President Barack Obama—and Neil Kornze, the director of the Federal Bureau of Land Management (BLM)—had some serious lessons to learn about the uses of power.   

For more than 20 years, Cliven Bundy, a Nevada cattle rancher, has refused to pay fees for grazing cattle on public lands, some 80 miles north of Las Vegas.

BLM said Bundy owed close to $1 million. He said his family had used the land since the 1870s and didn’t recognize the federal government’s jurisdiction.

In 2013, a federal judge ordered Bundy to remove his livestock. He ignored the order, and in early April, 2014, BLM agents rounded up more than 400 of his cattle.

Over the weekend of April 12-13, Bundy’s family and other ranchers—backed up by a motley assortment of self-declared militiamen armed with rifles and pistols—confronted the agents.

Bureau of Land Management logo 

U.S. Government, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Fearing another Waco—regarded by Right-wing Americans as a second Alamo—the BLM agents backed down and released Bundy’s cattle.  And then retreated.

Right-wing bloggers and commentators portrayed the incident as a victory over Federal tyranny.

According to Alex Jones’ Infowars.com: “Historic!  Feds Forced to Surrender to American Citizens.”

Right-wingers depicted Bundy as a put-upon Everyman being “squeezed” by the dictatorial Federal government.

They deliberately ignored a number of inconvenient truths—such as:

• Bundy claimed that his grazing rights were established in 1880 when his ancestors settled the land where his ranch sits.
• But the Nevada constitution—adopted in 1864 as a condition of statehood—contradicted Bundy’s right to operate as a law unto himself.
• The constitution says: “The people inhabiting said territory do agree and declare, that they forever disclaim all right and title to the unappropriated public lands lying within said territory, and that the same shall be and remain at the sole and entire disposition of the United States.
• In 1934,  the Taylor Grazing Act gave existing ranchers permits allowing them to run their herds on federal land
• In turn, ranchers paid user fees, which were lower than what most private landowners would have charged.
• Amidst mounting fees and fines, Bundy repeatedly slugged it out in court against government lawyers. He lost.
• In 1998, a federal judge permanently barred him from letting his cattle graze on protected federal land.

Bundy’s refusal to recognize the federal government’s jurisdiction amounted to: “I will recognize—and obey—only those laws that I happen to agree with.”

Cliven Bundy 

Gage Skidmore from Peoria, AZ, United States of America, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0&gt;, via Wikimedia Commons

And the BLM’s performance offers a textbook lesson on how not to promote respect for the law—or for those who enforce it.

As Niccolo Machiavelli, the father of modern political science warned more than 500 years ago in The Prince:

[A ruler] is rendered despicable by being thought changeable, frivolous, effeminate, timid and irresolute—which [he] must guard against as a rock of danger…. [He] must contrive that his actions show grandeur, spirit, gravity and fortitude. 

As to the government of his subjects, let his sentence be irrevocable, and let him adhere to his decisions so that no one may think of deceiving or cozening him.

Niccolo Machiavelli

In his master-work, The Discourses, he outlines the consequences of allowing lawbreakers to go unpunished: 

.…Having established rewards for good actions and penalties for evil ones, and having rewarded a citizen for conduct who afterwards commits a wrong, he should be chastised for that without regard to his previous merits….

For if a citizen who has rendered some eminent service to the state should add to the reputation and influence which he has thereby acquired the confident audacity of being able to commit any wrong without fear of punishment, he will in a little while become so insolent and overbearing as to put an end to all power of the law.

The conduct of the agents of BLM violated that sage counsel on all counts.

BLM agents should have expected trouble from Right-wing militia groups—and come fully prepared to deal with it.

The FBI and the U.S. Marshals Service, for example, have created heavily-armed, highly-trained SWAT teams to deal with those who threaten violence against the Federal Government. One or both of those agencies should have backed up the BLM agents with such force.

Civil War General William Tecumseh Sherman had a formula for dealing with domestic terrorists of his own time.

General Willilam Tecumseh Sherman

Writing to his commander, Ulysses S. Grant, about the best way to treat Confederate guerrillas, he advised: 

“They cannot be made to love us, but they may be made to fear us.  We cannot change the hearts of those people of the South.

“But we can make war so terrible that they will realize the fact that….they are still mortal and should exhaust all peaceful remedies before they fly to war.” 

On January 6, 2021, President Donald Trump incited his Right-wing supporters to violently storm the United States Capitol building. Their goal: To overturn the legitimate results of the 2020 Presidential election won by former Vice President Joe Biden.

For three hours, the mob inflicted $30 million worth of damage on the building. Its police shot only one of their 2,00-2,500 attackers.  

This encouraged Right-wingers to think themselves untouchable—and to continue supporting the man who had incited their treasonous violence.