Broken windows policing says, in brief, that police ought to focus on basic issues of public order and cleanliness to establish a community culture inhospitable to serious crime. The theory, originated by the neoconservative James Q. Wilson in 1982, was extremely influential in the crime response debates of the 1990s. Operating under this theory, police addressed abandoned cars, panhandling, public intoxication, and, of course, the namesake broken windows. Wilson and others were relatively unconcerned with the legality or morality of these relatively insignificant annoyances-at-worst. But they did believe that, left alone and given time, such petty disruptions would lead to increased violent crime.
Broken windows policing, of course, remains influential in conservative crime policy circles, which have a long, sometimes troubled history of commitment to “law and order.” But the logic of the theory has broken into nearly every conservative social policy argument over the past few decades. Somehow, almost everything seems to circle back to crime prevention, as if crime were the only thing American society can agree is wrong. Rather than making the moral cases for conservative institutions and values, conservatives have too often fallen back on arguments based on more-or-less tenuous connections between their policies and crime prevention.
Nowhere is this tendency more evident than in debates over family policy. The classic example is the Moynihan Report, a (controversial) work of social science written by conservative Democrat Daniel Patrick Moynihan in 1965. Moynihan argued firstly that in African-American communities, the two-parent family had deteriorated significantly, and secondly, that this deterioration was the cause of increased poverty and crime in these communities. The Moynihan Report can be challenged or endorsed on its own merits, but it and its themes have become central to conservative argumentation. A search in National Review, which has long been conservatism’s flagship magazine, reveals over 60 results for “Moynihan report” and almost 100 for “two-parent family” (mostly from the last fifteen years). This is not a specific criticism, but rather a means to demonstrate a trend.
Conservative think tanks, too, have embraced and furthered Moynihan’s argument wholeheartedly. The Heritage Foundation published a 35-page report helpfully titled “The Real Root Causes of Violent Crime: The Breakdown of Marriage, Family, and Community.” More recently, it published another report connecting single parenthood to rising crime. Other arguments are more attenuated, focusing on the negative effects of certain family structures (cohabitation, homosexuality) on children, without an explicit connection to crime. Just recently, conservative social scientist Charles Murray launched a Twitter discussion asking whether lesbian parenthood or single motherhood was worse for children.
Such arguments in and of themselves are not necessarily wrong, counterproductive, or uninteresting. Many are backed with solid social science and have contributed to major policy reforms. However, an exclusive focus on consequentialist social science arguments risks degrading conservatives’ own moral rigor and their influence in the public sphere.
First, this focus allows conservative writers, staffers, policy wonks, and politicians to default to easy arguments. Rather than making robust moral cases for their positions, and thus having to work through complex areas of morality and philosophy, they can simply point to a widely-accepted unpleasantry – crime – and draw a connection. Skipping normative arguments, they only need discuss causality. Having to make and defend arguments expands individuals’ moral understanding and reaffirms their commitment to the position they wish to defend; shortcuts prevent such development. As a result, moral sense atrophies. Removing normative arguments from politics also further reduces the quality of public discourse, for similar reasons – it discourages citizens from regular engagement in moral discussions.
Furthermore, positing that crime is a moral wrong leaves the national moral conscience unaddressed. Prescriptively, John Rawls’ theories may be underwhelming, but, descriptively, some kind of “overlapping consensus” of principles is necessary for any policy to meaningfully last in a democracy. Conservatives who want to influence public policy must address the national moral consensus, either to challenge it or to reaffirm and strengthen the nation’s convictions on a certain issue. If they do not, this consensus is left to decay naturally or, more likely, be shaped by progressive cultural and political forces.
When making crime prevention arguments, conservatives fail to address the national moral conscience regarding the actual issue they care about. Crime is assumed to be immoral, and the other issue – traditional marriage, for example – is simply tacked on to crime’s preexisting moral weight. American society’s actual moral views on marriage are left to degenerate on their own.
Now that some radicals are even challenging the wrongness of crime – see the controversy over the 2020 book In Defense of Looting – perhaps conservatives will recognize the importance of aiming their arguments directly toward citizens’ moral conscience. Without substantive moral arguments for conservative positions, the American conservative movement will be left with not just broken windows, but a broken rhetorical toolkit and a broken moral consensus.
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