By
Kevin D. Williamson
A great deal of the discussion about the Cliven Bundy standoff in Nevada has focused on the legal questions — the litigation between Mr. Bundy and the BLM, his eccentric (i.e., batzoid) legal rationales, etc. But as Rich Lowry and others have argued, this is best understood not as a legal proceeding but as an act of civil disobedience. John Hinderaker and Rich both are correct that as a legal question Mr. Bundy is legless. But that is largely beside the point.
Of course the law is against Cliven Bundy. How
could it be otherwise? The law was against Mohandas Gandhi, too, when he
was tried for sedition; Mr. Gandhi himself habitually was among the
first to acknowledge that fact, refusing to offer a defense in his
sedition case and arguing that the judge had no choice but to resign, in
protest of the perfectly legal injustice unfolding in his courtroom, or
to sentence him to the harshest sentence possible, there being no
extenuating circumstances for Mr. Gandhi’s intentional violation of the
law. Henry David Thoreau was happy to spend his time in jail, knowing
that the law was against him, whatever side justice was on.
But not all dissidents are content to submit to what we,
in the Age of Obama, still insist on quaintly calling “the rule of
law.” And there is a price to pay for that, too: King George not only
would have been well within his legal rights to hang every one of this
nation’s seditious Founding Fathers, he would have been duty-bound to do
so, the keeping of the civil peace being the first responsibility of
the civil authority. Every fugitive slave, and every one of the sainted
men and women who harbored and enabled them, was a law-breaker, and who
can blame them if none was content to submit to what passed for justice
among the slavers? The situation was less dramatic during the government
shutdown, but every one of the veterans and cheesed-off citizens who
disregarded President Obama’s political theater and pushed aside his
barricades was a law-breaker, too — and bless them for being that.
Harry Reid, apparently eager for somebody to play the
role of General Dyer in this civil-disobedience drama, promises that
this is “not over.” And, in a sense, it can’t be over: The theory of
modern government is fundamentally Hobbesian in its insistence that
where political obedience is demanded, that demand must be satisfied
lest we regress into bellum omnium contra omnes. I myself am of
the view that there is a great deal of real estate between complete
submission and civil war, and that acts such as Mr. Bundy’s are not only
bearable in a free republic but positively salubrious. Unhappily, those
views are not shared by many in Washington, and, if I were a wagering
sort, my money would be on Mr. Bundy ending up dead or in prison, with a
slight bias in the odds toward death.
Mohandas Gandhi and George Washington both were British
subjects who believed that their legal situation was at odds with
something deeper and more meaningful, and that the British were a legal
authority but an alien power. (Washington is not really so much closer
to London than New Delhi is.) Mr. Bundy is tapping into a longstanding
tendency in the American West to view the federal government as a
creature of the Eastern establishment, with political and economic
interests that are inimical to those of the West and its people. And it
is not as though there is no evidence supporting that suspicion. The
federal government controls 87 percent of the land in Nevada, something
that would be unheard-of in any state east of Colorado. Uncle Sam owns
less than 1 percent of the land in New York, 1 percent of Maine, less
than 1 percent of Rhode Island, less than 1 percent of Connecticut, but
nearly half of New Mexico, Arizona, and Utah, more than half of Utah and
Idaho, and is practically a monopolist in Nevada. And a monopolist is
rarely a good and honest negotiating partner. The original Sagebrush
rebels objected to conservation rules written by Eastern
environmentalists who had never so much as set foot in the lands they
were disposing of; a century and some later, people travel more, but the
underlying dynamic is the same.
There are of course questions of prudence and proportion
to be answered here, and though I note that he uses the very strong
phrase “lawless government,” I sympathize with Mr. Lowry’s desire that
both sides should follow the law. But there is a more important question
here: Is government our servant, or is it our master? The Left has long
ago answered that question to the satisfaction of its partisans, who
are happy to be serfs so long as their birth control is subsidized. But
the Right always struggles with that question, as it must. The thing
that conservatives seek to conserve is the American order, which 1)
insists that we are to be governed by laws rather than by men and 2) was
born in a violent revolution. Russell Kirk described the conservative
ideal as “ordered liberty,” and that is indeed what we must aim for —
keeping in mind that it is order that serves liberty, not the other way
around. And it is the government that exists at the sufferance of the
people, including such irascible ones as Mr. Bundy, not the other way
around.
If the conservatives in official Washington want to do
something other than stand by and look impotent, they might consider
pressing for legislation that would oblige the federal government to
divest itself of 1 percent of its land and other real estate each year
for the foreseeable future through an open auction process. Even the
Obama administration has identified a very large portfolio of office
buildings and other federal holdings that are unused or under-used. By
some estimates, superfluous federal holdings amount to trillions of
dollars in value. Surely not every inch of that 87 percent of Nevada
under the absentee-landlordship of the federal government is critical to
the national interest. Perhaps Mr. Bundy would like to buy some land
where he can graze his cattle.
Prudential measures do not solve questions of principle.
So where does that leave us with our judgment of the Nevada
insurrection? Perhaps with an understanding that while Mr. Bundy’s stand
should not be construed as a general template for civic action, it is
nonetheless the case that, in measured doses, a little sedition is an
excellent thing.
— Kevin D. Williamson is roving correspondent for National Review.
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