People in glass houses

“Perhaps I’ve sinned,” said an embattled Cliven Bundy about his remarks that blacks were better off in slavery—later amended to having a small farm—than on welfare. Republican Sen. Dean Heller and Fox cable host Sean Hannity immediately denounced him for his “appalling racist remarks.”

Perhaps Bundy did sin, but he sinned more against political correctness than against black people. North Las Vegas is idle due to high unemployment more than welfare, and nationally there are more whites on welfare than blacks. Bundy’s remarks put himself into the middle of a political battle much larger than his personal fight against the Bureau of Land Management. The Western states held a summit on the federal land transfer issue the same weekend Bundy made his inelegant remarks. It is hard to associate the Sagebrush Rebellion 2.0 with racism, unless you want to call the governments of all the Western states racist.

Those on the left stopped calling themselves “liberal” and prefer “progressive” because the right has successfully identified liberalism with welfare dependency and fraud. The original meaning of liberal came from the Enlightenment idea of liberating oneself from the state. This original class theory names the state, especially when colluding with state established religion and crony corporate power, the oppressor.

Classic liberalism proposed a civil society free from concentrated state power that respects work, initiative and private property. Modern liberalism desires concentrated state power to create a new society based on an oxymoronic collectivist diversity. Liberals follow Jean Jacques Rousseau rather than John Locke. They changed the class struggle to a war of envy over the means of production rather than of liberation from the power of the state. Rousseau’s social contract theory is obsessed with inequality and a universal political will. He changed freedom from a natural condition to a political benefit. “Democracy” came to mean an interventionist state growing in power as it constantly fixes perceived market failures to change outcomes. The problem is that government intervention just makes things worse.

The Welfare Reform Act of 1996 is one of the few recent conservative victories. Democratic Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan and libertarian scholar Charles Murray questioned the welfare state. They said the welfare state led to a cycle of dependency, creating powerlessness while encouraging irresponsibility and damaging the black family. Their arguments revived the idea that work is preferable to welfare.

A 67-year-old rancher suddenly in the national spotlight spoke clumsily. A similarly aged Sen. Harry Reid, uses his position of power to call his opponents anarchists—if only!—and un-American. He called Bundy and his followers “domestic terrorists.” Bundy retorted the Senate ought to “reel him in.”

Niger Innis spoke with Bundy about his remarks, and he’s satisfied Bundy is not a racist. Niger is the son of Roy Innis, the founder of CORE (Congress for Racial Equality). Innis is running for the U.S. House in Las Vegas against a liberal incumbent. Perhaps Innis can better articulate the ideas that Bundy stumbled over, but conservative and libertarian black public figures have it only marginally better than Bundy. They can’t be called racist so Uncle Tom is the preferred epithet. Just ask Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.

Sen. Rand Paul is challenging the left’s vise grip on black voters. His outreach to minorities is drawing considerable interest from the NAACP and other civil rights organizations. While Sean Hannity has been attacking the NAACP for excluding black conservatives, Paul has been courting the venerable civil rights organization by eloquently attacking the devastating effects of the war on drugs on black families.

Bundy sinned? Let the pundit or politician who is without sin cast the first stone.