Cliven Bundy’s ‘Way of Life’

The military-grade to-do over Cliven Bundy’s felonious cattle will surely have a prime place in the tome chronicling the decline and fall of the Republic. Others have written much more wisely about the matter than I can, but I’d like to add one point that none seems to have mentioned.

The fact that Bundy’s family has been ranching on the same parcel of land since the 19^th century is not important simply as a bit of romance. Bundy is the sole surviving practitioner of a particular “way of life,” all others around him having been squeezed off the land by the federal government.

One’s “way of life” is of special concern to the strain of conservative thought that blossomed in the postbellum South. Richard Weaver, M.E. “Mel” Bradford, the Vanderbilt Agrarians, and others, are attentive to the importance of how one lives one’s days—ranching, farming, in the factory, etc.—and the concomitant spiritual, cultural, and social consequences. The notion that farming, for instance, has more than economic consequences is at the heart of Wendell Berry’s entire oeuvre.

These same writers observe that the federal government has long expressed preferences as to “ways of life,” paying special attention to the philosophical conflict between North and South that precipitated the Civil War. The problem of slavery was, of course, a crucial component, but they also identify a sharp cultural divide between the two sections predicated on different ways of life: the agrarian South versus the industrial North. Among the goals of the latter, these authors note, was to standardize the “ways of life” in the United States, an aim that Southerners staunchly opposed. They had no desire to see the factories—and, consequently, the Weltanschauung—of the North established in Southern cities.

Of course, the Union victory and the devastation of the Southern economy facilitated the South’s transformation; more ancient “ways of life,” distinct from industrial and professional America, are now all but vanished.

Cliven Bundy is a holdout—but the federal government presses on in its efforts to standardize, to which the lone rancher in the West, preserving old ways, is an impediment. We have long since abandoned any notion that those ways might have something important to offer—and that their benefits, once lost, could be lost forever.