Benjamin Franklin famously wrote, “Those Who Sacrifice Liberty For Security Deserve Neither.” Even though they talk almost obsessively about the Founding Fathers, this simple truth has been totally lost on Republicans for decades. The trend has accelerated since 9/11, but "law and order" as a Republican wedge issue dates back to at least Nixon.

The tenets of "law and order conservatism" are essentially as follows. Society is beset by predators who are bent on destroying our fragile way of life. Innocent people need constant and vigilant protection by police who are free to deal harshly with the low-life scum committing crimes. The police are heroes in blue who form a thin line holding back utter chaos.

According this brand of "conservatism," the Democrats are the exact opposite. They are bleeding-heart, liberal Flower Children who hate the police and want to empower the criminals by protecting them from imprisonment through all kinds of "technicalities."

These technicalities, of course, are often civil rights that our forebears fought Britain to secure, but never mind that for now.

The Democrats aren't on the side of the victims of crime, but rather on the side of the "victims" of society who turned to crime because of racism or poverty. The Democrats hamstring prosecutors, hate cops, and want to let rapists and murderers out of jail.

Charitably speaking, this is all hogwash. The good news is, it appears that "law and order conservatism" may finally be losing its appeal among the Republican rank and file.

Why is this happening? Here are what I think are the most important reasons.

First of all, there has been a realization among Republicans that mainstream, office-holding Democrats aren’t really anti-police at all. Among Republicans, it is commonly believed that Democrats are trying to expand government power to new heights by increasing the scope of the regulatory state to intrude into almost every corner of our lives.

Funny thing is - you can’t do that without the cooperation of the police. You can’t regulate everything to death and concentrate power in Washington, unless the thin blue line is on-board with the agenda. While Republican talking heads and party leaders strive mightily to ignore this simple fact, it is becoming increasingly impossible for people of average intelligence to ignore. The police are perfectly okay with the increasingly regulated environment in which we live. As laws proliferate and our rights are increasingly circumscribed, the power and prestige of the police expand concurrently. Our loss is their gain, so to be speak.

Many Democrats love laws and regulations, both of which would be useless without men with guns to enforce them. Far from hating police, Democrats need them more than anyone. They provide the muscle to put all those lovely regulatory plans into action. Nor are Democrats strong supporters of civil liberties, as those pesky things often stand in the way of "progressive" legislation.

This realization has caused many rank-and-file Republicans to suddenly get defensive about Civil Liberties. There is nothing like suddenly understanding that a Democratic Administration might easily consider you an enemy of the state, to start a Republican talking like Thomas Jefferson.

The next reason for the Republican re-think on law and order is the sheer number of run-ins that average people are having with heavy-handed police tactics. Not long ago at a fundraiser, I met a Republican business-owner and Christian activist who was a big supporter of Ron Paul. I asked him why he had gone in that direction.

His conversion to Ron Paulism began when he was a little too vocal in protesting a speeding ticket that he felt was unjustified. The cop issuing the citation believed that he was being "uncooperative" and "challenging Police authority." So this father of three, who owns a printing business with eight employees, was dragged from his vehicle, hit with a taser, handcuffed, and left bleeding face down on the side of the road. Eventually, he was charged with resisting arrest without violence and obstruction of a police officer.

They used to say a Conservative is a Liberal who has been mugged.

Now you can say a Libertarian is a Conservative who has been hit with a taser.

It used to be that middle class, professional types that are commonly Republican didn't interact much with the police. Not anymore. With municipalities facing lean budgets, there is more emphasis than ever on speeding tickets as a source of revenue. This puts an increasing number of everyday people in potentially dangerous confrontations with cops, who seem increasingly willing to react violently to any perceived challenge to their authority. Bad things are bound to happen to good people under such conditions - and they are.

And it's not just traffic stops for speeding. Sobriety checkpoints are multiplying. We now have "border" checkpoints that are up to 100 miles from any international border at which U.S. citizens are challenged to prove their identities. We have surly TSA agents pawing us at airports. We have middle class people getting their assets seized by police, and then having to go through Hell to recover them.

We even face the increased use of SWAT teams for simple regulatory infractions. Failing to file some government-mandated paperwork has left many farmers and small business owners suddenly staring down the barrel of an assault rifle. This is just one example:

"You don’t need to know. You can’t know.” That’s what Kathy Norris, a 60-year-old grandmother of eight, was told when she tried to ask court officials why, the day before, federal agents had subjected her home to a furious search.

The agents who spent half a day ransacking Mrs. Norris’ longtime home in Spring, Texas, answered no questions while they emptied file cabinets, pulled books off shelves, rifled through drawers and closets, and threw the contents on the floor.

The six agents, wearing SWAT gear and carrying weapons, were with – get this- the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Kathy and George Norris lived under the specter of a covert government investigation for almost six months before the government unsealed a secret indictment and revealed why the Fish and Wildlife Service had treated their family home as if it were a training base for suspected terrorists. Orchids.

That’s right. Orchids.

By March 2004, federal prosecutors were well on their way to turning 66-year-old retiree George Norris into an inmate in a federal penitentiary – based on his home-based business of cultivating, importing and selling orchids..

Mr. Norris ended up spending almost two years in prison because he didn’t have the proper paperwork for some of the many orchids he imported. The orchids were all legal – but Mr. Norris and the overseas shippers who had packaged the flowers had failed to properly navigate the many, often irrational, paperwork requirements the U.S. imposed when it implemented an arcane international treaty’s new restrictions on trade in flowers and other flora.

The judge who sentenced Mr. Norris had some advice for him and his wife: “Life sometimes presents us with lemons.” Their job was, yes, to “turn lemons into lemonade.”

The whole story is covered here .

This leads into my next point. It is just so damned easy to go to jail in the United States. Screw up some paperwork. Boom, jail time. Mess up on your taxes. Boom, jail time. Go through the wrong door at an airport. Boom, you guessed it, jail time. Actions you didn't even know were crimes, or weren't even recognized as crimes before you were prosecuted, can land you in jail.

How is this possible? Boston civil-liberties lawyer Harvey Silverglate explains this in his book "Three Felonies a Day." The criminal code of the United States is so vast, so confusing, and so badly written that Silverglate estimates that the average American now unwittingly commits three felonies each and every day.

In his book, Silverglate explains that under the English common law we inherited, a crime requires intent. But this protection is fast disappearing in the U.S. As Mr. Silverglate writes, "Since the New Deal era, Congress has delegated to various administrative agencies the task of writing the regulations," even as "Congress has demonstrated a growing dysfunction in crafting legislation that can in fact be understood."

As he points out, prosecutors identify defendants to go after instead of finding a law that was broken and figuring out who did it. If you make it on some prosecutor's RADAR screen, then chances are you are going to jail. The lawyers will find a way to get you, and the heroes in blue will be there every step of the way to help them. Expect more of this as new regulations proliferate out of Washington.

And that makes Republicans really nervous. If the prosecutors are out of control, and the police will follow any order with the diligence of the SS, where does that leave the average citizen?

In a world of hurt, that's where.

The final piece of this puzzle has to do with guns. More and more Republicans have come to the realization that they must take responsibility for their own security. The terrorist attacks that have been thwarted have been stopped by airline passengers, not by air marshals. Armed home owners stop home invasions, not cops. The "law and order" narrative depends on citizens feeling vulnerable and demanding protection. With more and more citizens taking responsibility for their own safety, the narrative loses its punch.

The leadership of the Republican Party hasn't gotten the memo on all this, yet. Which is why we are likely to keep hearing Sean Hannity bleat on about heroes in blue and public-servant prosecutors. And why 2010 and 2012 are likely to feature the "law and order" themes from a lot of Republican campaigns.

But, frankly, many rank-and-file Republicans, not to mention Tea Partiers, are less interested in more cops on the beat than they are in safeguarding themselves, their businesses, and their families from rapacious prosecutors and their minions in blue. The party and/or candidates that figure that out are quite likely to do very well in upcoming elections.

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 [Good Riddance to Law and Order Conservatism]

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