RISING VOICE OF THE RIGHT

IT has become increasingly evident in recent months that the dominant theme of the U.S. presidential campaign may not be Viet Nam, the economy, or any one of a score of infinitely complex problems. Instead, it will probably be the elusive issue of "law and order." Last week all three major candidates vied to put forward their own shadings of a law-and-order policy, almost to the exclusion of other questions facing a troubled nation. Once, the term might have been used in all innocence to describe the minimal conditions necessary to maintain a democratic society. No longer. Today it has become a loaded catchall, with room for every suspicion, grudge, fear, resentment and jealousy that divides the American electorate.

No major figure has exploited the issue more assiduously or effectively than Alabama's George Wallace, who has made startling headway among U.S. voters as a result. Though Richard Nixon airily skirted the issue last week when he was asked to comment on the confrontation between police and protesters during the Democratic Convention in Chicago, he, too, is regarded by millions of voters as a strong law-and-order man who, as President, would "do something" about rising crime rates, unsafe streets, noisy demonstrators and restless blacks. Hubert Humphrey is desperately attempting to straddle the issue, though in the text of his campaign kick-off speech in Washington this week he accused Nixon and the G.O.P. of "openly competing with Mr. Wallace for the votes of people who, at very best, want to put the brakes on our progress toward full opportunity." The frenetic efforts by all the candidates to get on the right side of the issue prompted San Francisco's Democratic Mayor Joseph Alioto to comment: "None of the candidates is running for President. They're all running for sheriff."

Cutting Deep. Even so, Humphrey and Nixon attack the issue from markedly different starting points. Said the Vice President last week: "I do not believe the American people are bitter or filled with hate. I do not believe that they're racists. I intend to appeal to their basic goodness." Nixon had a more calculated approach: "The quiet Americans, the silent Americans, who have not been the protesters, who have not been the shouters--their voice is welling up across the country today. The great majority of Americans are angry. They don't like what's been happening in America these last four years."

After three years of angry dissent among white intellectuals, students and militant Negroes over the problems of Viet Nam, civil rights and poverty, a reaction is setting in--a dissent to the dissent. It is manifesting itself in scores of ways. In the roar of approval that greeted Richard Nixon's promise at Miami Beach to replace Attorney General Ramsey Clark in order "to restore order and respect for law in this country." In-the bitter resistance to gun-control legislation, evidenced last week when proposals for stronger regulations were hooted down at a meeting of 3,500 Maryland suburbanites as a plot hatched by subversives or "bleeding hearts." In the mushrooming of openly right-wing cabals in big-city police forces, which have now become a major political force on their own.

New York City is particularly plagued by this phenomenon. Last week a mob of 150 whites, including many off-duty policemen, tore into a small group of Black Panthers and their sympathizers in a Brooklyn courthouse corridor. Some of the assailants shouted "White Power!" and "Win with Wallace!" before they flailed away with fists, rubber truncheons and some billy clubs conveniently dropped by uniformed policemen near by. Mayor John Lindsay angrily ordered an investigation, but he also suggested that the episode "could possibly be part of the currents that are running across the country."

Yearning for Order. The currents discerned by Lindsay are running strongly to the right. Among incalculable numbers of lower and middle-class white Americans, there is a yearning for more order, less "coddling" of criminals by the courts, fewer shackles on the police, a tougher approach to dissenters and demonstrators everywhere, and less permissiveness in dealing with the Negro's grievances.

The rightward current has been strengthened by some powerful streams. Abroad, Moscow's intervention in Czechoslovakia gave comfort to those who are convinced that it is impossible to negotiate in good faith with any Communist country--ever. At home, the militance of such ghetto groups as the Black Panthers is being matched by a counterreaction among alarmed whites. Some Negroes warned last week, for example, that there would be disastrous consequences if Black Panther Leader Huey Newton, on trial in Oakland, Calif., on charges of murdering a policeman, were convicted. The effect of such menacing words is simply to push the pendulum a little farther to the right.

This is the case despite the fact that the Negro ghettos remained remarkably cool during the summer in the face of widespread predictions that they would erupt in unprecedented violence. Now that school days are here again, some observers expect scores of campuses to erupt in riots--and thereby help to feed the fed-up feeling. After a fracas occurred near the University of California campus at Berkeley, Governor Ronald Reagan last week lost no time in pinning the blame on a "nationwide conspiracy of New Left elements."

Equal Law. With Wallace courting the hate vote, both Nixon and Humphrey may well be tempted to emulate him by playing on the obvious fears and frustrations of the voters. The upshot could be the most corrosive campaign in memory--one that could cause the U.S. to avert its eyes from its goals of justice and equal opportunity for years to come.

Two years ago, Humphrey was less timid than he has lately become in his defense of the dissident. "The right to dissent is a sacred right," he said. "I want to warn all Americans now that one of the most precious freedoms that we have is the right to be different--yes, even the right to be obnoxiously different." Some dissenters are obnoxious, but the fact remains that their right to dissent is not diminished by their manners and dress. In the acrimony of the law-and-order debate, the candidates might do well to address themselves to securing the guarantees inherent in Thomas Jefferson's thesis: that the will of the majority "to be rightful must be reasonable; that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal law must protect, and which to violate would be oppression."

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