drug pushers, pornographers, prostitutes, and gangs of noisy black youths, who strutted their contempt for middle-class respectability. "These maniacs, the way they walk the streets and the language they use, forget it!" An air of menace hung over the city. "I don't really hate the blacks," said a Jewish woman in Canarsie. "I hate that they make me look over my shoulder." "When the blacks robbed me," said another Canarsie resident, "I left all that black-and-white together stuff." Instead of writing off "law and order" as a code word for racism, liberals would have been well advised to address themselves to the breakdown of public order. Even if their culture of self-expression and self-advancement made it impossible for them to see any value in lower-middle-class culture, they might at least have acknowledged the problem of public safety. Liberalism itself, after all, was historically dependent on the rise of the modern state, which put an end to feudal and religious warfare, monopolized the means of violence, and took away the right of private vengeance. The erosion of the state's capacity to assure public order forced city residents to improvise solutions of their own, ranging from neighborhood patrols and block associations to gang warfare. Liberals wanted to restrict the sale of handguns, with good reason, but they refused to understand the fears that led people to arm themselves as a last resort against the rising tide of violence and crime. They deplored the campaign for more vigorous law enforcement as a threat to liberties guaranteed by the Bill of Rights, but they did not explain how the Bill of Rights would assure the safety of the streets.

From the point of view of those who lived in deteriorating urban neighborhoods, liberals were not only indifferent to their needs but actively hostile, bent on destroying those neighborhoods if they stood in the way of racial integration. The principle of preferential treatment for disadvantaged minorities offended ethnic groups that had never enjoyed any such favoritism, as far as they could see, in their own struggles against

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