“Law and order”

If leaders promising to “pay any price” and build Communism dominated the early 1960s, figures pledged to “law and order” shaped the early 1970s. President Nixon popularized the phrase in the United States, but his counterparts in West Germany, the Soviet Union, and other countries used similar terms. In the wake of the counter-culture, leaders rebuilt their authority around commitments to restore rationality, reasonableness, and domestic peace. As best as we can tell, this is what a “silent majority” of people wanted in many societies, following years of upheaval and violence. Nixon captured this sentiment in his inaugural address of January 20, 1969. Addressing “America’s youth” and “the people of the world,” the new president argued: “We cannot learn from one another until we stop shouting at one another - until we speak quietly enough so that our words can be heard as well as our voices.” “For all our people,” Nixon continued, “we will set as our goal the decent order that makes progress possible and our lives secure.”724 Nixon’s words received favorable attention at home and abroad, including China, where Mao Zedong sought to rein in the excesses of the Cultural Revolution and open relations with the United States.725

"Law and order” was more than just a reaction to disorder and upheaval. It represented a new kind of counter-culture in the 1970s, one that rejected both the standard ideological rhetoric of the Cold War and the oppositional claims of figures like Betty Friedan, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and Rudi Dutschke. "Law and order” meant a return to something more basic - commitment to civility, faith in moderation, and loyalty to nation. These beliefs did not challenge the Cold War per se, but they reframed the conflict in terms of limits rather than possibilities. Instead of proclaiming a mission to improve the lives of diverse people at home and abroad, "law and order” focused on restraining the excesses of the last decades that in Vietnam, on university campuses, and in countless other locales had brought despair and disillusion. "Law and order” was about a sober political and social reassessment that lowered popular expectations and encouraged citizens to accept an imperfect world.726

This rhetoric appealed to some of the racist, chauvinist, and ethnocentric instincts that characterized the backlash against the counter-culture. In doing so, it rejected the faith in the possibilities of liberal capitalist and communist "development” that underpinned earlier Cold War conflict. The United States and the Soviet Union continued to intervene overseas - and Moscow, in fact, increased its activities in the Third World - but these undertakings lacked the optimism of prior ventures.727 The leaders and citizens of the superpowers acted in response to local and allied pressures, often to protect face more than pursue global change. There were exceptions (particularly massive Soviet support for an Ethiopian revolution that promised to lead the African continent to Communism), but the 1970s was not a decade of grand projects or grand expectations.728 The counter-culture of these years rejected the ambitions shared by advocates and opponents of Cold War policy in prior decades.

Proponents of "law and order” told activists like Betty Friedan that they were indeed mistaken to expect happiness in Cold War suburbia. They were also wrong to pursue an alternative form of liberation. Instead, they should accept their lives as they were and protect what they had against worse possibilities. A culture of pessimism and limits replaced the Cold War culture of optimism and possibilities.