"Law and order" as a metaphor for other things

Beth Schwartzapfel, The Marshall Project - The phrase was strategically lobbed into presidential politics for the first time in 1964, when candidate Barry Goldwater used it against the incumbent, Lyndon B. Johnson.

At the apex of the civil rights movement, as White voters saw the familiar social order attacked and upended, Goldwater and other conservative politicians needed a way to tap into these voters’ fears without appearing to talk about race, say political scientists and historians. “Law and order” was “a strategy for reaching suburban voters without having to say the ugly part out loud,” says Leah Wright-Rigueur, a political historian and public policy professor at Harvard University.