Cliven Bundy isn't alone: the country is still full of people who are convinced that slavery wasn't so bad, and that the "welfare state" (a laughable description for anyone who's remotely familiar with what that term means in other countries that actually do care for their citizens' well-being) is worse than the lash of the whip.
Why is that?
The answer traces back to one of the most transparent attempts at bullshitting people who damn well knew better in American history.
It's called The Lost Cause: A New Southern History of the War of the Confederates, by Edward A. Pollard. Pollard was a Virginian, a secessionist, a virulent white supremacist, and an all-around lying asshole. He was the original revisionist: the man who first tried in earnest to remake posterity's view of the Confederacy into a noble pursuit of freedom, as opposed to an abhorrent attempt to deny it.
In 1866, just after the war's conclusion, he published The Lost Cause, which ran for hundreds of pages of essentially one long fabrication. The South didn't really want to secede - it was forced to by the North. Slave-trading wasn't brutal and vicious - it was just another way of showing "their characteristic as a people has always been that sober estimate of the value of men and things." And, most damningly, slavery wasn't really that bad, and slaves were perfectly happy before Yankees started stirring up trouble (what I call the "'Outside Agitator' School of Bullshit").
Here's the paragraph* that, when I heard Cliven Bundy's ridiculous comments, sprang to mind:
We shall not enter upon the discussion of the moral question of slavery. But we may suggest a doubt here whether that odious term "slavery," which has been so long imposed, by the exaggeration of Northern writers, upon the judgment and sympathies of the world, is properly applied to that system of servitude in the South which was really the mildest in the world; which did not rest on acts of debasement and disenfranchisement, but elevated the African, and was in the interest of human improvement; and which, by the law of the land, protected the negro in life and limb, and in many personal rights, and, by the practice of the system, bestowed upon him a sum of individual indulgences, which made him altogether the most striking type in the world of cheerfulness and contentment.
-Edward A. Pollard, "The Lost Cause," 1866 (p.49)
This was one of the finest lines of utter bullshit revisionism ever written, and it worked really damn well. This became adopted as fact for a century throughout the South, thanks to the bold bullshitting of the Sons of Confederate Veterans and other groups formed to whitewash the Civil War. It also led to such gems as the claim that
thousands of black soldiers fought for the Confederacy, and
right-wing complaints that "12 Years a Slave" didn't do enough to depict the "contented slaves" that surely
must have existed in the South at the time.
It's this devaluing of the slaves' suffering, and the fabrication of slave-owner altruism, that allows the thoughtless boobs like Cliven Bundy to truly believe that, somehow, government assistance is actually a worse form of slavery than slavery itself.
It's indeed a peculiar institution.
* - Okay, to be fair, that's actually only half the paragraph. The rest is just as full of shit as the first part, but on a slightly different topic. Instead of the benign nature of slavery, it covers Pollard's odious views on northern Abolitionists:
But it is not necessary to prolong this consideration. For, we repeat, the slavery question was not a moral one in the North, unless, perhaps, with a few thousand persons of disordered conscience. It was significant only of a contest for political power, and afforded nothing more than a convenient ground of dispute between two parties, who represented not two moral theories, but hostile sections and opposite civilizations.
"A few thousand persons of disordered conscience" - the 1866 way of saying "dirty fucking hippies."