AMERICAN NOTES Law Day
May Day was also Law Day, and that coincidence served, in a way, to define some perimeters of the national mood. Demonstrators massed in Washington and other cities to protest the war, as they have each spring since 1965. While the demonstrations had an immediate potential for violence, many Americans continued to fear lawlessness from their own institutions —wiretapping, for example, and other intimations of Big Brotherhood.
Yet it is surprising, after so much volatile dissent, after a decade of dangerously increased crime vastly complicated by overburdened courts and jails, that the rule of law has endured so well in the U.S. The violent strains of the past few years might, by many rules of human behavior, have led to vigilante gangs, urban civil war and brutal police and military retaliations. Sometimes they did. But overall, the New Left’s nightmare of massive repression has become no more real than the rightists’ premonitions of perpetual fire bombs and anarchy. Despite clangorous divisions in the nation, Americans remain almost remarkably united in settling most of their conflicts through legal processes.
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