I had a mapping job last year that required me to drive most of the streets in a city. One thing that never ceased to amaze me was the sheer number of Confederate flags out and about. I mean it's not like you find a lot of Germans who proudly fly the swastika.
Yet, for the disgust seeing the stars and bars provokes in many of us, there's a far more more insidious threat at work in American politics. For every Confederate flag flying fool, there are many more of their neo-confederate friends who are better at dog whistling:
The Federal Government is overreaching its authority......
trampling on state's rights......
it's about time we "restore" the Constitution.....
by any means necessary.....
A Very Dumb Dog Whistler
Cliven Bundy is a racist fool, but really the man's a blessing of sorts. Because he's the the sort of fool that can't dog whistle very well. Dog whistles are words or phrases that have a much deeper meaning to the members an in-group than the public as a whole:
In 1981, former Republican Party strategist Lee Atwater when giving an anonymous interview discussing the GOP's Southern Strategy (see also Lee Atwater on the Southern Strategy) said:
"You start out in 1954 by saying, "N*!%#r, n*!%#r, n*!%#." By 1968, you can't say "n*!%#r" — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me — because obviously sitting around saying, "We want to cut this," is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "N*!%#r, n*!%#r."
The performance art that has been happening out in Nevada is a dog whistle extraordinaire, a coded message intended to rally the faithful to the cause.
A Call to the Faithful
As has been pointed out the hot mess at the Bundy Ranch was orchestrated part and parcel by two Koch influenced organizations: Americans for Prosperity (AFP) and the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).
While the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) was attempting to protect the property of the American people, AFP wound up its Western affiliates to send out a call to action.
AFP-Nevada and AFP-Colorado lit up this action like a Christmas tree, envoking the Sagebrush Rebellion, a failed 1970s attempt to transfer federal lands to the states.
A second Koch influenced organization, ALEC, has been hard at work promoting the idea that federal lands should be handed over to the states for years. Their Sagebrush Rebellion Act has been active since at least 1980. And, in recent years, it has piled on the issue with multiple new bills, and a full court press planned for 2014.
Cui Bono?
The Koch Brothers have good reason to covet federal lands. Let's be honest, with the zeal of Western states to privatize (Arizona had plans to sell the state capitol, how fitting) we all know how this will end. Federal lands will be given to the states, who in turn will have a fire sale to the favored political donors.
At a personal level, Bill Koch has been fighting to take public lands in order to create his very own fantasy:
an unpopulated, faux Western town that might boggle the mind of anyone who ever had a playhouse. Its full-size buildings come with polished brass and carved-mahogany details and are fronted with board sidewalks and underpinned by a water-treatment system. A locked gate with guards screens who comes and goes….
Koch’s project manager has told county officials that the enclave in the middle of the 6,400-acre Bear Ranch won’t ever be open to the public. It is simply for Koch’s amusement and for that of his family and friends
Competing with Marie Antoinette to see who's most out of touch, eh? In fairness, the plan involves a land swap, so the federal government would receive compensation for the lands it loses. Nonetheless, the fact of the matter is that federal lands are not for sale. Since 1976, with the passage of the Federal Land Policy and Management Act (FLPMA), the federal government has been required to hold in trust those lands it has possession of. There is no new frontier here. Only lands so marginal that no one wants to live on them, leased out, for a fee, to private companies.
The BLM manages almost a billion acres of land for the federal government. This land nets around $4 billion in revenues each year, with these funds being split between the state and federal government. That works out to about $25 a year for each and every working American. This is despite the fact that the BLM has been found to consistently undercharge many of those companies which hold leases on federal land. One report estimated this subsidy to federal leaseholders at more than a billion dollars a year. Together with woodlands administered by the US Forest Service, these federal lands represent a tremendous natural resource held in trust for the American people, for which companies must pay if they want access. Nonetheless, numerous businesses which benefit from the use of public lands desire to have them for their own. And... they are willing to support neo-confederate efforts to attack the very idea of the United States in order get what they want.
Reviving Compact Theory
It's not just this Sagebrush Rebellion stuff, or even the nullification acts pushed as model legislation. At a very basic level, the reason the AFP and ALEC exist is in order to push an understanding the relation between states and the federal government discredited before long before Nevada even became a state.
In 1995, ALEC published what amounts to bible for the group. Contained within is the "truth" as revealed by ALEC to legislative members. On page 19:
This here is the real dogwhistle. Remember when Clive Bundy said this:
"I believe this is a sovereign state of Nevada," Bundy said in a radio interview last Thursday. "I abide by all of Nevada state laws. But I don’t recognize the United States government as even existing."
Amazing as this statement is, it is also the official doctrine of a membership organization to which hundreds of state legislators belong. Bundy has done us the service of unmasking the dog-whistle here. It is the official doctrine of an organization to which hundreds of state legislators belong that the federal government does not exist, because all government is the creation of state government. It is the
compact theory reborn.
...compact theory holds that the nation was formed through a compact agreed upon by all the states, and that the federal government is thus a creation of the states. Consequently, states should be the final arbiters over whether the federal government had overstepped the limits of its authority as set forth in the compact.
The problem here is that the supremacy of the federal government over states, let alone its existence, has been an established matter of law since 1819
when the Supreme Court ruled:
The sovereignty of a State extends to everything which exists by its own authority or is introduced by its permission, but does it extend to those means which are employed by Congress to carry into execution powers conferred on that body by the people of the United States? We think it demonstrable that it does not. Those powers are not given by the people of a single State. They are given by the people of the United States, to a Government whose laws, made in pursuance of the Constitution, are declared to be supreme. Consequently, the people of a single State cannot confer a sovereignty which will extend over them.
If we accept that the states are sovereign, then we accept that the United States does not exist. This was the mission of the Confederacy, thus it should be no surprise that it draws the Clive Bundys of the world to it. But, more importantly, if we accept that the states are sovereign, then we accept that the people are not. That's the mission of these neo-confederates like Bundy. That should be no surprise.
Yet, that so many of our state legislators should be beholden to the same doctrine?
That's a shock to our system of government that demands reply.
For those that have aligned themselves with an organization that refuses to recognize the very existence of our system of government, there's only one question that needs to be asked:
Are you going to stand with ALEC or the United States of America?