Other, older neocon themes are also resurfacing. For example, New York Post columnist Michael Goodwin declared that New York mayor Bill de Blasio needed to embrace the broken windows theory of policing or face a potential civic breakdown: Baltimore should be his wake-up call. It shows that handcuffing the cops ultimately leads to more violence and crime, not less, and ends up with the National Guard patrolling the streets like a war zone. Above all, conservatives are pointing to the issue of morality to suggest that a broken culture is responsible for the dismal state of cities like Baltimore.
In commenting on such stands, Frank Rich recently observed in New York magazine that the GOP could seek to profit politically from law-and-order issues to drive a wedge between Hillary Clinton and those white Democratic and independent voters who defected from Obama but who might be inclined to vote for her. When it comes to these issues, however, leading Republican politicians are punting. Speaker of the House John Boehner, for example, is backing more federal grant money for body cameras for police officers and said that if the charges against the six Baltimore police officers in the Freddie Gray case are true, Its outrageous, and its unacceptable. Its hard to avoid the impression that Republicans in general often create much ado about nothing, but are afraid to tackle vexing policy issues directly. So far, the GOP has neither shown an appetite for rediscovering Nixon and 1968 nor explained how it could successfully reinvent itself as a new party. A party that does not understand itself is not a party that can make itself understood to the electorate.
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