Democracy in America | The rise and fall of Cliven Bundy

No hero

A law-breaking, subsidy-grubbing crank turns out to also be a racist

By T.N. | LOS ANGELES

THERE should be plenty of conservative commentators feeling rather sheepish today after reading what Cliven Bundy, a man they had elevated to an avatar of righteous patriotism, had to say about welfare and race:

"I want to tell you one more thing I know about the Negro,” he said. Mr. Bundy recalled driving past a public-housing project in North Las Vegas, “and in front of that government house the door was usually open and the older people and the kids—and there is always at least a half a dozen people sitting on the porch—they didn’t have nothing to do. They didn’t have nothing for their kids to do. They didn’t have nothing for their young girls to do.

“And because they were basically on government subsidy, so now what do they do?” he asked. “They abort their young children, they put their young men in jail, because they never learned how to pick cotton. And I’ve often wondered, are they better off as slaves, picking cotton and having a family life and doing things, or are they better off under government subsidy? They didn’t get no more freedom. They got less freedom.”

Mr Bundy's charming comments came too late to be included in our print piece this week. But I think they make it harder to deny that this law-breaking crank should be no one's poster boy; nor should the self-styled militiamen who journeyed from across the country to defend, at the point of assault rifles, Mr Bundy's right to trespass be hailed as heroes.

Watchdogs like the Southern Poverty Law Centre warn of fringe ideas like those animating Mr Bundy's backers migrating "from the margins to the mainstream". This dynamic has clearly been at play in the past couple of weeks. Politicians who should know better, such as Dean Heller, Nevada's Republican senator, and Brian Sandoval, the state's mild-mannered governor, were all too quick to suggest that the story's real villains are the federal officials seeking to enforce multiple court orders against Mr Bundy, rather than the ragtag posse ranged against them. These same politicians have had to move fast in denunciating Mr Bundy's comments today.

Why did this happen? There are good arguments for the federal government to offload some of its vast land holdings in western states (which we discuss this week); and reasonable people have been making the case for some time. It is understandable that politicians who complain about the size of government might wish to exploit the debate Mr Bundy's adventure has restarted, without backing his methods.

The problem is that such advocates have been unable to make their case strongly enough to gain traction in Congress. They certainly haven't out-argued the various interest groups who do rather well out of the feds' holdings, from ranchers who enjoy subsidised grazing privileges (including Mr Bundy, ironically) to environmentalists who seek the shroud of federal protection over unspoiled land. This is why previous calls for transfers of federal land, such as the Sagebrush rebellion of the late 1970s and 1980s, eventually fizzled out.

And yet populist anger against the federal Bureau of Land Management (which dates back to at least the 1934 Taylor Grazing Act, and probably further) needs somewhere to go, and politicians who seek to harness it need opportunities to display their fed-hating credentials. Enter Mr Bundy and his followers, energised by the spread of tea party anti-government sentiment and enabled by the echo chamber of conservative blogs and social media. This is a powerful wagon to hitch your star to. Slapping these guys on the back is more likely to earn you media attention and conservative approval than hammering out tedious bills in the Nevada or Utah state legislatures calling for the creation of task forces to analyse the value of putative land transfers.

If the American Lands Council and other such groups were having more luck pressing their case, Messrs Heller, Sandoval and others might have a more respectable way of flipping the feds the bird. That day may yet come. But for now they chose to ally themselves with a more unsavoury icon. They may decry today's revelations, but they have no right to express surprise at them.

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