Ben Carson puts the case of Clive Bundy versus the Bureau of Land Management in an interesting light that goes right to the left-right Rorschach aspect of the controversy:

The massive show of federal force in the Bundy case is frightening because it gives us a brief glimpse of the totalitarian regime that awaits a sleeping populace that does not take seriously its voting responsibilities, and places in public office (and returns them to office) who do not represent traditional American values.

Somewhere in the shadows of time one imagines there may have been an actual incident to inspire the phrase “it depends whose ox is gored.”  In the ranges of Nevada, we have a perfect representation that ought to inspire a new folk phrase like “everybody’s got a cow out grazing.”

Look, for a start, to the Washington Post time line of the controversy (courtesy commenter Max D.):

March 1993: The Washington Post publishes a story about the federal government’s efforts to protect the desert tortoise in Nevada. Near Las Vegas, the Bureau of Land Management designated hundreds of thousands of acres of federal land for strict conservation efforts. “Among the conservation measures required,” according to the Post’s coverage, “are the elimination of livestock grazing and strict limits on off-road vehicle use in the protected tortoise habitat. Two weeks ago, the managers of the plan completed the task of purchasing grazing privileges from cattle ranchers who formerly used BLM land.”

Except, that is, Clive Bundy, who was “digging in for a fight.”  Most of the intellectual commentary on the issue, including Carson’s, includes disclaimers that his legal case is pretty spare, which is ultimately a tautology affirming that when the government gives itself powers, those powers are not against the law.

Those acres in Nevada are therefore a physical manifestation of areas of all human activity that government may or may not constrain in the future, and what better evidence of totalitarianism could there be?  It’s a complete inversion of the foundational principles of American governance, as succinctly stated in the tenth amendment to the Constitution:

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

The free range of activity is supposed to be ours by right, not simply some parcels allowed to us by a government that hasn’t found a pretense to close it off, yet.

Much about the travails of Nevada rancher Clive Bundy, who has been facing down the federal Bureau of Land Management (BLM) with the help of militia-type groups from across the country, offers many lessons from a conservative point of view.  David French makes a good one:

With few options left within conventional politics, rural Americans are beginning to contemplate more dramatic measures, such as the state secession movements building in Colorado, Maryland, California, and elsewhere. The more viable state secession movements aim to limit urban control by literally removing rural counties from their states and forming new states around geographic regions of common interests.

But until there’s a long-term solution, we may very well see more Bundy Ranch moments, where individual Americans (and their allies) simply refuse to consent to laws that destroy their way of life for the sake of regulations that provide no perceivable benefit to others. (I can only imagine my frustration if I had to end a more-than-century-old family lifestyle, arguably for the sake of a turtle that no one will see).

So does Peter Kirsanow:

One can acknowledge that the government has the right — in fact, the responsibility — to enforce the law, yet object that this administration habitually enforces the law in a capricious, arbitrary, and discriminatory manner. They imperiously go after a Bundy while excusing scores of miscreants whose get-out-of-jail-free card is membership in a politically-correct class. They regularly waive legal requirements out of sheer political expediency. They fail to defend duly enacted statutes with which they, the enlightened, disagree.

It can hardly be denied that President Obama and the progressive movement generally traffic in divisiveness, especially when they feel those who wind up on their side of the divide are more powerful.

The thought that keeps returning to me, however, is that the Bundy episode is a great illustration of the different perspectives of the Left and the Right.  I mean, one needn’t give total credence to speculation that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D, NV) is orchestrating the routing of the rancher as part of a Chinese solar farm deal to think the whole story sounds very familiar… even to the point being a cliché.  The main difference is that the Hollywood cliché would require the powerful force behind the strong-arm tactics to drive people off of their land to be Big Business.  Jean-Claude Van Damme’s Nowhere to Run comes quickly to mind.

It’s interesting, isn’t it, that progressives, the media, the Democrats (etc.) would find a huge story worthy of deep investigation in the controversy if it were a private business doing the strong arming.  When it’s the government, though, we may get some minor concessions that the BLM is going about things the wrong way, but motives and justifications are assumed to be pure.

Over the weekend, I had a Twitter tiff with Providence Journal columnist Ed Fitzpatrick over a comment in his Sunday column, which was about the negativity between the two Republicans vying for the party’s gubernatorial nomination.  Noting that they both have liberal or Democrat backgrounds, Fitzpatrick wrote, “In Ted Cruz’s Texas, they’d give you the electric chair for less than that.”

It’s obviously a joke, but this sort of humor requires some sense of underlying truth.  To mainstream New England liberals, the two bits of common wisdom on which Fitzpatrick is playing are that conservatives brook no dissent and that we are casual about human life.

But humor doesn’t only rely on underlying truth, it also reinforces it.  If that smart and reasonable political columnist in the state’s major newspaper can casually reference conservatives’ willingness to put people to death for disagreeing with them, then (while of course everybody knows they aren’t that bad… at least not all of them) it’s smart and reasonable of others to trust in the sentiment.  This is how the Obama administration can actively abuse Americans during the government shutdown in full expectation that the news media will blame conservative Republicans (e.g., Ted Cruz).  This is how local activists (backed by the teachers’ union, naturally) can get away with declaring that their neighbors want to hurt children and destroy the community for seeking to slow the rate of growth of taxes.

It wasn’t that long ago that mainstream journalists (including Fitzpatrick, as I recall) were assuring me that they understood that it’s possible to oppose same-sex marriage without being a bigot, and now look where we are.  In part we’re here based on the casual dismissing of opponents’ views, such as performed by Fitzpatrick’s fellow Providence Journal columnist, Bob Kerr.  Many were the jokes about traditionalists’ ignorance and bigotry.

This is a lot of weight to put on a throw-away line in an ephemeral bit of political literature, to be sure.  I elaborate on the 140 characters of my tweet only because Fitzpatrick and others objected to my objection.  Comedians are comedians, and ideologues are ideologues.  Even those who agree with them can see the role they fill and take their words in that spirit.  At some level in the development of a smart and reasonable columnist, though, an awareness should develop that even jokes can have consequences.

An ethical government is critical for a healthy society, and the burden of enforcing it ultimately falls on the voters. If unethical officials can get reelected without fail, then imposing small fines on their behavior is simply a cost of doing business. In that context, as I’ve said before, advisory opinions from an official Ethics Commission can become a mechanism for approving all corruption up to a line.

But what about that line?

Writing about the new Speaker of the House’s professed emphasis on jobs and the economy, Providence Journal columnist Ed Fitzpatrick argues that strong ethics laws have an effect on such matters, too:

“You can’t convince me that being in The New York Times two days in a row for an FBI raid on the State House sends the right message about the way we do business in Rhode Island,” John M. Marion, Common Cause Rhode Island executive director, said. …

I’d argue that restoring Ethics Commission power is not about progressive or conservative government; it’s about good government. I’d argue that ethics and openness are directly tied to the main priorities — jobs and the economy.

Whatever the effect of New York Times coverage, would a restored Ethics Commission have prevented the FBI raid? I don’t think so. After all, the commission did recently manage to fine the FBI’s target.

I’m not saying that legislators should be immune to the Ethics Commission; they shouldn’t. But we have to be careful about seeing the Bureaucracy of Ethics as a magic pill.

For context, I’ll admit that I’m currently down on the Ethics Commission as an agency. I’ll soon be elaborating on the reasons, but for now, I’ll summarize that it has to do with the complete lack of protection it offers residents of Rhode Island when the conflicts of interest they’re fighting are entirely within government. Conflicts of interest one step into the shadows are entirely invisible to the commission’s government lawyers.

In a separate op-ed, Marion suggests that the Ethics Commission’s advice “protects” citizens and legislators both. I think that’s incorrect, at least if the citizenry isn’t willing to protect itself, and if the commission’s understanding of ethics is as skewed as the legislators’.

Small government Rhode Islanders have a lot to dislike about HealthSource RI, the state’s ObamaCare health benefits exchange. But never mind that the agency is spending public dollars to remedy much-lower-than-expected paying customers, but instead attracting many-more-than-expected free Medicaid recipients (including many in the non-expansion group for whom the federal government isn’t picking up the whole tab).

Never mind that it’s simply inappropriate for the government to take our money and change our laws in order to create a market space that it can fill with a $100 million start-up with no plan to pay for itself and nobody whose livelihood is really on the line if it fails.

Never mind all of that, because HealthSource has stepped into the realm of self-parody with regard to how invasive government can get when money is no object and behavior must be changed. Welcome to HealthSource’s “Nag Toolkit.” As Christine Rousselle of Townhall explains:

The website for the “Nag Toolkit” features tutorials to teach adults how to use the mobile apps Snapchat, Twitter, Vine, Tinder, and OkCupid to connect with their children. While Snapchat, Twitter, and Vine are apps mostly used for communication and sharing things with friends, Tinder and OkCupid are dating/hookup apps. The goal of the “Nag Toolkit” is to assist parents with bothering their kids about health insurance in places where children would not typically expect to find their parents.

So, parents, pick a “provocative username,” and ambush your children on social media, encouraging them to sign on to an overreaching top-down plan to rope them into dependence on government. It gets even better, at the bottom of the page, where the government suggests that confused (or squeamish?) parents can just hand over their kids’ email addresses, and “we’ll do the nagging.”

We can only hope that such efforts have the unintended consequence of pushing young Rhode Islanders toward a gut-level distrust of government and lead them to rebel.

(Click “continue reading” for addendum.)

Two interesting assessments, today, give one the impression that the characteristic Rhode Island game of “let’s pretend” is perhaps coming to its untenable end, at least with regard to land usage. This is from a column by retired Providence Journal commentary page editor, Robert Whitcomb:

It is hard to quantify how much Rhode Island has gained or lost from trying to preserve old mills because people think that they’re quaint. Many can never be retrofitted to make a fair (without tax breaks) profit. Preservationists (not a few of whom are financially secure and don’t have to worry too much about finding a job in the sluggish Rhode Island economy) fiercely fight to save as many of these mills as possible, once built for economically logical reasons that disappeared decades ago. Indeed, the Ocean State has not exactly become a boom town during all these years of trying to keep old factory buildings that don’t make anything anymore except the occasional arsonist.

And this is from the weekend column of Millennial WPRI journalist Ted Nesi:

It’s time for Rhode Island to take a deep breath about the old I-195 land – particularly the state’s politicians, who’ve been promising big things from the 19 acres of potential redevelopment for years now. I-195 Commission Chairman Colin Kane said on this week’s Executive Suite he doesn’t expect construction on any buildings to begin there before the fall of 2015, with the spring of 2016 more likely. And as Jef Nickerson has pointed out, Providence already has plenty of undeveloped land in prime locations in the form of surface parking lots (not to mention Victory Place); the fact that developers aren’t snapping those up suggests weak demand.

It all comes back to Rhode Island’s practice of single-entry bookkeeping — meaning that the powers who be like to coddle the public into believing that the benefits of their preferences have no negative consequences.

Ours isn’t a mature polity. Rhode Island is an excellent sampling of what the world would look like if teenagers ran it. Every game is designed to make sure the cool kids do well.