How has America dealt with the tension between liberty and order?
JAMES Q. WILSON: We deal with the tension between liberty and order in the usual confused and ambiguous way that any serious culture deals with it. The two cannot be perfectly reconciled. But I think America makes the greatest effort to reconcile liberty and order. Sometimes it does so in ways that irritate me. There are things the American Civil Liberties Union can demand that I think are absolutely absurd. On the other hand, there are things that police officers demand that I think are wrong. But in the balance that we strike in providing ordered liberty – liberty within a framework of more or less stable expectations about how people are supposed to behave – we do very well. We don’t do very well for everyone all of the time, and there are parts of our cities where we haven’t done well at all. There are parts of our cities that are still victimized by gang warfare and predatory drug sales, single-parent families living, no fathers on the street to control disorder. These are disaste
