Might the 2020 campaign bring back "law and order" as a political wedge issue?

The question in the title of this post is prompted by this extended new New York Times opinion piece authored by Thomas Edsall. The piece's full headline captures its main point: "Trump Wants Law and Order Front and Center; The president and his allies are trying to make Democratic plans to reform law enforcement a potent campaign issue." The piece merits a full read, and here are excerpts:

Unexpectedly, the 2020 presidential campaign is drilling down on petty crime and homelessness.  Donald Trump and his Republican allies are reviving law-and-order themes similar to those used effectively by Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew in the late 1960s and early 1970s to demonize racial minorities.

To this end, Republicans seek to discredit liberalized law enforcement initiatives adopted by a new breed of Democratic prosecutors.  These Democratic district attorneys — in cities, counties and suburbs from Philadelphia, Orlando, Chicago and St. Louis to Contra Costa County, Calif., Suffolk County, Mass., and Durham County, N.C. — are pursuing policies intended to decriminalize vagrancy, and eliminate cash bail, and they are aggressively pursuing charges in cases of shootings by police officers.

They are playing a key role in a hotly politicized movement to curb mass incarceration and to roll back what has become known as “the carceral state.”  The decarceration movement is backed by a wide array of organizations tightly aligned with the progressive wing of the Democratic Party: the Real Justice PAC, Black Lives Matter, the Brennan Center for Justice, the ACLU, Justice Democrats, MoveOn.org and Brand New Congress....

At the same time, as this movement has been gaining momentum, it has provided ammunition for a powerful counterattack from President Trump, his attorney general, William Barr, and other law-and-order Republicans.

The result is that the 2020 election is expanding the 50-year-old culture war into new territory as Democrats — often under pressure from younger voters — seek to extend broader rights to those who have been previously stigmatized or marginalized, now moving beyond protection for minorities, women and gays, to provide more freedom to criminal defendants, the homeless, the mentally ill and unknown numbers of men and women imprisoned through prosecutorial misconduct, judicial error or other forms of systemic failure.

Republicans, in turn, are betting that the Democratic presidential candidates have moved substantially farther to the left on issues of crime and punishment than the voting public. Leading Democratic presidential candidates, for their part, are not shying away from the challenge, endorsing in whole or in part the decarceration and decriminalization agenda.

Even Joe Biden, one of the more moderate 2020 candidates, argued at the September Democratic presidential debate that “We should be talking about rehabilitation. Nobody should be in jail for a nonviolent crime” and that “Nobody should be in jail for a drug problem. We build more rehabilitation centers, not prisons.” Once a strong supporter of the death penalty, Biden now calls for its elimination....

While many of the Democratic presidential candidates have effectively joined the decarceration movement, the same unity cannot be found among House and Senate Democrats. At this level, the movement is one more source of conflict between the Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wing and the many members of the House and Senate who must fight for re-election in more moderate districts and states, including those that cast majorities for Trump in 2016....

Republicans are responding to the initiatives of progressive prosecutors with a vengeance. In a fiery speech on Aug. 12 at the Grand Lodge Fraternal Order of Police’s conference in New Orleans, Barr warned that progressive prosecutors in cities across the nation are “demoralizing to law enforcement and dangerous to public safety.”...

Three days later, William M. McSwain, the Trump-appointed United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, called a news conference to explicitly attack the Philadelphia district attorney, Larry Krasner.... Most recently, President Trump, at a rally on Dec. 10 in Hershey, Pa., told the crowd “You have the worst district attorney,” referring to the Philadelphia D.A., roughly 95 miles east. “I’ve been hearing about this guy, he lets killers out almost immediately. You better get yourself a new prosecutor.”

Turning the decarceration movement into a 2020 campaign issue fits into Trump’s go-to strategy of inflaming divisive conflicts, especially those involving disputed rights — particularly those benefiting minorities — in order to activate racial resentment, to mobilize his core voters and to goad swing voters into lining up against the Democratic Party....

Over the past four years, many progressive Democrats have turned sharply against the aggressive policing that broken windows enforcement produced, arguing that it has contributed to excessive incarceration that results in the disproportionate imprisonment of African-Americans and other minorities.  At the presidential debate in September, virtually every candidate voiced strong opposition to mass incarceration and support for the release or sentence reduction of those convicted of nonviolent crime....

On this issue, one of Trump’s key allies is Tucker Carlson.  Every night this week, Carlson is devoting segments of his Fox News show to homelessness. His show will reinforce the 2020 Republican election theme that Democrats are fostering endemic social disorder.  On Jan. 3, Carlson tweeted: “Drugs.  Homelessness.  Third world inequality.  San Francisco’s radical left wing government has turned their city into an American Dystopia.”

This week’s series is the second time in less than a year that Carlson has devoted five straight nights to homelessness, with footage of men and women injecting themselves, evidence of public defecation, the vagrant mentally ill, and sidewalks in California lined for blocks with tents....

The Trump campaign is gambling that Democrats are outside the mainstream of public opinion on these issues, while the leading Democratic candidates are convinced that enough of the electorate has become sufficiently skeptical of law-and-order strategies — and the accompanying racial undertones (and overtones) — to produce a Democratic victory on Nov. 3, 2020.  Over the past 50 years, Democratic strategies based on the presumption of increasing liberalism among voters at large have rarely succeeded. Perhaps 2020 will be different.