If you happened to click on the TV news this past week or stumble upon a story from a right-wing website posted by one of your Facebook contacts, there’s no doubt you were subjected to the tale of the new Nathan Hale of our age, Cliven Bundy.
Bundy — an octogenarian Nevada rancher who refuses to recognize the authority of the federal government — became the darling of far-right sovereign citizens everywhere when he refused — even after losing several court cases — to pay for the right to graze his cattle on public lands managed by the Bureau of Land Management, a division of the Department of the Interior. In fact, he has refused to do so for 20 years, despite numerous court losses where his arguments were derided even by conservative legal analysts as being laughably poor.
His complete lack of standing was no deterrent to freeloading on public lands owned by you and me, however, and when the Bureau of Land Management finally had enough of his antics, they began the process of confiscating his wayward, illegally grazing cattle. Lest anyone think this is some example of federal tyranny common in the area, the bureau very rarely does this because most ranchers pay their heavily subsidized fees to graze their cattle. The few that are rounded up are usually strays that are quickly returned to their owners.
Thus, it should be clearly understood that the “unprecedented” roundup of Bundy’s cattle was entirely due to Bundy’s intransigence, not some new draconian example of federal overreach. If anything, the Bureau of Land Management should have acted much sooner to squash Bundy’s blatantly illegal mooching. Claims that there was some sort of corrupt deal between Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada and “Big Solar” — an absurd concept if there ever was one — to turn Bundy’s land into some sort of giant solar panel is completely, totally insane.
So, to be clear, Bundy is a deluded, self-righteous, entitled moocher who took it as his God-given right to use lands that were not his by any stretch of the legal imagination. He refused to stop using land that wasn’t his, refused to pay the fees he owed for illegally grazing his cattle, and then refused to obey the writ of multiple court orders — courts, mind you, in which he was allowed to make his case several times. Naturally, being reasonable people and given they were absolutely in the right, the Bureau of Land Management decided to take action by impounding Bundy’s cattle.
Unfortunately for the forces of common sense and law and order, what happened next was even crazier than Bundy’s ludicrous arguments. Like cockroaches scuttling out of the crooks and crannies of an abandoned insane asylum, firearm-toting militiamen dressed up in fatigues appeared to support Bundy in his standoff with the bureau. Federal government agents were suddenly confronted with large numbers of deeply ignorant, well-armed mouth-breathers who believed impounding illegally-grazing cattle was a sign of impending American Nazism.
A local TV report of the incident that appeared on the major cable news networks showed a surreal situation wherein clearly outnumbered and outgunned federal agents were forced to retreat from carrying out a court order. For the first time in what seems like forever, armed force — not legal argument or the will of the electorate — dictated the outcome of public policy. Fearing bloodshed — not least of which of the women the brave militiamen planned to use as human shields — the feds backed down and, for the time being, Bundy is allowed to keep his cows and use our land to graze them without paying for the privilege of doing so.
The American far-right went nuts about this victory over “tyranny,” and began warning that blood-thirsty, jack-booted federal forces might soon be raiding Bundy’s ranch in retribution. Fox News practically salivated at the prospect, and intoned on and on about the possibility of another Waco or Ruby Ridge — two incidents that have been mythologized by the anti-government far-right as modern-day martyrdoms of patriotic, liberty-loving Americans crucified by the forces of tyrannical big government.
As with most myths, however, the stories behind these incidents are much more complex than its purveyors would lead you to believe. Like the standoff at the Bundy ranch, the tragedy at Waco was, despite the ham-fisted way in which the feds handled the crisis, entirely the fault of the Branch Dravidians — a messianic religious cult led by a fanatic that turned his compound into an illegal weapons dump and engaged in sex with underage members of the cult. They were, quite simply, crazy people led by a bad man — a Texas Jim Jones and Jonestown, only with machine guns instead of poisoned Kool-Aid.
So, too, with the tragedy at Ruby Ridge, where admittedly overzealous U.S. Marshals cornered the Weaver family — a group of survivalists that had associations with anti-government white supremacists — on charges of illegal arms trading. Trapped in a quasi-religious ideological fantasy that saw the feds as agents of the Antichrist, the family refused to surrender, despite a number of attempts by law enforcement to get them to surrender peacefully. When force was finally used, several members of the Weaver family were caught in the crossfire and, unfortunately, died.
This, of course, does not mean that the government is always blameless, the cops are always good, or agencies like the Bureau of Land Management can do no wrong. None of these things are true, and every day we should be greatly concerned about the slow, steady encroachment of the government and its security services — local, state and federal — on our rights and freedoms.
That being said, this does not mean the government is an all-powerful ogre so crushingly evil and inimical to our liberty that armed force can be justified to resist it.
That belief is pure fantasy, drivel thrown up by members of the far-right to scare Americans into thinking that Mayberry has turned into Munich and there are commie-Nazi storm troopers and Gestapo-KGB types around every corner. The government, Lord knows, often does things wrong and can trample on the rights of individuals and groups, but it is not so unconstrained that peaceful protest, political organization, smart legal argument and patience cannot win out over it.
What’s more, even if you do all these things and still lose, that doesn’t mean ipso facto that you live in a tyrannical country. Sometimes people lose a court case or an election, but the beauty of liberal democracy is that even if you lose, you generally never lose everything and you always have the opportunity to make your case — either in court or in an election — somewhere down the road. The point is that the procedures used to determine the outcome are fair, reasonable and not so all-encompassing that one’s life and property are completely and totally destroyed by one toss of the legal or political dice.
Democracy, then, is like a poker game that never ends. Sometimes you win a few hands, sometimes you lose. The point is that the stakes are never high enough and the odds of winning the next round good enough that the decision to cheat or end the game altogether by overturning the table and drawing one’s pistol ever becomes a rational choice. Accepting a loss peacefully, even a big one, because the rules used to determine them were fair and known and agreed to beforehand, is a defining feature of democracy. It is the foundation upon which the rule of law, and thus our entire social order, rests. Belief in the legitimacy of the system is what keeps us from turning into armed mobs that substitute rough justice for election ballots and legal briefs.
So, what was so disturbing about the events that played out over at the dry and dusty Bundy ranch in Nevada was not the confrontation itself, but the fact so many well-armed citizens view our system and the decisions it hands down as totally illegitimate, despite the actual facts of the matter, as to warrant the threat of using force. Nothing good can come of this. If Bundy and his brutes are allowed to get away with so obviously and openly flouting the will of the people and the rule of law — however imperfectly constituted it may seem — it sets an extremely dangerous precedent going forward.
Where will these criminal rebels — for that is what they are — strike next? Perhaps some of the more religiously fanatic will oppose the constitutionally-guaranteed free exercise of secular or religious expression by slaughtering members of a religious community they don’t like. Maybe they’ll begin bombing buildings or confiscating assets. Who knows, they may try to use force or the threat of force to roll back and eliminate anything they don’t like and give justification for those opposing them to take up arms in their own defense and to use violence in a tit-for-tat fashion.
So take warning, America. We may not like our inefficient, often corrupt government, but by rejecting the legitimacy of our system and so turning to privately-wielded violence to oppose it, we will not suddenly find ourselves transported to some libertarian nirvana where freedom rides in on unicorns to save us all. Instead, we will find ourselves at the mercy of whichever group of armed thugs is strong enough to control the area in which we reside. Maybe those thugs will like us enough to not extort, oppress, or kill us, but what’s for certain is that reason, debate and the outcome of free and fair elections won’t stop them one iota.
Once we collectively make the choice to junk the writ of elections and courts and take up force simply because we don’t like the outcomes they produce, there is no turning back — armed might, not the authority of procedural right, will be the order of the day. Perhaps that is exactly what the far-right wants — a second Civil War that they hope to use as a vehicle to empower their own ideological views over others unconvinced of the merit of their cause. The irony, of course, is that in so doing, they would inevitably use the same might-makes-right logic they are accusing the government of levying against them.