Luke Phillips
One of the protestors/militants at Malheur National Wildlife Refuge was shot dead, apparently, by federal marshals. Few details yet and the situation is still developing as of the time of writing, but a couple of notes about the Malheur standoff and what it means about the federal government’s resource policies and the brewing unrest in this country:
Just like the white working class flocking to Trump, just like the black populations of Ferguson and Baltimore rising to rioting, just like the Occupiers of 2011 blocking the streets and squares of every major city in America, the Bundyites of Malheur Bend have a reason for disturbing the piece and rebelling against authority. But rather than that being stagnant wages, social crisis and discrimination, or plutocratic capture and inequality, in this case it is a bloated and overextended Federal Government stifling land rights in the American West. Any way you slice it, there’s a problem in the fact that the feds own 47% of the land out there while ranchers and farmers and miners seek it for their own enterprises. It’s not a pernicious government actively seeking to take away the rights of landowners- it’s a bumbling government entrenched in policies from decades ago, unwilling or incapable of self-reform from the inside. People in the natural resources industries have a legitimate complaint against how the federal government manages land, and that complaint has for so long not been heard.
Does this by any means legitimate the Bundy clan’s riotous, unlawful, treasonous troublemaking that has resulted in the death of one of their own?
NO!
It merely points to the reality, obvious on the Western plains but obliviously ignored by politicians in Washington, that the federal government needs to seriously reform its land-use and resource-extraction policies on behalf of the people who are most effected by them. I need not add that it also must work to reform municipal services like policing and housing for inner-city blacks, immigration and trade and wage policy for working class whites, and financial regulatory policy for all Americans across all economic, social, and geographic strata beneath the financial class’s level.
True conservatism not only preserves, but reforms, that it might preserve traditions and institutions in the face of a changing world. This reform can take place at different speeds depending on pressure and necessity, and in the four aforementioned crises- of the sprawling federal government, of the decline of the working class, of the decay of municipal institutions, of the decadence of the financial system- we desperately need reform, probably quicker rather than slower. True conservatives would advocate reasonable policies to alleviate these crises and better serve the constituencies affected by them. If Republicans cannot provide solutions to these and other crises, they deserve to lose the support of the people these crises affect.
The Henry Clay Institute 