The Problem with Cliven Bundy: His plight is sympathetic; his actions are hard to defend.

The righteous indignation burns a little brighter on this side of the Atlantic than it does in Europe and beyond — the United States, per Fitzgerald, “having about it still that quality of the idea.” Forged in revolution, informed by soaring sentiment, and defined by acts of variously prudent dissidence, Americans of all sorts fancy themselves to be fighting the good fight. Judging by the rapturous reception that he has received from conservatives of late, Cliven Bundy is one of these sorts, and protests such as his, it seems, are how the West was won. After a longtime dispute with the federal government, the rebellious cattle rancher has forced the government to back down. Hooray?

Not quite, no. Sympathetic as I am to his plight — and quietly thrilled, too, by anyone standing up to the state’s endless overreach — I fear that Bundy’s champions are rather mixing up their issues. There is a veritable mountain of ugly, dangerous, and indulgent law in this country — so much, indeed, that anyone seeking seriously to diminish it will need a lawnmower rather than a paring knife. And, as we learned at Waco, where Leviathan goes, trouble will inexorably follow. Certainly, Bundy’s predicament is the product of an unlovely changing of the guard — of our statesmen having managed to transmute the unmistakable shouts of “liberty or death” into the convoluted edicts of power, and to substitute soaring charters of rights and untrammeled expressions of individual sovereignty with memorandums and edicts that determine the extent to which ranchers may encroach upon tortoises. Certainly, too, Bundy’s story is that of a family that has raised cattle in the West since before the automobile was invented being turned into a grotesque social experiment. Nevertheless, as one of the better of those statesmen once said, this is a nation with a “government of laws and not of men” — and not the other way around — and it seems to me that this principle should not be considered null and void because one of those men happens to have an agreeable tale, a photogenic complaint, and a romantic genealogical past.

History teaches us that, in all cases of rebellion, the final arbiter is success — a standard that, as a matter of raw fact, has some merit. Still, History is wrong to glue success and virtue together as if they were inextricable. George Washington is a man I admire greatly, and, in his fight against the British at least, he and his contemporaries had the distinct and happy advantage of being right. But had the signatories to the Declaration paid for their treason with their sacred honor — as they were greatly worried that they might — would they have been rendered as fools by their loss? Or would they have been a group of men who got the morals right but the fighting wrong? Likewise, if Bundy had lost in his altercation with the feds, would that have made his cause any less noble? I rather think not.

Which is to say that the stirring defenses of Bundy to which both Powerline’s John Hinderaker and National Review’s own Kevin D. Williamson have committed this week are all well and good, but that they ultimately conflate two questions that no ordered republic can have conflated for too long. Hinderaker rightly contends that the federal government has “squeezed the ranchers in southern Nevada by limiting the acres on which their cattle can graze” — the effect of which “has been to drive the ranchers out of business”; that, preposterously, “the federal government owns more than 80 percent of the state of Nevada,” a number common in many Western states; and that, ultimately, “Cliven Bundy is just one more victim of progress and changing mores.” These grievances serve as an indictment of the regulatory state, yes. But they do not serve as an executioner for our ailing rule of law. If Cliven Bundy’s behavior is legitimized by the gravity of his circumstances, how many others may follow suit, singing his name as they go?

Hinderaker concedes at the outset that “legally, Bundy doesn’t have a leg to stand on,” that Bundy’s claim that the federal government does not own the land is flagrantly incorrect, and that Bundy has been relegated to defending himself because “no lawyer could make that argument.” (I’d quibble with the last point, but perhaps we know different lawyers.) Then he suggests that Bundy didn’t have a chance in the “age of Obama.” This is a strange claim to make. The rule of law, as my editor Rich Lowry noted yesterday morning, has been extolled by presidents for centuries if not millennia, among them Abraham Lincoln, who hoped that “reverence for the laws” would “become the political religion of the nation” and that “the old and the young, the rich and the poor, the grave and the gay, of all sexes and tongues, and colors and conditions,” would “sacrifice unceasingly upon its altars.” Are we really to believe that the government’s backing up its rules with force is unique to Obama? And why would we imagine that Bundy would have a chance if he doesn’t have a case?

That there is a point beyond which the state may not advance without expecting legitimate pushback is acknowledged by even the most committed of the state’s enablers. Indeed, this principle is baked into America’s instruction manual — albeit with a caveat. “Whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive,” the Declaration reads, “it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government.” But it also chides the hotheaded among us, inviting us to remember that “prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient Causes.” As far as we know, Bundy is not set on starting a revolution. (Although any shots fired would, certainly, have been heard around the world.) But then he isn’t set on civil disobedience as we understand it, either. There is a compact that governs disobedience, and it might be said to follow an old Spanish proverb: “Take what you want but pay for it.” Bundy did not ready himself for prison in order to make a point, but hoped that his obstinacy would lead to a direct change in policy with no consequences to himself. He wished, in other words, to win — nothing more, nothing less. That, in a vacuum, his winning looks good to limited-government types such as myself remains beside the point. If he can opt out, who cannot?

Setting out to make “the case for a little sedition,” my colleague Kevin Williamson ended up making a whole lot more, relying for his rhetorical firepower on wholesale revolutionaries Mohandas Gandhi and George Washington — men, lest you forget, who succeeded in bringing down the existing order in its entirety. “Mr. Bundy’s stand should not be construed as a general template for civic action,” Williamson writes, thereby demonstrating the problem rather neatly: When you change the government, you do not need to worry about setting a precedent; when you merely disobey it, you are setting yourself above a system that remains in force. Respectfully, I would venture that Williamson is here suggesting that he is to be the arbiter of legitimate rebellion — a peculiar position for a libertarian concerned with the integrity of the political process to adopt.

When can one refuse to obey the law without expecting to bring the whole thing down? Certainly such instances exist: I daresay that I would not stand idly by quoting John Adams if a state reintroduced slavery or herded a religious group into ovens or even indulged in wholesale gun confiscation. But Bundy’s case is not remotely approaching these thresholds. Are we to presume that if the government is destroying one’s livelihood or breaking one’s ties with the past, one can revolt? If so, one suspects that half the country would march on Washington, with scimitars drawn, and that West Virginia would invade the Environmental Protection Agency.

Nor I. As government expands and civil society retreats, bad laws pile atop bad laws, and the cause for dissent is magnified and deepened. Cliven Bundy has been dealt a raw hand by a system that is deaf to his grievances and ham-fisted in its response. But this is a republic, dammit — and those who hope to keep it cannot pick and choose the provisions with which they are willing to deign to comply.

The headline captures my feelings exactly. I understand there is a lot of nuance, along with judicial and historical twists and turns, that bear on this and I’m still open to hearing more. Somewhere along the line, there was a missed opportunity to sort this out, probably about the time Bundy decided to represent himself before the court. Still listening and reading, though...

Try to listen to Mark Levin's 1st hour from yesterday. It is very eye opening.

Mark definitely get's to the central point -- it is a direct abuse of power by the Feds.

Mark masterfully exposed the evils of those in government. He goes through the actions of the Feds over the past few decades that lead up to the events of the past few weeks.He says that he would not advise those to ignore a court order but he says the greater evil is the abuse of power.

I concluded that Mark admires Bundy for standing up to an abusive government.

The law is on Bundy’s side - strictly speaking. Nevada grazing law says that Bundy, by historic use, has a grazing easement on the land, regardless of who owns the dirt. This easement includes the forage and the water, and is similar to mineral rights in that they can be held separately from the real estate.

Bundy’s rights were established before the feds took possession of the land - the transfer of the land from the state to the feds did not end his grazing easement. He needs to start making his case based on Nevada range law and grazing easements. His rights have nothing to do with whether or not the feds own 80% of the land - his grazing easement supersedes the federal ownership. They do not have the authority to charge him for rights or easements he already owns - which is why they claim payment for “management”. However, they are supposed to manage it to maximize grazing - and they haven’t been doing that - which is why Bundy stopped paying them. They have no right to “manage” the grazing without his consent - and if they aren’t doing the job he was paying them for, i.e. managing HIS forage for maximum grazing capacity, he has every right to stop paying them.

He has the law on his side, if he and his attorneys would argue the proper laws.

Nobody likes to see the massive power of a federal agency targeting an individual citizen. But there aren’t any good guys in this, just one who is less bad than the other. Hell yes the government overreacted. But Bundy also broke the law. The courts have ruled against him at every stage. And at the end of the day the government will continue to pursue it and he’s going to lose his land and his business through less visually attention grapping means.

Please see post #21 of this thread. Also, try to listen to Mark Levin's opening segment from yesterday.

The Feds are wrong. Bundy is in the right. Levin masterly explains the devious acts of the left that led directly to Bundy's action.

Mark speaks of context. Bundy is standing up to a very abusive government.

"As government expands and civil society retreats, bad laws pile atop bad laws, and the cause for dissent is magnified and deepened. Cliven Bundy has been dealt a raw hand by a system that is deaf to his grievances and ham-fisted in its response. But this is a republic, dammit — and those who hope to keep it cannot pick and choose the provisions with which they are willing to deign to comply."

see Post #21 and please listen to Mark Levin's first segment from yesterday.

If you do, you will clearly see that your comment will apply to those in power, not to Bundy.

The Feds are abusing their power. Bundy is standing up to naked tyranny.

Levin masterfully gives context and background of the actions of the Feds that led up to Bundy's actions.

Levin's 1st segment is very eye opening.

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