The political right in America had found the message that resonated with voters before which its opposition in the Democratic Party ranks capitulated. Early in her tenure, Clinton appointee Attorney General Janet Reno proclaimed the message “prenatal care is more important than prisons” in controlling crime, and formed a working group to document the effect of federal mandatory sentences that found low-level, non-violent drug offenders with limited criminal histories made up close to 20% of the entire federal prison population as a consequence of minimum sentencing policies (Mauer 1999:74). But the Clinton administration, spooked by pressures originating on the right, and attracted by the obvious political gains to be gleaned from the “get-tough” stance, buried Reno’s report and in the 1994 State of the Union Address enthusiastically endorsed federal “three strikes legislation.” Today it is virtually impossible to distinguish between Democrat and Republican on the issues of crimes and drugs. The drug issue touches on the sensitive underbelly of America’s racial dysfunction without having to go through the embarrassment of overtly referring to it.

And the issue captured other aspects of American mythology including the central and congenital American distrust in government. Founded in revolution, the ultimate rejection of central authority, America tells itself that it accepts government only as a necessary evil--the best being that which governs least. “There is more to this attitude, in our culture, than the normal and universal resistance to authority. Americans believe that they have a government which is itself against government” (Wills 1999:15).

The political right in America has successfully exploited this belief, so central to American thinking, convincing voters that their freedom would be seriously jeopardized by a little more health care security and a little less personal fire power. And by some strange twist in logic, the frame depicting good government as limited government has been extended to justify expansion of the nation’s criminal justice system, with all the coercive power, for certain segments of the population anyway, that such a distension entails.

Ronald Reagan drew the connection between the scaling back of social welfare programs in favour of social control considerations this way:

[T]his is precisely what we’re trying to do to the bloated Federal Government today: remove it from interfering in areas where it doesn’t belong, but at the same time strengthen its ability to perform its constitutional and legitimate functions....in the area of public order and law enforcement, for example, we’re reversing a dangerous trend of the last decade. While crime was steadily increasing, the Federal commitment in terms of personnel was steadily shrinking (quoted in Beckett 1997:51).

The right’s law and order message plays well with two other strong themes in American life: traditional conceptions of the family and Christian fundamentalism.

Family values and fatherhood have become central values in conservative politics. In conservative thought it is the “strict father” model of family life which motivates a corresponding set of metaphorical priorities for moral action. This model assumes that the exercise of authority is in and of itself moral and that it is essential to reward obedience and punish defiance because reward and punishment have a further purpose. This model assumes that life is a struggle and that children must learn discipline and build character to survive, and that these virtues are learned through obedience. This conception of proper family life is reinforced repeatedly in conservative discourse in words and phrases that refer to character, virtue, discipline, get tough, tough love, self-reliance, individual responsibility, freedom, intrusion, and common sense (Lakoff 1996).