We’ve all heard politicians talk about the need for law and order. “It was one of these phrases I’d taken for granted,’’ said Chris Hayes, host of an eponymous evening program on MSNBC. It was while researching the phrase that Hayes found a speech by then-candidate Richard Nixon at the 1968 Republican National Convention in Miami.

While talking about civil rights, Nixon had warned against creating “a colony in a nation’’ — separate societies for blacks and whites — a situation that reminded Hayes of what he had seen in Ferguson, Mo., while reporting on unrest after a deadly police shooting. “When I was in Ferguson, I remember being struck by how much it felt like some kind of occupation,’’ he said. While most middle-class white Americans live in a nation of laws, it struck Hayes that the working-class and poor black people he met in Ferguson lived in a colony in which order was enforced by a heavy-handed police power.

“There’s something our founders would have hated about this setup,’’ Hayes said. After all, he added, similar tyrannical power exerted by British customs agents was “literally what the revolution was fought over! Thomas Jefferson himself wrote, ‘He hath sent forth swarms of officers to harass our people and eat out their substance.’ ’’

Another lesson from Ferguson, Hayes added, was the enduring cultural inheritance of white fear. “The desire for order and the power of white fear that starts from the beginning,’’ he said. “I quote the captain of the ship from Jamestown, the first entry in that diary is: ‘We came upon the savages, who attacked us.’ ’’

Hayes wrote “A Colony in a Nation’’ during the 2016 presidential campaign; the electoral outcome, he said, has elevated the stakes. “The fear is that this combination of cultivating the law and order rhetoric with white fear and then sending the message to agents of the state that are at the front lines that all is permitted now that this tough guy is there — that’s a really worrisome combination.’’

Hayes will speak 6 p.m. at the Old South Church, 645 Boylston St., Boston, in a conversation with professors Jabari Asim of Emerson College and Frank Rudy Cooper of Suffolk University Law School, moderated by Anthony Brooks.

Kate Tuttle can be reached at kate.tuttle@gmail.com.