Crime in the Suites
Kevin Phillips writes that liberals hope that “crime in the suites” can catapult them into power.
He argues, however, that corporate scandals will not be enough, in themselves, to lead to an electoral shift.
Crime rarely becomes a dominant national political issue by itself. It usually takes on a high profile when connected to a broader governmental incapacity. In the 1960s and early ’70s, amid central-city and campus riots and the morass of Vietnam, crime in the streets became Richard M. Nixon’s catchword for a failure of liberal politics, jurisprudence and sociology, as well as excessive belief in the power of government to do good. That deeper worry was the motor that made crime statistics a cutting-edge indicator: the public’s fear of deadly streets, revolutionary campuses, police crippled by liberal judges, ruined neighborhoods, endangered homes.
This year, politics is still looking for its conceptual motor. For crime in the corporate suites to become one, it too must come to symbolize a broader failure, most likely of conservative economic policy.
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