accepts an appalling degree of inequality and allows entire sections of the country to tumble into despair.Making that case is a long-term undertaking, too, as is to be expected of a project trying to topple half a century of political thinking. But until Nixon’s version of law and order is purged from American public life, we’re going to remain locked into the nation he built on its appeal, its future shaped, as so much of its past has been, by its racism and its fear.Kevin Boyle, a history professor at Northwestern University, is the author of, most recently, “The Shattering: America in the 1960s.”The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Crime and Political Punishment

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      Results from Tuesday’s primaries in California suggest that crime may be a big issue in the midterm elections. In San Francisco, a progressive prosecutor was ousted in a recall vote. In Los Angeles, a businessman and former Republican who has run for mayor on the promise to be a big crime fighter made a strong showing.It’s not hard to see why crime has moved up on the political agenda. Murders surged nationwide in 2020 and ticked up further in 2021, although we don’t really know why. Right-wingers blame Black Lives Matter, because of course they do. A more likely explanation is the stress caused by the pandemic — stress that, among other things, led to a large increase in domestic violence.Despite the recent surge, the overall homicide rate is still well below its peak in 1991, and the geography of the political backlash doesn’t seem closely correlated with actual crime rates: San Francisco and Los Angeles both have less violent crime than, say, Houston. But rising crime is real, and voter concern is understandable.But will the public backlash against crime lead to positive results? I wish I could be optimistic.At the very least, we’ll need to get past some widespread misconceptions. And even then, talking about cracking down on crime is easy; actually doing something about it isn’t.First, we need to get past the idea that crime is mainly a big-city problem — an idea that is still very much out there, even though it has long since stopped being true. Last year J.D. Vance, now the Republican nominee for senator from Ohio — and definitely in the running for one of America’s most cynical politicians — tweeted to his followers: “I have to go to New York soon, and I’m trying to figure out where to stay. I hear it’s disgusting and violent there.” I think that was sort of a joke, but one that he knew perfectly well that many of his followers wouldn’t get.The truth, as Bloomberg’s Justin Fox recently documented, is that New York is remarkably safe, not just compared with other large U.S. cities, but also compared with small towns and rural areas. In particular, New York City has a substantially lower homicide rate than that of Ohio as a whole.This doesn’t mean that everything is fine in the Big Apple; Eric Adams was elected mayor in part because crime has risen sharply, and he took a get-tough-on-crime stance. But in a rational world politicians from the heartland wouldn’t be sneering at New York; they’d be looking at our biggest city, which also happens to be one of the safest places in America, and trying to figure out what it’s doing right.Another misconception we need to get past is the idea that rising crime is all about immigration. Vance, in particular, has based his campaign largely on demagoguery about immigration, and especially about immigrant crime — demagoguery that seems to work best in places with very few immigrants: Less than 5 percent of Ohio’s population is foreign-born, compared with 38 percent in New York City.Even if we can avoid the misconceptions, however, what can politicians actually do about crime?It would help if we knew what caused crime to fall so much between the early 1990s and the mid-2010s — a decline, by the way, that was accompanied every step of the way by Gallup polls showing a plurality, and usually a large majority, of Americans asserting that crime was rising. But my reading is that there’s no consensus on why that decline — which took place all across the nation, in red states and blue — took place.It would also help if there were a clear pattern to the crime wave of 2020-21. But like the earlier decline, it was pretty much universal across America; it hit states and cities run by conservative Republicans, centrists and liberal Democrats with more or less equal force.So complaining about crime is easy, but actually bringing it down is hard; in fact, New Yorkers already seem deeply disillusioned with Adams’s efforts.One thing that might help is better policing; the available evidence suggests that severe sentences for convicted criminals don’t do much to deter crime, but that an increased probability of being caught does. So “defund the police” was a stupid (and politically destructive) slogan; we probably need to devote more, not less, resources to law enforcement. But of course we also need the police who do their job — the story from Uvalde just keeps getting worse — and don’t abuse their position. If fear of crime is a real issue, so is minority groups’ fear of being abused by the people who are supposed to protect them, and we can’t simply trust the police to always do the right thing.Oh, and it would help matters if criminals weren’t equipped with military-grade weapons and body armor — and no, having everyone else heavily armed isn’t the answer. New York doesn’t have low crime by American standards because it’s full of good guys with guns.Anyway, like it or not, crime will be an issue in November. As I said, I wish I could be optimistic. But my fear is that the beneficiaries of the new focus on crime will be politicians who have nothing to offer but tough talk.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Sometimes, History Goes Backward

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      Bret Stephens: Hi, Gail. I don’t know if you remember the Lloyd Bridges character from the movie “Airplane,” the guy who keeps saying, “Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit smoking/drinking/amphetamines/sniffing glue.” We were away last week and … stuff happened. Your thoughts on what appears to be the imminent demise of Roe v. Wade?Gail Collins: Well, Bret, I have multitudinous thoughts, some of them philosophical and derived from my Catholic upbringing. Although I certainly don’t agree with it, I understand the philosophical conviction that life begins at conception.Bret: As a Jew, I believe that life begins when the kids move out of the house.Gail: But I find it totally shocking that people want to impose that conviction on the Americans who believe otherwise — while simultaneously refusing to help underprivileged young women obtain birth control.Bret: Agree.Gail: So we have a Supreme Court that’s imposing the religious beliefs of one segment of the country on everybody else. Which is deeply, deeply unconstitutional.You agree with that part, right?Bret: Not entirely.I’ve always thought it was possible to oppose Roe v. Wade on constitutional grounds, irrespective of religious beliefs, on the view that it was wiser to let voters rather than unelected judges decide the matter. But that was at the time the case was decided in 1973.Right now, I think it’s appalling to overturn Roe — after it’s been the law of the land for nearly 50 years; after it’s been repeatedly affirmed by the Supreme Court; after tens of millions of American women over multiple generations have come of age with the expectation that choice is a fundamental right; after we thought the back-alley abortion was a dark chapter of bygone years; after we had come to believe that we were long past the point where it should not make a fundamental difference in the way we exercise our rights as Americans whether we live in one state or another.Gail: If we’re going to have courts, can’t think of many things more basic for them to protect than control of your own body. But we’ve gotten to the same place, more or less. Continue.Bret: I’m also not buying the favorite argument-by-analogy of some conservatives that stare decisis doesn’t matter, because certain longstanding precedents — like the Plessy v. Ferguson decision that enshrined segregation for 58 years until it was finally overturned in Brown v. Board of Ed. in 1954 — clearly deserved to be overturned. Plessy withdrew a right that was later restored, while Roe granted a right that might now be rescinded.I guess the question now is how this will play politically. Will it energize Democrats to fight for choice at the state level or stop the Republicans in the midterms?Gail: Democrats sure needed to be energized somehow. This isn’t the way I’d have chosen, but it’s a powerful reminder of what life would be like under total Republican control.Bret: Ending the right to choose when it comes to abortion seems to be of a piece with ending the right to choose when it comes to the election.Gail: And sort of ironic that overturning Roe may be one of Donald Trump’s biggest long-term impacts on American life. I guarantee you that ending abortion rights ranks around No. 200 on his personal list of priorities.Bret: Ha!Gail: When you talk about your vision of America, it’s always struck me as a place with limited government but strong individual rights. Would you vote for a Democratic Congress that would pass a legislative version of Roe? Or a Republican Congress that blows kisses to Justice Alito?Bret: I’ll swallow my abundant objections to Democratic policy ideas if that would mean congressional legislation affirming the substance of Roe as the law of the land. Some things are just more important than others.Gail: Bret, I bow to your awesomeness.Bret: Minimum sanity isn’t awesomeness, but thanks! Then again, Democrats could really help themselves if they didn’t keep fumbling the political ball. Like on immigration. And inflation. And crime. And parental rights in kids’ schooling. And all the stupid agita about Elon Musk buying Twitter. If you were advising Democrats to shift a little toward the center on one issue, what would it be?Gail: I dispute your bottom line, which is that the Democrats’ problem is being too liberal. The Democrats’ problem is not getting things done.Bret: Not getting things done because they’re too liberal. Sorry, go on.Gail: In a perfect world I’d want them to impose a windfall profits tax on the energy companies, which are making out like bandits, and use the money to give tax rebates to lower-income families. While also helping ease inflation by suspending the gas tax. Temporarily.Bret: “Temporarily” in the sense of the next decade or so.Gail: In the real world, suspending the gas tax is probably the quickest fix to ease average family finance. Although let me say I hate, hate, hate the idea. Not gonna go into a rant about global warming right now, but reserving it for the future.What’s your recommendation?Bret: Extend Title 42 immediately to avoid a summer migration crisis at the southern border. Covid cases are rising again so there’s good epidemiological justification. Restart the Keystone XL pipeline: We should be getting more of our energy from Canada, not begging the Saudis to pump more oil. Cut taxes not just for gasoline but also urge the 13 states that have sales taxes on groceries to suspend them: It helps families struggling with exploding food bills. Push for additional infrastructure spending, including energy infrastructure, and call it the Joe Manchin Is the Man Act or whatever other flattery is required to get his vote. And try to reprise a version of President Biden’s 1994 crime bill to put more cops on the streets as a way of showing the administration supports the police and takes law-and-order issues seriously.I’m guessing you’re loving this?Gail: Wow, so much to fight about. Let me just quickly say that “more cops on the street” is a slogan rather than a plan. Our police do need more support, and there are two critical ways to help. One is to create family crisis teams to deal with domestic conflicts that could escalate into violence. The other is to get the damned guns off the street and off the internet, where they’re now being sold at a hair-raising clip.Bret: Well, cops have been stepping off the force in droves in recent years, so numbers are a problem, in large part because of morale issues. It makes a big difference if police know their mayors and D.A.s have their backs, and whether they can do their jobs effectively. That’s been absent in cities from Los Angeles to Philadelphia to Seattle. I’m all for getting guns off the streets, but progressive efforts such as easy bail, or trying to ban the use of Stop, Question and Frisk, or getting rid of the plainclothes police units, have a lot to do with the new gun-violence wave.Gail: About the Keystone pipeline — you would be referring to Oil Spill Waiting to Happen? And the answer to our energy problems can’t be pumping more oil, unless we want to deed the families of the future a toxic, mega-warming planet. Let’s spend our money on wind and solar energy.Bret: Right now Canadian energy is being shipped, often by train, and sometimes those trains derail and blow up.Gail: Totally against trains derailing. Once again, less oil in general, however it’s transported.But now, let’s talk politics. Next week is the Pennsylvania primary — very big deal. On the Republican side, Trump is fighting hard for his man, the dreaded Mehmet Oz. Any predictions?Bret: Full disclosure: Oz played a key role in a life-threatening medical emergency in my family. I know a lot of people love to hate him. But he’s always going to be good in my books, I’m not going to comment on him other than that, and our readers should know the personal reason why.However, if you want to talk about that yutz J.D. Vance winning in Ohio, I can be quite voluble.Gail: Feel free. And does that mean you’ll be rooting for the Democrat Tim Ryan to win the Ohio Senate seat in November? He’s a moderate, but still supports the general party agenda.Bret: I like Ryan, and not just because he’s not J.D. Vance. I generally like any politician capable of sometimes rebelling against his or her own party’s orthodoxies, whether that’s Kyrsten Sinema or Lisa Murkowski.As for Vance, he’s just another example of an increasingly common type: the opportunistic, self-abasing, intellectually dishonest, morally situational former NeverTrumper who saw Trump for exactly what he was until he won and then traded principles and clarity for a shot at gaining power. After Jan. 6, 2021, there was even less of an excuse to seek Trump’s favor, and still less after Russia’s second invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022.Democracy: You’re either for it or against it. In Kyiv or Columbus, Vance is on the wrong side.Gail: Whoa, take that, J.D.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      As Crime Surges, Roll Back of Tough-on-Crime Policies Faces Resistance

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      With violent crime rates rising and elections looming, progressive prosecutors are facing resistance to their plans to roll back stricter crime policies of the 1990s.Four years ago, progressive prosecutors were in the sweet spot of Democratic politics. Aligned with the growing Black Lives Matter movement but pragmatic enough to draw establishment support, they racked up wins in cities across the country.Today, a political backlash is brewing. With violent crime rates rising in some cities and elections looming, their attempts to roll back the tough-on-crime policies of the 1990s are increasingly under attack — from familiar critics on the right, but also from onetime allies within the Democratic Party.In San Francisco, District Attorney Chesa Boudin is facing a recall vote in June, stoked by criticism from the city’s Democratic mayor. In Los Angeles, the county district attorney, George Gascón, is trying to fend off a recall effort as some elected officials complain about new guidelines eliminating the death penalty and the prosecution of juveniles as adults. Manhattan’s new district attorney, Alvin Bragg, quickly ran afoul of the new Democratic mayor, Eric Adams, and his new police commissioner over policies that critics branded too lenient.The combative resistance is a harsh turn for a group of leaders whom progressives hailed as an electoral success story. Rising homicide and violent crime rates have even Democrats in liberal cities calling for more law enforcement, not less — forcing prosecutors to defend their policies against their own allies. And traditional boosters on the left aren’t rushing to their aid, with some saying they’ve soured on the officials they once backed.“I think that whole honeymoon period lasts about five or six hours,” said Wesley Bell, the prosecuting attorney for St. Louis County in Missouri, who is seeking re-election this fall.St. Louis County Prosecutor Wesley Bell, center, surrounded by area police chiefs before a news conference about a police officer who was shot and killed in 2019.Robert Cohen/St. Louis Post-Dispatch, via Associated PressMr. Bell, a former city councilman in Ferguson, Mo., is part of the group of prosecutors elected on a promise to address racial disparities in the criminal justice system. Most support eliminating the death penalty and cash bail, limiting prosecutions for low-level, nonviolent offenses and scaling back sentences.In a show of political strength, progressive prosecutors in Chicago and Philadelphia handily defeated challengers in recent years. Mr. Bell’s re-election bid in November is one of several races being watched for signs that voters’ views have shifted on those policies as violent crime has risen and racial justice protests have fallen out of the headlines.Homicide rates spiked in 2020 and continued to rise last year, albeit less slowly, hitting levels not seen since the 1990s. Other violent crimes also are up. Both increases have occurred nationally, in cities with progressive prosecutors and in cities without.That’s left no clear evidence linking progressive policies to these trends, but critics have been quick to make the connection, suggesting that prosecutors have let offenders walk and created an expectation that low-level offenses won’t be charged. Those arguments have landed on voters and city leaders already grappling with a scourge of pandemic-related ills — including mental health care needs and housing shortages, rising drug use, even traffic deaths.Last week, a Quinnipiac University poll of registered voters in New York City found that 74 percent of respondents considered crime a “very serious” problem — the largest share since the survey began asking the question in 1999 and more than 20 percentage points greater than the previous high, which was recorded in January 2016.Politicians are heeding those concerns. In New York, Mr. Adams, a Democrat, has promised to crack down on crime, and his police commissioner, Keechant Sewell, slammed Mr. Bragg’s proposals as threatening the safety of police officers and the public. In San Francisco, Mayor London Breed has become an outspoken critic of Mr. Boudin’s approach, which emphasizes social services over policing.“This is not working,” Ms. Breed said recently on The New York Times podcast “Sway.” “We’ve added all these additional resources — the street crisis response team, the ambassadors, the services, the buildings we purchase, the hotels we purchase, the resources. We’ve added all these things to deal with food insecurity. All these things. Yet people are still being physically harmed and killed.”The criticisms from two prominent Black mayors are particularly biting. In their liberal cities, the leaders’ nuanced complaints have far more influence with voters than familiar attacks from Republicans or police unions. Both mayors have argued that the minority communities that want racism rooted from the justice system also want more robust policing and prosecutions.President Biden, who was one of the architects of the tough-on-crime criminal justice overhaul of the 1990s, recently spoke highly of Mr. Adams’s focus on crime prevention. Some prosecutors and their allies took that as sign that the Democratic establishment is digging in on a centrist approach to criminal justice reform.Mr. Biden’s comments came as the Democratic Party worried about retaining the support of moderate suburban voters in midterm elections this year. Many Democratic lawmakers and strategists believe that protest slogans like “defund the police” hurt the party in the 2020 elections — particularly in Congressional swing districts and in Senate races. Republican candidates, eager to retake control of Congress in November, already have run advertisements casting Democrats as soft on crime.Most progressive prosecutors oppose the calls to gut police department budgets, but that is a nuance often missed. At one liberal philanthropic group, some newer givers have said they will not donate to any criminal justice groups — or to the campaigns of progressive prosecutors — because they don’t want to endorse defunding the police, according to a person who connects donors to criminal justice causes, and who insisted on anonymity to discuss private conversations.Samuel Sinyangwe, an activist who has been involved in several organizations pushing progressive prosecutors, said prosecutors hadn’t been as forceful as law enforcement unions in selling their solutions to rising violence in cities.“Police are spending a lot of money convincing people the appropriate response to that is more policing and incarceration,” he said. “I think that individual cities and counties are having to push back against that narrative. But I think they’re struggling to do that right now.”In San Francisco, Mr. Boudin argued that the effort to recall him was fueled by politics, not voters’ worries about crime. He pointed to the Republican megadonors who have funded the recall efforts and said Ms. Breed has a political incentive to see him ousted — he beat her preferred candidate for district attorney.San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin earlier this week. He faces an effort to recall him.Justin Sullivan/Getty Images“These are Republican talking points,” Mr. Boudin said. “And it’s tremendously destructive to the Democratic Party and the long-term progress that the party is making at the local and national level around public safety and criminal justice to allow a few folks dissatisfied with a local election to undermine that progress.”Mary Jung, a Democratic activist leading the recall campaign, said those who painted the efforts as fueled by conservatives or moderates were missing the point. Many of their supporters, she said, are lifelong liberal Democrats.Those voters, she said, don’t view the effort to recall Mr. Boudin, who was elected in 2019, as a broad shift away from progressive policies, but as a local response in a community that feels unsafe. She cited several attacks against Asian immigrants and incidents of shoplifting as the sort of crimes that have rattled residents, regardless of political ideology.In another sign of Democrats’ discontent, San Francisco voters ousted three progressive members of the Board of Education in a recall election driven by pandemic angst.“Over 80,000 San Franciscans signed our petition and we only needed 53,000 signatures,” Ms. Jung said. “There’s only 33,000 registered Republicans in the city. So, you know, you do the math.”Some progressives warn against ignoring people’s fears. Kim Foxx, the state’s attorney for Cook County, which includes Chicago and some of the country’s most violence-plagued communities, said that any dismissive rhetoric could make prosecutors risk looking out of touch.“You can’t dismiss people,” Ms. Foxx said. “I live in Chicago, where we hit 800 murders last year, and that represents 800 immediate families and thousands of people who are impacted.”Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx, right, with Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot and Police First Deputy Supt. Eric Carter announcing charges last month in a fatal shooting.Pat Nabong/Chicago Sun-Times, via Associated PressMs. Foxx faced a well-funded opponent and won re-election in 2020, as did Philadelphia’s district attorney, Larry Krasner, the following year. Those victories show the resilient support for progressive ideas, Mr. Krasner said, warning the Democratic Party not to abandon them.“Put criminal justice reform on the ballot in every election in almost every jurisdiction, and what you’re going to see is a surge in turnout,” Mr. Krasner said. “And that turnout will overwhelmingly be unlikely voters, reluctant voters, brand-new voters, people who are not connected to what they see as governmental dysfunction between the parties — but they are connected to an issue that has affected their communities.”But there are signs that attitudes about overhauling the criminal justice system are changing even among progressives. Many activists have shifted their focus away from electoral politics and toward policies they think address root of the problem, such as reducing the number of police and abolishing prisons.That “makes it very difficult to even defend or support particular prosecutors, because at the end of the day, they’re still putting people in jail,” Mr. Sinyangwe said.In 2020, Mr. Bell, the St. Louis prosecutor, faced the ire of the same progressive activists who had helped elect him. That July, he announced that his renewed investigation into the 2014 fatal police shooting of Michael Brown Jr., a young Black man, which ignited weeks of protests, had delivered the same results: no charges for the officer who killed him.Mr. Brown’s mother denounced Mr. Bell’s investigation. Speaking to reporters then, Mr. Bell said the announcement was “one of the most difficult things I’ve had to do as an elected official.”Asked to discuss the incident and the investigation, Mr. Bell declined.Josie Duffy Rice, the former president of The Appeal, a news outlet focused on criminal justice, said that in some ways the voters were learning the limitations of the progressive prosecutor’s role.“Prosecutors have the power to cause a lot of problems,” Ms. Duffy Rice said. “But not enough power to solve problems.” More

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      How to Stop Trump and Prevent Another Jan. 6

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      On Christmas morning, I woke up early and flipped on CNN, where I found the newscaster toggling among three news stories — two really depressing ones and an amazingly uplifting one.The first depressing story was the rapid spread of the Omicron variant. The other was the looming anniversary of the Jan. 6 insurrection. Both the threat from the virus and the distorted beliefs about the attack on the Capitol were being fueled by crackpot conspiracy theories circulated by Facebook, Fox News and Republican politicians.But then there it was — sandwiched between these two disturbing tales — a remarkable story of U.S. and global collaboration to reach a new scientific frontier.It was the launch at 7:20 a.m. Christmas Day of the James Webb Space Telescope. According to NASA, “thousands of scientists, engineers and technicians” — from 306 universities, national labs and companies, primarily in the U.S., Canada and Europe — contributed “to design, build, test, integrate, launch and operate Webb.”JM Guillon/ESAThank you, Santa! What a gift to remind us that a level of trust to do big, hard things together is still alive on planet Earth. By operating from deep in space, Smithsonian magazine noted, “Webb will help scientists understand how early galaxies formed and grew, detect possible signatures of life on other planets, watch the birth of stars, study black holes from a different angle and likely discover unexpected truths.”I love that phrase — unexpected truths. We have launched a space telescope that can peer far into the universe to discover — with joy — unexpected truths.Alas, though, my joy is tempered by those two other stories, by the fact that here on Earth, in America, one of our two national parties and its media allies have chosen instead to celebrate and propagate alternative facts.This struggle between those seeking unexpected truths — which is what made us great as a nation — and those worshiping alternative facts — which will destroy us as a nation — is THE story on the anniversary of the Jan. 6 insurgency, and for the coming year. Many people, particularly in the American business community, are vastly underestimating the danger to our constitutional order if this struggle ends badly.If the majority of G.O.P. lawmakers continue to bow to the most politically pernicious “alternative fact” — that the 2020 election was a fraud that justifies empowering Republican legislatures to override the will of voters and remove Republican and Democratic election supervisors who helped save our democracy last time by calling the election fairly — then America isn’t just in trouble. It is headed for what scientists call “an extinction-level event.”Only it won’t be a comet hurtling past the Webb telescope from deep space that destroys our democracy, as in the new movie “Don’t Look Up.”No, no — it will be an unraveling from the ground up, as our country, for the first time, is unable to carry out a peaceful transfer of power to a legitimately elected president. Because if Donald Trump and his flock are able in 2024 to execute a procedural coup like they attempted on Jan. 6, 2021, Democrats will not just say, “Ah shucks, we’ll try harder next time.” They will take to the streets.Right now, though, too many Republicans are telling themselves and the rest of us: “Don’t look up! Don’t pay attention to what is unfolding in plain sight with Trump & Company. Trump won’t be the G.O.P.’s candidate in 2024.”Who will save us?God bless Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, the two Republican House members participating on the Jan. 6 investigation committee. But they are not enough. Kinzinger is retiring and the G.O.P. leadership, on Trump’s orders, is trying to launch Cheney into deep space.I think our last best hope is the leadership of the U.S. business community, specifically the Business Roundtable, led by General Motors C.E.O. Mary Barra, and the Business Council, led by Microsoft C.E.O. Satya Nadella. Together those two groups represent the roughly 200 most powerful companies in America, with 20 million employees. Although formally nonpartisan, they lean center-right — but the old center-right, the one that believed in the rule of law, free markets, majority rule, science and the sanctity of our elections and constitutional processes.Collectively, they are the only responsible force left with real leverage on Trump and the Republican lawmakers doing his bidding. They need to persuade their members — now — not to donate a penny more to any local, state or national candidate who has voted to dismantle the police or dismantle the Constitution.Yes, that’s false equivalency. Nothing is as big as the Trump cult’s threat to our constitutional order. But it’s still relevant. For a lot of Americans, watching a smash-and-grab gang ransack their local mall and violent crime jump — and then seeing the far-left trying to delegitimize, defund or dismantle their police — is just as frightening as those trying to dismantle their Constitution on the Capitol mall.Joseph Prezioso/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesI believe there are many Americans in the center-left and center-right who vigorously oppose both, and they think it’s a disgrace when progressives tell them not to worry about the first or when Trumpers tell them not to worry about the second.When you take both seriously, many more people will listen to you on both. Individually, in their hometowns — like mine, Minneapolis — business leaders have effectively pushed back on dismantling the police. Now it is time for America’s business leaders to just as forcefully push back on the Trump Republicans trying to dismantle the Constitution.Why should they risk alienating pro-Trump lawmakers who soon may control both the House and the Senate? Besides love of country?Let me put it crassly: Civil wars are not good for business. I lived inside one in Lebanon for four years. Corporate America shouldn’t be lulled by 2021’s profits, because once a country’s institutions, laws, norms and unstated redlines are breached — and there is no more truth, only versions, and no more trust, only polarization — getting them back is almost impossible.Can’t happen here? It sure can.Rick Wilson, a longtime G.O.P. strategist opposed to Trump, recently described to The Washington Post what will happen if the campaign by Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene and other Trump cultists succeeds to get more Big Lie promoters elected in 2022 — and the G.O.P. takes the House or Senate or both: “We’re looking at a nihilistic Mad Max hellscape. It will be all about the show of 2024 to bring Donald Trump back into power.” He added, “They will impeach Biden, they will impeach Harris, they will kill everything.”So what will big business do? I wish I were more optimistic.CNBC reported Monday that data compiled by the watchdog group Accountable.US “shows that political action committees of top corporations and trade groups — including the American Bankers Association, Boeing, Raytheon Technologies, Lockheed Martin and General Motors — continued to give to the Republican election objectors.”Kyle Herrig, president of Accountable.US, said in a statement: “Major corporations were quick to condemn the insurrection and tout their support for democracy — and almost as quickly, many ditched those purported values by cutting big checks to the very politicians that helped instigate the failed coup attempt. The increasing volume of corporate donations to lawmakers who tried to overthrow the will of the people makes clear that these companies were never committed to standing up for democracy in the first place.”The leaders of these companies are totally underestimating the chances that our democratic institutions will unravel. And if American democracy unravels, the whole world becomes unstable. That will not exactly be good for business, either.Neutrality is not an option anymore. As Liz Cheney put it on Sunday: “We can either be loyal to Donald Trump or we can be loyal to the Constitution, but we cannot be both.”So, my New Year’s wish is that item one on the agenda for the next meetings of both the Business Roundtable and the Business Council will be: Which side are we on?The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      ‘Once a City Hall Reporter, Always a City Hall Reporter’

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      Patricia Mazzei has spent nearly 15 years covering Miami. The experience helped her make sense of a controversy swirling around the city’s new police chief.MIAMI — Ten years ago, I sat inside the over-air-conditioned chambers of the Miami City Commission for many long hours to cover a tense debate over the fate of a beleaguered police chief.Recently, I did it again, returning to the same City Hall — to the same second-row seat, in fact — to report on a different commission discussing the future of a different official, Chief Art Acevedo, with a precarious hold on his job. Back then, I was a local government reporter for The Miami Herald, where I worked for 10 years. Now, I am the Miami bureau chief for The New York Times. Once a City Hall reporter, always a City Hall reporter.My job on the National desk is to cover Florida and Puerto Rico, a wide-ranging beat that makes it impossible to attend every City Commission meeting (of which there are many) or follow every bit of gossip (of which there are even more). In the nearly four years since I have been at The Times, I have written about hurricane hunters, climate change and statewide elections.But sometimes the story takes you back to the beginning. Knowing how City Hall works, and its bizarre and colorful history, has been essential to understanding Miami and translating its eccentricities to Times readers. Just as all politics is local, all news is local, too, and this is why I was back in my old seat.City Hall reporters have a Spidey sense that tingles when drama is near. That is why I told my editor, Kim Murphy — herself a former City Hall reporter in Mississippi — that I planned to drop in on a recent commission meeting about Chief Acevedo, who was hired to lead the Miami Police Department six months ago. His arrival made a splash — a big-name hire for a city trying to establish itself as a player in big tech. He was chosen by Mayor Francis Suarez, who faces re-election and has grown his national profile over the past year. But the hype could not save either the chief or the mayor from the political entanglements of powerful city commissioners.A majority of city commissioners were mad at the chief, in part because he had — jokingly, he said later — referred to the Police Department as being run by a “Cuban mafia.” (The chief himself is a Cuban immigrant.) In response, Chief Acevedo had written a long letter essentially accusing some commissioners of corruption.Cops, corruption, Cuba: The day had all the makings of quintessential Miami political theater.This, after all, is one of the best news cities in the country — not only for its well trodden Florida Man oddities but also because of its many local governments and their corresponding soap operas. Miami-Dade County alone has 34 cities. That’s a lot of elected officials, a lot of public employees and a lot of news, which The Herald and other outlets cover admirably, though there never seem to be enough local reporters to hold everyone accountable.Becoming a national reporter was liberating in many ways. My time is no longer dictated by the whims of local officials. I can tackle a wider range of issues. I get to explore more of the country. But it is also more challenging to write for an audience that goes beyond local readers. Why would someone in another state or another part of the world care about a little Florida story? Sometimes it’s the stories that seem obvious to people living here that make good national stories. Other times it’s the oddball anecdote that you find yourself telling friends about that demands a larger audience.We chose to write about Chief Acevedo, and the machinations of Miami politics, in The Times because his story has elements that resonate in any big American city currently trying to bring reforms in policing, as it balances entrenched competing interests.The city has gone through six police chiefs in 11 years, though not all their tenures have been as contentious as Chief Acevedo. The meeting to discuss his fate turned into something of a circus. In the afternoon, I got a slew of text messages from sources who had seen me on the meeting livestream, remarking on how wild it was. Many Miami government types had been watching for hours, transfixed by it all.A few days later, commissioners held another special meeting to further discuss Chief Acevedo. I was not, technically, covering the story. But I turned on the meeting and watched anyhow. I could not tear myself away.This week, the saga came to an end: The city manager suspended Chief Acevedo with the intent to fire him. His ouster, as expected, made headlines. But it is also be just another outlandish chapter in the history of the Magic City. More

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      Why Do Republicans Hate Cops?

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      WASHINGTON — It was, I must admit, a virtuoso performance by Sean Hannity.Not since the sheriff in “Blazing Saddles” put a gun to his own head and took himself hostage has anyone executed such a nutty loop de loop. More

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      Eric Adams Is Going to Save New York

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      Eric Adams arrives for lunch alone, no entourage or media handler. He shows me his new earring — “the first thing,” he says, that Joe Biden “asked to see” when the two met recently to discuss gun violence. He orders a tomato salad with oil on the side, the abstemious diet of the all-but-crowned king of New York. More