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Not knowing what to expect from the strangers they live with, Americans begin to marinate in paranoia and suppressed rage. Crime combines fatally with inflation to subvert the old American hope, the idea that virtue, saving, obeying the law are rewarded, not punished. Psychologically intensifying the horrific reality of crime, the local TV news teams project it directly into the American fantasy life, the air filled with such vivid playlets of violence and death and fire and gore that children begin to grow up thinking that the world outside the front door is profoundly menacing—not the old America, not the nice America any more.
The spirits of Americans cannot rise unless they see crime much reduced and justice much more effectively dealt out.
The constitutional emphasis on the rights of criminals should be balanced by consideration for the community as a whole.
The number of actual victims has risen disastrously, but the social damage done by crime, the intangible injuries to confidence and hope and citizens' sense of justice, is incalculably higher. As Chief Justice Warren Burger says, crime has created "a reign of terror in American cities." In that sense, the victims and their sufferings receive preposterously little consideration in comparison with those who assault. Somehow the criminal must be persuaded that society despises crime —surely not the impression that the criminal justice system now gives. Tough gun laws are essential. The judicial process should be speeded up. Determinate sentencing—a given crime draws a given sentence—would serve to make the law more predictable, less apparently capricious. The costs of a better justice system will be huge—too large for local jurisdictions to assume. The Federal Government will have to pay much of the expense in order to make crime control broadly effective.
The Moral Majority and other religious fundamentalists are components of an ascendant movement, at times primitive and a little scary, that seeks to lay down some rules for a new national cohesion. All members of the Moral Majority—just another minority interest group, for all the self-righteousness of the title —should probably have the Bill of Rights embroidered on their shirt cuffs, lest some of their coercive impulses run away with them. The movement led by the Rev. Jerry Falwell is potentially dangerous to democracy; with a disturbing touch of zealotry and intolerance, it would like to impose by legislation its interpretations of Christian morality upon the rest of the erring populace. Of course the Falwells can argue that they are simply reacting against the liberals' own past attempts to legislate their version of civic virtue. Both sides may have to learn that rights may be guaranteed, but, beyond a certain point, virtue cannot be enforced by law. The Moral Majority's platform—against abortion, ERA, busing, gay rights, sex education and SALT II; in favor of school prayer—does not always square with the opinions that most Americans have registered with Gallup and ABC/Harris. But the Moral Majority's wide attraction is a sign that large numbers of Americans are sick of a society in which so many standards of conduct have collapsed.