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Episode 143 – Whither the Next Rebellion with Jamie Skillen
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In 2014, Nevada cattle rancher Cliven Bundy and his supporters engaged in armed confrontation with law enforcement. Bundy had been embroiled in a 21-year legal dispute with the US Bureau of Land Management. The “Bundy Standoff” was splashed across the news, allowing the public to watch as Cliven Bundy became a hero – a symbol of conservative America under attack by the federal government.
This week, Jamie Skillen talks with Steve Grumbine about the history and politics of federal lands. Skillen’s book, This Land is My Land, traces three periods of rebellion against federal land authority over the past forty years. The issue wasn’t originally defined by the so-called left/right divide. Prior to the Sagebrush Rebellion (1979-1982) these were regional actions waged by people who shared a common material interest in federal lands, regardless of political identification. Since 1979, however, federal land issues have become flashpoints in conservative politics.
In a nation that prizes private ownership and individualism, isn’t it ironic that the federal government owns 28% of the surface land? Conservatives demand these lands be ceded to the states, but were that to happen, the states would have to bear the cost of maintaining them. Politicians rail against public lands, pledging to eliminate them, while fully aware of their constituents’ love of national forests and parks.
When the federal government encouraged expansion beyond the original thirteen colonies, European Americans settled wherever there was arable land, across the Midwest and Great Plains and, eventually, on the West coast. The topography of the intermountain region was less hospitable to agriculture. When, in the late 19th century, the US government began creating national forests and parks, the lands available to it were largely those that nobody wanted at the time.
Historically, the federal government manages the development of oil, gas, coal, and timber, as well as ranges for livestock grazing. Generally, about half of the revenues from these ventures are given to the counties where they’re located. Any new federal regulations, restricting timber harvesting, for example, directly affect jobs and slice into funding mechanisms for those counties. (As MMTers, we know that states and counties are currency users, not currency issuers.)
Skillen sees the public lands issue as a microcosm of our national politics, replete with all the contradictions and hypocrisy therein. While Western states and conservative political leaders have become increasingly radical and vitriolic about federal ownership …
… I never hear a parallel complaint against the market economy, against corporations. There is built into our culture this idea that what government does is a choice, and we can question those choices. We can make different choices. Whereas what the markets do is like nature; it’s like evolution.
Note to the Macro N Cheese audience: on our website, realprogressives.org, you’ll find past podcast episodes with transcripts and extras. Please consider supporting Real Progressives by becoming a monthly donor at patreon.com/realprogressives.
James R Skillen is an Associate Professor of Environmental Studies at Calvin University and director of the Calvin University Ecosystem Preserve and Native Gardens. He is an expert on public land management and politics, including the impacts of anti-government extremism in public land politics and author of This Land is My Land: Rebellion in the West.
https://www.jamesrskillen.com/
@JamesskillenR on Twitter
Macro N Cheese – Episode 143
Whither the Next Rebellion with Jamie Skillen
October 23, 2021
[00:00:03.490] – James Skillen [intro/music]
In much of the West, one of the most important water sources is the Colorado River. Every drop of that river is used such that the river no longer reaches the ocean. The last about 90 miles of it are just dry riverbed.
[00:00:21.170] – James Skillen [intro/music]
There’s an environmental historian, Richard White, who says that the States viewed the federal government like a scratchy wool sweater in the winter. It’s uncomfortable, but it’s the only thing that’s going to keep you warm and let you survive.
[00:01:26.810] – Geoff Ginter [intro/music]
Now, let’s see if we can avoid the apocalypse altogether. Here’s another episode of Macro N Cheese with your host, Steve Grumbine.
[00:01:34.730] – Steve Grumbine
All right, this is Steve with Macro N Cheese. Today we’re going into the public, private debate. I have James R. Skillen, who is an associate professor of environmental studies and director of Calvin Ecosystem Preserve and Native Gardens at Calvin University.
He’s also the author of this Land Is My Land Rebellion in the West, put out by Oxford University Press in 2020. Federal Ecosystem Management: Its Rise, Fall and Afterlife and The Nation’s Largest Landlord, The Bureau of Land Management in the American West. So with that, let me bring on my guest. James Skillen, welcome to the show, sir.
[00:02:17.750] – Skillen
Thanks so much for having me.
[00:02:19.490] – Grumbine
Yeah, it’s a pleasure. I’ve been doing a lot of work in the macroeconomic space, and one of the big things that keeps coming up is the difference between states and the federal government and the financing of various initiatives and one of the big things that kept jumping out out was this idea of lands that were once private, lands that are private, lands that are public owned by the government.
There seems to be a mad dash towards trying to privatize public lands and public services. And your work jumped out at me because this is an area I don’t think we talk about nearly enough. I remember the Cliven Bundy standoff with the ranchers.
In Waco, Texas with David Koresh watching the way government and private ownership of land plays out in the public space has definitely been a journey for me. Can you tell us a little bit about what your understanding of this space is and what led you to write your most recent book, This Land is My Land?
[00:03:32.630] – Skillen
Sure. I think it is fascinating to me that the United States, a country that culturally really prizes private ownership and individualism, is also a nation where the federal government owns 28% of all surface land. And just trying to dig into that, I think, raises a whole host of questions, many of which you alluded to. I think my own interest in the topic probably began in college.
I had grown up in the East Coast, and when I started to travel in the West, I was just struck by this incredible space that was public. If you live in Maryland, Massachusetts, your opportunities for outdoor recreation are somewhat confined. But in the West there are million acre spaces that any citizen or even any visitor to the United States can wander.
And as I went to graduate school and began thinking about what constituted that public space, I tried to dig in a little more into why we have it. I just got hooked on the topic. What is important, I think to understand, is when we talk about federal public lands, these are not evenly distributed around the country, and for historic reasons, the overwhelming majority of those lands are in eleven Western states and Alaska.
In fact, even the national forests and national parks that you’ll visit in the Midwest and the East were largely all purchased back from private or state ownership or given to the federal government. It’s these Western lands that are kind of the remnant of the original public domain.
[00:05:22.010] – Grumbine
What makes the West so much different than the East? Because the East is completely dense, lots of population, people stacked on top of each other. And as you fan out to the West, obviously, they don’t have port access. There’s not a lot of waterways into those territories, which makes them probably not the greatest trade areas. But what do you think makes that space so prevalent in the West?
[00:05:48.890] – Skillen
It’s a historic artifact of two things. One is just the biogeography. It has a lot to do with climate and topography. And the second thing is the nature of federal law. When the federal government was transferring land to state and private ownership.
So the 13 original colonies, when they ratified the Constitution, they ceded what was then the Western territories to the federal government. But they kept all of the land within those colonies. So there was no real federal ownership there. And the federal government’s primary goal initially was selling land to raise revenue to pay off war debt.
And it had a profound interest in having that land settled, basically to defend the claim of sovereignty and also to bring these sort of hinterlands into the market economy. And so the federal land laws at the time were largely written to whether it was selling land outright or the Homestead Act, which would essentially give land free to anyone who would settle it and work it.
And then other laws were designed to move minerals and timber into private ownership. And those laws were hugely effective. If you look at westward expansion with European Americans, it moved rapidly across the Midwest and the Great Plains, basically moving across all of that land that was arable. What happens is settlement hit the latitude that’s the 100th Meridian that’s Eastern Colorado and West of that precipitation just plummets.
And so all of these laws that were primarily designed for agricultural settlement failed entirely. People simply couldn’t settle on, in the case of the Homestead Act, just 160 acres in the Intermountain region and survive. And so settlement kind of skipped over that whole Intermountain West. You saw it on the coast in California, and particularly when gold was discovered.
But there was this whole region that was just unsettled. So when the federal government, by the late 19th century, started to reserve lands, started to create national parks, national forests. The lands available to it were in those eleven Western States, and then the remaining land, in fact, what the Bureau of Land Management now manages were largely lands that in the 19th century no one wanted.
These are the desert lands or semiarid lands that if you don’t have a spring, just simply aren’t viable. And Alaska has a different story but it’s a similar story of kind of the timing of settlement and the value of land and the purposes of settlement in Alaska. And so here we’re left with this history that’s written onto the landscape.
And when you fly over the country at night, when you see the dense lights of urban areas in the East, smaller cities in the Midwest, and then other than the big cities in the West, it’s basically just dark as you fly over. And with the absence of water, it’s going to remain pretty sparsely populated.
[00:09:14.390] – Grumbine
There’s some technology out there that would easily allow them to aerate and irrigate those lands. I’m curious. There’s all sorts of other important aspects of these public lands. We frequently hear a President say that they’re going to open up XYZ area for drilling or whatever other thing.
But I’m sure there’s a lot of other land grant opportunities, public private partnerships, et cetera, to get at those valuable resources beneath the surface of the Earth. What are some of the thoughts in terms of mineral rights and the politics at play as it pertains to the underlying minerals?
[00:09:56.630] – Skillen
All right, that’s actually a challenging question. I’ll tackle it, but I’ll start with water, and it’s true we can through civil engineering, move water large distances. And there is an agency called the Bureau of Reclamation that was organized in 1903. And its job was to reclaim the arid West. The challenge there is there still is simply a limited amount of water.
So one of the things, if you travel in much of the West, one of the most important water sources is the Colorado River. Every drop of that river is used such that the river no longer reaches the ocean. The last about 90 miles of it are just dry riverbed. And that’s because there are massive waterworks that move water to Tucson and Phoenix, that move water to Southern California agriculture.
So even with the kind of full allocation of the Colorado River, the total area or the percentage of land that can be made arable is fairly limited. And I should add, too, that there are complicating factors with water in that water law is state law. So generally the States own the water within their boundaries, not the federal government.
Minerals are interesting because back in about 1929, 1930, President Hoover asked the Western States if they would like to have the remaining public domain lands. He said they could have it for free. And the responses from governors and senators were things like, well, that’s like offering us an orange with all the juice squeezed out.
Or, you know, we have all this desert land that we can’t do anything with. Why would we want more of it? And at issue there is that Hoover was offering them the land, the surface land, but not the subsurface mineral rights. And what the States recognized, as you point out, is that there are plenty of areas where there are valuable resources, they just aren’t on the surface.
But even there, there are a couple of challenges. I think the first is hard rock minerals, so think gold and silver. They are still governed by the mining law of 1872. So not 1972, 1872. And one of the reasons why that law is still in effect, and in fact, why mining companies wouldn’t want those minerals transferred to the States is that that law remains designed to move mineral resources into private ownership and the market economy as easily and quickly as possible.
And what I mean by that is, under the mining law, anyone can stake a mining claim on unreserved public lands, and as long as they prove the presence of valuable minerals and develop them, they can have that land and the subsurface minerals for about $2.50 to $5 an acre.
And so what this means is if a mining company acquires claims to $10 billion of gold, they’re still only going to pay thousands or at most millions of dollars to access that, if those mineral rights went to the States based on the way States currently manage their mineral resources, I assure you that the States would be charging royalties. And whereas the federal government doesn’t.
Oil and gas is a slightly different story, the federal government does charge royalties, so it’s kind of a different game, I think certainly there’s an open question as to whether mining companies would prefer federal or state ownership. But basically the power of the mineral or mining lobby has kept the preferential federal policies. And that’s been a real obstacle to transferring ownership of those minerals to the States.
[00:13:56.550] – Grumbine
The current political environment that led up to Donald Trump being elected. For the last 40 years, neoliberalism has run rough shod through this country. You’ve seen people’s incomes not keep up with the massive incomes of corporations and CEOs, insane amounts of income inequality throughout that time period. And it’s only become more exaggerated.
We’re at a point now where it’s really hard to just forage on the land, especially in these more urban centers. So this divide between, it’s hard to call it left versus right. I don’t even know what the right framing of it is anymore. This radical libertarian strain that starts with the premise that government’s bad and by design they’ve made a government small enough to be feckless and look the other way in many cases.
This divide between the right and the left in this country for lack of a better framing, has never been, in my opinion, more stark than it is today. How does that political landscape impact our understanding of public lands?
[00:15:12.270] – Skillen
I want to start with the first thing you said about this tendency to blame government for our woes. When I look, particularly at the West, if we go back 100 years, even 50 years, Western States were willing to tolerate such large scale federal ownership, in part because the federal government was providing investment in the States that they needed.
The States could not afford to invest the way the federal government did. There’s an environmental historian, Richard White, who says that the States viewed the federal government like a scratchy wool sweater in the winter. It’s uncomfortable, but it’s the only thing that’s going to keep you warm and let you survive.
And what’s always struck me is as Western States, and there have been plenty of protests against federal ownership, but that as Western States have become increasingly more vocal and even kind of vitriolic about federal ownership.
I hear that but I never hear a parallel complaint against the market economy, against corporations. There is built into our culture this idea that what government does is a choice, and we can question those choices. We can make different choices, whereas what the markets do is it’s like nature, it’s like evolution.
[00:16:37.530] – Grumbine
The invisible hand.
[00:16:38.970] – Skillen
Yeah, you don’t question that. So if we look at the Pacific Northwest and what happened to the timber industry there, the timber industry collapsed in the 1990s in Western Washington, Oregon, and Northwest California. And there has been rightfully a lot of blame put on federal environmental law, the Endangered Species Act.
See, it’s the federal government that stops selling timber and that’s what’s putting loggers and mill workers out of work. There has never been a comparable critique of the fact, the way in which corporations shed employees through automation and technology, the way jobs are lost because companies were shipping whole logs to Southeast Asia because, again, it’s this notion that, well, the market is kind of like nature.
It can be lamented, but you can’t get angry at it for doing what it does. And I think that has really then added to this sense that if we can only blame government, then we’re going to blame government for all that ails us even if government wasn’t the source of those problems. What I do in This Land is My Land is actually look at the last three what are often called sagebrush rebellions.
These are kind of concerted periods of protest against federal land ownership and Federal Land Management Authority. And the first rebellion period that earned that title was the Sagebrush Rebellion from 1979 to 1982. And then I look at a period in the 1990s and then most recently, the period that corresponds with the Obama administration.
And the large trend that I see over that time is if we go back to 1979, that rebellion was a regional rebellion. It was waged by people who had a material interest in federal lands, and that rebellion was bipartisan. So it was Western legislators and congressional delegations, not evenly Democratic or Republican, but certainly both Democrats and Republicans in places like Nevada joined this fight.
What I see over the last 40 years is that the rebellions in the West that focus on the land are really no longer regional at all. They’re part of the national polarization that you just described. And it just happens to focus on federal land in the West because that’s the most visible symbol of federal authority in the region.
So the reason Cliven Bundy could feel such support is that he is now serving or served kind of as a symbol, an icon of conservative America under attack by the federal government. You have to ask, why was Sean Hannity in New York City flying out to spend a week with Bundy to stand with a real American?
Hannity doesn’t care about cows. He doesn’t care about public lands. But it is the nationalizing of that debate that has brought real reinforcements and real power on the conservative side to Westerners who are struggling for greater control over federal lands.
[00:20:08.250] – Grumbine
As a member of the proud left, I’m almost jealous of them because all you have to do is say something like “government bad” and you’ll have 1000 people at the event ready to stand up. They’re incredibly organized and committed, to be fair. And you’d like to believe we’re fighting for a better world for all, including those we disagree with.
And you couldn’t get that many people to show up. This mindset of government bad, you can see the effects of it from the great financial crisis when Wall Street basically shorted the mortgage industry and did a lot of nefarious elite control fraud and nobody batted an eye.
[00:20:50.070] – Skillen
Right.
[00:20:50.970] – Grumbine
I can understand why they don’t trust government, but government has been kept intentionally small and largely incapable based on the way things are structured and funded, to really do anything meaningful, the Cliven Bundys of the world, they’ve been able to get away with this kind of thing with impunity.
[00:21:11.070] – Skillen
Yeah. In my scholarship, the goal that I have is would say critical empathy. What I do try to do to the best of my ability is enter in to the story of someone like Cliven Bundy and ask, what would I have to assume in order for what he’s doing to make sense.
And I would say that particularly with the Trump administration, with some of the other standoffs that have taken place with militias like Oath Keepers, we see with the Proud Boys, I have found the limits of my empathic capacity, right? There is a point at which I, like you, just can’t enter into the kind of context in which protest, particularly potentially violent protest is in any way, a meaningful expression of professed values.
I do want to add two things. One, that your point about how organized some of the protest on the right is. There’s a wonderful book by Jefferson Decker entitled The Other Rights Revolution. And he writes about the progressive rights revolution of the 50s and 60s, which gives us civil rights and some movement and failed efforts at gender equality.
And that in the 70s, you have these two movements that integrate. One is business interests who say, we’re getting killed by OSHA. We’re getting killed basically by the success of the Progressive Rights Revolution. With all of their grassroots organizations, with all of their highly organized lobbying in Washington, we need to come up with what one conservative, Paul Weyrich called comparable weapons system. And they did.
This is a remarkable period in the late 70s, where virtually every conservative think tank, advocacy organization that I can think of. That’s unfair. Most of them were formed about 1975 to 1982. So there’s this surge of organizing power and also conservative foundations. People like Joseph Coors, this is as we move past their kind of Koch Brothers. And then the other piece of this is what I would call the family movement.
So this is people who are really concerned about, they would say, is the breakdown of the family and concern that some of the new equity that federal government is protecting is going to destroy the American way of life. So this is particularly true of conservative evangelical Christians and Mormons. And so a lot of the big family groups that you might have heard of also form during this period, including in like, Focus on the Family.
[00:24:07.170] – Grumbine
Yep, James Dobson.
[00:24:08.970] – Skillen
Absolutely. And so there really is a difference between the early 70s and beyond. When we look at how conservative voices can mobilize and can win politically. I think there is no greater example of this than the Federalist society formed in this period. They’ve been playing the long game. And now you can look at the Supreme Court and see, oh, yeah, they’re winning their long game. And that level of organization just shouldn’t be underestimated.
[00:25:15.850] – Intermission
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[00:25:42.030] – Grumbine
One of the things that really stands out. And I hear the left talk about this to get rid of money in politics. They want to have a constitutional convention. And I think to myself, oh, silly rabbit, your friends across the aisle are hoping that you beg for that. They’ve been preparing for this day now for 50 years, maybe longer. They’ve been getting their governorships tidied up.
They’ve been making sure that gerrymandering has taken place. They’ve got things stacked in such a way that they hope to do a constitutional convention because they are desperate to put a balanced budget amendment in and do things that, once done, would eliminate a progressive agenda in any way. They were so close to having enough governorships locked up to make that a real threat.
And I think that a lot of us on the left aren’t aware of how incredibly organized they are. The think tanks like the Pete Peterson Foundation that seemed to straddle the fence on both sides of this. But they’re all targeted toward one thing, austerity. And by making everyone believe the government is broke, it can’t do these things… But I’m curious what your thoughts are on that?
[00:27:00.450] – Skillen
Well, it’s not my area. I would say that I question, even though the desire to get money out of politics, regardless of ideology, because I haven’t heard someone who is really prepared to do it, maybe in an individual campaign. But as I see it, the arms race, which is now leading to multibillion dollar election cycles. Let’s just take the amount of money spent in the 2020 election.
Think about what could have been done with that in education, in other areas. It’s a meaningful amount of money. And so I do think you are at this point of brinksmanship where let’s say that progressives really said we’re going to get big money out of politics. We’re going to just go with a populist movement. We’re just going to go with small donations or we’re going to require public funding.
That would be to lay down your arms, as you’re saying and to basically accept defeat. So there is a kind of mutually assured destruction at this moment in our campaign financing that it’s a great idea. I just don’t see how, well I shouldn’t be so pessimistic, but I don’t see how meaningful steps could be taken, particularly at this moment of polarization.
[00:28:21.390] – Grumbine
The thing that jumps out at me if you follow the money, if you follow where the money is coming from, you see these big corporations with their hand in the middle of this. And so who do you think would be fighting the government for the opportunity to drill in Alaska and offshore in these marine areas where the potential for catastrophe is so great?
It’s probably not your rank and file voter. It’s a lobbyist. It’s a major fossil fuel Corporation backing that effort. And so what would be bringing those folks to bear in fights on public land? And this is where I’m coming back to with regards tying it together with your work. It seems like there’s got to be more than just some rank and file voter dissatisfaction with the federal government.
There has to be big money behind it, which tends to point towards big corporations. The funding of this right wing cycle in terms of the Cliven Bundys of the world. Is this just a Koch Brother machination? Are these wealthy individuals who decided that they could do it or is money not an option? People just there for the cause.
[00:29:36.330] – Skillen
Well, I think you’re going to find a range. I think that I’ll back up and say it’s essential to understand how political coalitions function in our country. When I look at most democracies around the world, they have some form of proportional representation that allows for 5, 6, 10 meaningful political parties. So you have an election, the parties win their seats, and then they form a majority coalition to govern.
That means that the parties can be clearer about what they stand for. You have a better sense as you vote what the Green Party’s for and what the Fascist Party’s for, et cetera. I think that in our system, those coalitions, since we only have two parties capable of winning national elections, the coalition building is happening behind closed doors.
We don’t see it happening. And so if we look at the conservative coalition of today, there’s really no inherent reason why it’s made up of the people in it. In other words, libertarians and religious social Conservatives, why they joined forces. And this leads to all manner of hypocrisies. And this is true on the right and the left.
But what that does mean is that as something like public lands, mining policy, as something like that comes up, it can’t be separated from this larger coalition that includes all kinds of unrelated interests. And what that means, I think, is that you have huge money and Koch Brothers are a good example that are funding all kinds of PACs, all kinds of think tanks, university programs around the West because they see opportunity to further that coalition.
I don’t think the Koch brothers care at all about marriage equality acts, but what they recognize is if they don’t show an interest in that, they can’t continue to build the power of their coalition. And what that coalition then does is it provides the center of power that the true believers tap into. So I’m not so cynical to think if I look around at the protests, these are all just paid actors.
But what I do think is that the true believers, whether you’re talking about Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, is that without that big money that will further their voice, that will actually translate their complaints into real lobbying in DC, they would just be people shouting out in the desert. And so it’s somehow the linkage from genuine grassroots anger to a kind of corporate interest. And it’s linking those that gives the coalition its power
[00:32:42.810] – Grumbine
I remember the 60s and 70s, you had the quote/unquote cloth coat Republican, and it was largely blue collar, and were a regular rank and file person. They weren’t radical. They were largely slightly different centrists, if you will.
[00:33:01.450] – Skillen
Sure.
[00:33:02.170] – Grumbine
But here we have a new strain. And you brought up Focus on the Family and I remember Table Talk and all the other shows that the Christian radio would put out for years. And most of what they were talking about tended to trend into religion-meets-politics. And so people were listening to whatever pastor or voice they had started to develop some sort of bond with, and that became their marching orders.
But even that wasn’t quite as crazy as it’s become. Just the standoff alone that we talked about with the Bundys. And I think that your book lays this out as well. The extreme right. These Western States that have different mindsets, and it’s become very extreme. How has that extremism become a thing?
[00:33:59.690] – Skillen
Yeah, in This Land is My Land, that’s one of the arguments of the book is that the extreme has always been there. If we go back to the 60s and early 70s, there were plenty of militias. A lot of them in Idaho, and the militias then were explicitly racist, Christian Identity Movement, Aryan Nations. They wanted nothing to do with society.
They were going to build their Aryan Utopia in Idaho. So how did we go from that where those militias were fringe, genuine fringe, to today, when not only are some of the explicitly racist views mainstream, but where the kind of celebration of political violence is now mainstream. And to me, I think one of the most disturbing developments in our politics.
There are a couple of pieces that I think are important to this. The first is the longer historical piece, and that is the nature of American civil religion, civil religion being this idea that certainly draws on Christianity, comes out of some Christian teaching and Mormon teaching. But it is the idea that America is a special nation.
It’s set apart by God, that it is exceptional in world history and that it was founded erroneously as a Christian nation, and that so long as it stuck to those moorings, it would remain the dominant economic and political power in the world. If we look at the 70s and early 80s, the kind of civil religious narrative of a James Dobson, of Pat Robertson, it sounded rhetorically a little more plausible, right?
What they were saying is we want to deal with the moral degeneracy of society. We want integrity in our elected officials. We’re trying to address the moral failings in society, and that’s why we’re seeking political power. Somehow we move from that to what Donald Trump exposed, which is the reality that the concern about moral integrity is simply gone.
Even among the majority of evangelical Christians voted for Trump and continue to support Trump. Well, it’s not because he embodies Christian character or virtue. It’s not because the policies are really expressions of the formal religion. What Trump is is an expression of a kind of nationalist anger.
And I think what Trump revealed is how thin the formal religious veneer was, or at least is for many people, and that civil religion is just bald nationalism. I should also add that it’s hard to separate that from what would be called just status politics. The reason to retell the story, the history of America as a Christian nation.
The reason to gloss over slavery and racism is that the driving fear and anger is that a kind of white Protestant patriarchal culture is fading. And there’s this rear guard action to try to restore that culture. And if you look at the enemy, if you look at who they’re battling, it’s the federal government. Why? Well, the federal government is the one that forced integration to public schooling, and we could go on and on as if we just get government out of here.
The United States will reset to this earlier culture. And not only I disagree with it, but I also just think that’s a fallacy. The more proximate cause, I think, or if we want to see the extremism in near term, this really does go to the Tea Party movement and the Patriot movement, 2009 and the anger at big banks being bailed out. But I also think we can’t separate it from anxiety about an African American President.
These things come together, and I think you’re seeing, too, a repackaging of militias not as racist but as defenders of the Constitution. And we have to go into the roots of this, but the celebration of the Second Amendment as the principal amendment, protecting all the others, the celebration of the Revolutionary War.
So all the rhetoric about we need another revolution like that one where we overthrow the tyrants. It’s been twelve years of that. And I think we’re seeing now the fruits of that effort, which maybe for many people, was simply rhetoric in 2009. I don’t know, but certainly it’s not just rhetoric today.
And this is what gives us January 6, where if you look at some of the images, you see these curious symbols of the Gadsden flag, you see the American flag, you see crosses. If we look closely, I’m sure we’ll find someone dressed up as King George. But the way in which all of these symbols mobilize and create a credibly dangerous environment in which to try to do politics.
[00:39:40.430] – Grumbine
There’s tons of literature and historical references to when people rose up against an unjust government and did, in fact, overthrow or change that government through direct action, demonstrations, taking to the streets. All of these are distinctly American values. I don’t stand against that per se. Even the French Revolution.
You have rights of men and the restructuring of society and ending the religious rule, if you will, and fundamentally changing power dynamics. Then you have the Haitian Revolution, where people got tired of being slaves. And the American Revolution is one that I don’t really point to typically because it tends to be glossed over.
But this was largely a rich man’s revolution where the people that were already wealthy land owners didn’t feel like paying money back to England, and they got the poor people to fight with them. So largely that isn’t even told correctly. But the point, I guess, is revolutions do happen. But what we’re watching with these folks. It’s a weird bastardization.
They take things like masking. I know everybody can have different opinions on things, but they take these wedge issues and build an entire case around this to add legitimacy, add numbers, et cetera. But it takes something so small, so innocuous and turns it into this toxic, festering wound that everybody’s got a rally around. It’s genius in its own sick way. But the public private lands coming back to that.
[00:41:24.770] – Skillen
Sure.
[00:41:25.250] – Grumbine
How does this organization behind the scenes, the political collaborations between right wing Christians who want to control social standing and right wing libertarians that want any kind of control over social constructs completely eliminated as long as you protect private property. How does that collaboration between odd bedfellows translate into the fight over public lands?
[00:41:58.590] – Skillen
I could take that in a number of directions. I think one of them is it leads to some of the remarkable inconsistencies and downright contradictions of our public lands debate. So the Republican Party’s platform in 2016 and again in 2020 because it didn’t have a new one, that included a pledge that they would work to pass new legislation that would get rid of public lands.
Not all of them probably keep national parks, but transfer most of these public lands to the Western States. And this is the kind of symbolic issue that even when Marco Rubio, Senator from Florida, was running in the primaries, he was railing against public lands. No one in Florida hates public lands. They have the Everglades.
It’s not an issue, but recognizing that you have to stand against government wherever government can be found with obviously certain exceptions. But when Chaffetz from Utah in 2017 introduced legislation to actually sell 3 million acres of public lands in Utah, which by the way, were acres that the Bureau of Land Management had long identified as not really appropriate for federal ownership.
I mean, these were the lands they had said should probably be sold. And when he introduced that legislation, it was crushed. By whom? Well, certainly not by Progressives. It was crushed by Republicans, because if you live in Utah and turns out outdoor recreation is not a partisan issue, it doesn’t matter how conservative or Liberal you are.
You like being outdoors. And so hunters and anglers, off-road enthusiasts, all of these people who use public lands said, “Absolutely not. You’re not going to really sell public lands, right?” And I think that we then get trapped in these wars of the kind of symbolic debate.
Which, part of what’s unfortunate is that it means it will never lead to a meaningful policy change, because that’s not the purpose of it. The purpose is really just issue signaling to people that you’re on the right side, which is the side that’s against the government.
[00:44:33.930] – Grumbine
So this land battle is largely a symbolic gesture, as yet again, another poke at the federal government. Is that what we can boil it down to?
[00:44:47.670] – Skillen
I think that it’s a symbolic gesture. And if we want to think about strategy and tactics, for a number of Western States, it’s really reframing a debate. As far as I can tell, the majority of elected officials in Western States don’t necessarily want ownership of the federal lands because it would come with an enormous cost. Right now, the federal government spends over $2 billion a year on wildfire suppression.
The States can’t pick up that tab, but what they do want is they want to reframe this as a justice issue in order to gain political leverage in decision-making about public lands. So I think there is something sincere, it just has nothing to do with ownership.
[00:45:40.350] – Grumbine
It’s interesting, and I know this is not your area of specialty, so I’ll just take a second to add that the federal government is the currency issuing entity. It is the monopolist on the money side, so it can afford anything available for purchase in US dollars. States have always been constrained. This is why trying to do bold public programs is so impossible at the state level. You laid it out eloquently.
Billions of dollars would have to go into maintaining those public lands if it was transferred from the Feds to the States. That federal funding actually is counted on by each state. They must have that infusion of cash because a lot of them don’t have huge amounts of income coming into the state to begin with.
So I guess the question becomes, what is the end game here? They can’t afford the land even if they gave it to them. So this would be giving it to a Bill Gates Foundation or something like that?
[00:46:45.270] – Skillen
It’s a great question. States have studied the cost, the economics of it. Utah did a study that showed if it got all federal minerals and developed all the oil and gas and coal, it could probably afford those lands. But you’re right. It really is a battle over the monetary value of those lands to the states. One of the real sticking points, I think in a lot of the economic debates over federal lands is that the federal government doesn’t pay property tax to the states.
That doesn’t mean the federal government isn’t giving money to the counties and the States. There are a host of mechanisms whereby the federal government does just that. There are programs for payment in lieu of taxes. But the principal way in which federal land ownership has benefited, particularly counties, economically, is that historically, the federal government has been in the business of developing oil, gas, coal, timber, and then also a range for livestock grazing.
And in all of those programs, the federal government gives generally half, depending on the program, of all revenue directly to the counties in which they’re located. And what that means is when new federal restrictions come in and there’s less timber harvesting, that’s not just about jobs, though it is, it’s also about a fundamental funding mechanism for those counties.
But, to your point, the federal government can simply choose to do a kind of payment in lieu of taxes to support counties financially, more like a property tax instead of relying on resource development, always as the tool to economically support.
[00:48:50.130] – Grumbine
Very well stated. So let me close this out. I love the fact that you’ve got several books to dig into on this, but the most current one, This Land is My Land, what do you want them to get from this book more than anything?
[00:49:08.190] – Skillen
Well, if I could pique their interest in federal public lands in the West, that would be great. I think that the two things that are most important to me in the research and writing are, one, appreciating the way in which formerly regional political conflicts, which were different in the West and the Southeast than the industrial Northeast, have been homogenized through a number of forces leading to the kind of simple national polarization that we have today.
And also seeing that if we look at the battles over federal lands in the West, what we’re seeing is, I think some of the earlier shifts from mainstream to extreme, particularly with armed conflicts that now has become mainstream within our national politics. And in that way, it’s the public lands issue, and there are several others.
But the public lands issue is a microcosm of our politics generally. Both what is dysfunctional about it, but also, I think and there aren’t many, but some of the opportunities, some of the kind of hopeful opportunities. If we look carefully.
[00:50:30.570] – Grumbine
Very good. Full disclosure. I purchased the books. I can’t wait to dig into it and read it myself. I encourage everyone else to do that as well. On our website, we will be adding your books to our library. We put all their books in there, so really excited about getting them out there for you.
But with that, Mr. Skillen, thank you so much for joining me today. It was a real pleasure to have you on and for everyone out there listening. This is Steve Grumbine, Jamie Skillen, Macro N Cheese. We’re out of here.
[00:51:28.630] – Ending Credits
Macro N Cheese is produced by Andy Kennedy, descriptive writing by Virginia Cotts, and promotional artwork by Mindy Donham. Macro N Cheese is publicly funded by our Real Progressives Patreon account. If you would like to donate to Macro N Cheese, please visit patreon.com/realprogressives.
Mentioned in the podcast:
This Land is My Land: Rebellion in the West by James R. Skillen
The Nation’s Largest Landlord: The Bureau of Land Management in the American West by James R. Skillen
Federal Ecosystem Management: Its Rise, Fall, and Afterlife by James R. Skillen
The Other Rights Revolution: Conservative Lawyers and the Remaking of American Government by Jefferson Decker
Recent Articles by Jamie Skillen
Conservative Hate of Public Lands Morphed Into Hate Of Gov w/ James R. Skillen – MR Live – 5/13/21
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In 2014, Nevada cattle rancher Cliven Bundy and his supporters engaged in armed confrontation with law enforcement. Bundy had been embroiled in a 21-year legal dispute with the US Bureau of Land Management. The “Bundy Standoff” was splashed across the news, allowing the public to watch as Cliven Bundy became a hero – a symbol of conservative America under attack by the federal government.
This week, Jamie Skillen talks with Steve Grumbine about the history and politics of federal lands. Skillen’s book, This Land is My Land, traces three periods of rebellion against federal land authority over the past forty years. The issue wasn’t originally defined by the so-called left/right divide. Prior to the Sagebrush Rebellion (1979-1982) these were regional actions waged by people who shared a common material interest in federal lands, regardless of political identification. Since 1979, however, federal land issues have become flashpoints in conservative politics.
In a nation that prizes private ownership and individualism, isn’t it ironic that the federal government owns 28% of the surface land? Conservatives demand these lands be ceded to the states, but were that to happen, the states would have to bear the cost of maintaining them. Politicians rail against public lands, pledging to eliminate them, while fully aware of their constituents’ love of national forests and parks.
When the federal government encouraged expansion beyond the original thirteen colonies, European Americans settled wherever there was arable land, across the Midwest and Great Plains and, eventually, on the West coast. The topography of the intermountain region was less hospitable to agriculture. When, in the late 19th century, the US government began creating national forests and parks, the lands available to it were largely those that nobody wanted at the time.
Historically, the federal government manages the development of oil, gas, coal, and timber, as well as ranges for livestock grazing. Generally, about half of the revenues from these ventures are given to the counties where they’re located. Any new federal regulations, restricting timber harvesting, for example, directly affect jobs and slice into funding mechanisms for those counties. (As MMTers, we know that states and counties are currency users, not currency issuers.)
Skillen sees the public lands issue as a microcosm of our national politics, replete with all the contradictions and hypocrisy therein. While Western states and conservative political leaders have become increasingly radical and vitriolic about federal ownership …
… I never hear a parallel complaint against the market economy, against corporations. There is built into our culture this idea that what government does is a choice, and we can question those choices. We can make different choices. Whereas what the markets do is like nature; it’s like evolution.
Note to the Macro N Cheese audience: on our website, realprogressives.org, you’ll find past podcast episodes with transcripts and extras. Please consider supporting Real Progressives by becoming a monthly donor at patreon.com/realprogressives.
James R Skillen is an Associate Professor of Environmental Studies at Calvin University and director of the Calvin University Ecosystem Preserve and Native Gardens. He is an expert on public land management and politics, including the impacts of anti-government extremism in public land politics and author of This Land is My Land: Rebellion in the West.
https://www.jamesrskillen.com/
@JamesskillenR on Twitter
Macro N Cheese – Episode 143
Whither the Next Rebellion with Jamie Skillen
October 23, 2021
[00:00:03.490] – James Skillen [intro/music]
In much of the West, one of the most important water sources is the Colorado River. Every drop of that river is used such that the river no longer reaches the ocean. The last about 90 miles of it are just dry riverbed.
[00:00:21.170] – James Skillen [intro/music]
There’s an environmental historian, Richard White, who says that the States viewed the federal government like a scratchy wool sweater in the winter. It’s uncomfortable, but it’s the only thing that’s going to keep you warm and let you survive.
[00:01:26.810] – Geoff Ginter [intro/music]
Now, let’s see if we can avoid the apocalypse altogether. Here’s another episode of Macro N Cheese with your host, Steve Grumbine.
[00:01:34.730] – Steve Grumbine
All right, this is Steve with Macro N Cheese. Today we’re going into the public, private debate. I have James R. Skillen, who is an associate professor of environmental studies and director of Calvin Ecosystem Preserve and Native Gardens at Calvin University.
He’s also the author of this Land Is My Land Rebellion in the West, put out by Oxford University Press in 2020. Federal Ecosystem Management: Its Rise, Fall and Afterlife and The Nation’s Largest Landlord, The Bureau of Land Management in the American West. So with that, let me bring on my guest. James Skillen, welcome to the show, sir.
[00:02:17.750] – Skillen
Thanks so much for having me.
[00:02:19.490] – Grumbine
Yeah, it’s a pleasure. I’ve been doing a lot of work in the macroeconomic space, and one of the big things that keeps coming up is the difference between states and the federal government and the financing of various initiatives and one of the big things that kept jumping out out was this idea of lands that were once private, lands that are private, lands that are public owned by the government.
There seems to be a mad dash towards trying to privatize public lands and public services. And your work jumped out at me because this is an area I don’t think we talk about nearly enough. I remember the Cliven Bundy standoff with the ranchers.
In Waco, Texas with David Koresh watching the way government and private ownership of land plays out in the public space has definitely been a journey for me. Can you tell us a little bit about what your understanding of this space is and what led you to write your most recent book, This Land is My Land?
[00:03:32.630] – Skillen
Sure. I think it is fascinating to me that the United States, a country that culturally really prizes private ownership and individualism, is also a nation where the federal government owns 28% of all surface land. And just trying to dig into that, I think, raises a whole host of questions, many of which you alluded to. I think my own interest in the topic probably began in college.
I had grown up in the East Coast, and when I started to travel in the West, I was just struck by this incredible space that was public. If you live in Maryland, Massachusetts, your opportunities for outdoor recreation are somewhat confined. But in the West there are million acre spaces that any citizen or even any visitor to the United States can wander.
And as I went to graduate school and began thinking about what constituted that public space, I tried to dig in a little more into why we have it. I just got hooked on the topic. What is important, I think to understand, is when we talk about federal public lands, these are not evenly distributed around the country, and for historic reasons, the overwhelming majority of those lands are in eleven Western states and Alaska.
In fact, even the national forests and national parks that you’ll visit in the Midwest and the East were largely all purchased back from private or state ownership or given to the federal government. It’s these Western lands that are kind of the remnant of the original public domain.
[00:05:22.010] – Grumbine
What makes the West so much different than the East? Because the East is completely dense, lots of population, people stacked on top of each other. And as you fan out to the West, obviously, they don’t have port access. There’s not a lot of waterways into those territories, which makes them probably not the greatest trade areas. But what do you think makes that space so prevalent in the West?
[00:05:48.890] – Skillen
It’s a historic artifact of two things. One is just the biogeography. It has a lot to do with climate and topography. And the second thing is the nature of federal law. When the federal government was transferring land to state and private ownership.
So the 13 original colonies, when they ratified the Constitution, they ceded what was then the Western territories to the federal government. But they kept all of the land within those colonies. So there was no real federal ownership there. And the federal government’s primary goal initially was selling land to raise revenue to pay off war debt.
And it had a profound interest in having that land settled, basically to defend the claim of sovereignty and also to bring these sort of hinterlands into the market economy. And so the federal land laws at the time were largely written to whether it was selling land outright or the Homestead Act, which would essentially give land free to anyone who would settle it and work it.
And then other laws were designed to move minerals and timber into private ownership. And those laws were hugely effective. If you look at westward expansion with European Americans, it moved rapidly across the Midwest and the Great Plains, basically moving across all of that land that was arable. What happens is settlement hit the latitude that’s the 100th Meridian that’s Eastern Colorado and West of that precipitation just plummets.
And so all of these laws that were primarily designed for agricultural settlement failed entirely. People simply couldn’t settle on, in the case of the Homestead Act, just 160 acres in the Intermountain region and survive. And so settlement kind of skipped over that whole Intermountain West. You saw it on the coast in California, and particularly when gold was discovered.
But there was this whole region that was just unsettled. So when the federal government, by the late 19th century, started to reserve lands, started to create national parks, national forests. The lands available to it were in those eleven Western States, and then the remaining land, in fact, what the Bureau of Land Management now manages were largely lands that in the 19th century no one wanted.
These are the desert lands or semiarid lands that if you don’t have a spring, just simply aren’t viable. And Alaska has a different story but it’s a similar story of kind of the timing of settlement and the value of land and the purposes of settlement in Alaska. And so here we’re left with this history that’s written onto the landscape.
And when you fly over the country at night, when you see the dense lights of urban areas in the East, smaller cities in the Midwest, and then other than the big cities in the West, it’s basically just dark as you fly over. And with the absence of water, it’s going to remain pretty sparsely populated.
[00:09:14.390] – Grumbine
There’s some technology out there that would easily allow them to aerate and irrigate those lands. I’m curious. There’s all sorts of other important aspects of these public lands. We frequently hear a President say that they’re going to open up XYZ area for drilling or whatever other thing.
But I’m sure there’s a lot of other land grant opportunities, public private partnerships, et cetera, to get at those valuable resources beneath the surface of the Earth. What are some of the thoughts in terms of mineral rights and the politics at play as it pertains to the underlying minerals?
[00:09:56.630] – Skillen
All right, that’s actually a challenging question. I’ll tackle it, but I’ll start with water, and it’s true we can through civil engineering, move water large distances. And there is an agency called the Bureau of Reclamation that was organized in 1903. And its job was to reclaim the arid West. The challenge there is there still is simply a limited amount of water.
So one of the things, if you travel in much of the West, one of the most important water sources is the Colorado River. Every drop of that river is used such that the river no longer reaches the ocean. The last about 90 miles of it are just dry riverbed. And that’s because there are massive waterworks that move water to Tucson and Phoenix, that move water to Southern California agriculture.
So even with the kind of full allocation of the Colorado River, the total area or the percentage of land that can be made arable is fairly limited. And I should add, too, that there are complicating factors with water in that water law is state law. So generally the States own the water within their boundaries, not the federal government.
Minerals are interesting because back in about 1929, 1930, President Hoover asked the Western States if they would like to have the remaining public domain lands. He said they could have it for free. And the responses from governors and senators were things like, well, that’s like offering us an orange with all the juice squeezed out.
Or, you know, we have all this desert land that we can’t do anything with. Why would we want more of it? And at issue there is that Hoover was offering them the land, the surface land, but not the subsurface mineral rights. And what the States recognized, as you point out, is that there are plenty of areas where there are valuable resources, they just aren’t on the surface.
But even there, there are a couple of challenges. I think the first is hard rock minerals, so think gold and silver. They are still governed by the mining law of 1872. So not 1972, 1872. And one of the reasons why that law is still in effect, and in fact, why mining companies wouldn’t want those minerals transferred to the States is that that law remains designed to move mineral resources into private ownership and the market economy as easily and quickly as possible.
And what I mean by that is, under the mining law, anyone can stake a mining claim on unreserved public lands, and as long as they prove the presence of valuable minerals and develop them, they can have that land and the subsurface minerals for about $2.50 to $5 an acre.
And so what this means is if a mining company acquires claims to $10 billion of gold, they’re still only going to pay thousands or at most millions of dollars to access that, if those mineral rights went to the States based on the way States currently manage their mineral resources, I assure you that the States would be charging royalties. And whereas the federal government doesn’t.
Oil and gas is a slightly different story, the federal government does charge royalties, so it’s kind of a different game, I think certainly there’s an open question as to whether mining companies would prefer federal or state ownership. But basically the power of the mineral or mining lobby has kept the preferential federal policies. And that’s been a real obstacle to transferring ownership of those minerals to the States.
[00:13:56.550] – Grumbine
The current political environment that led up to Donald Trump being elected. For the last 40 years, neoliberalism has run rough shod through this country. You’ve seen people’s incomes not keep up with the massive incomes of corporations and CEOs, insane amounts of income inequality throughout that time period. And it’s only become more exaggerated.
We’re at a point now where it’s really hard to just forage on the land, especially in these more urban centers. So this divide between, it’s hard to call it left versus right. I don’t even know what the right framing of it is anymore. This radical libertarian strain that starts with the premise that government’s bad and by design they’ve made a government small enough to be feckless and look the other way in many cases.
This divide between the right and the left in this country for lack of a better framing, has never been, in my opinion, more stark than it is today. How does that political landscape impact our understanding of public lands?
[00:15:12.270] – Skillen
I want to start with the first thing you said about this tendency to blame government for our woes. When I look, particularly at the West, if we go back 100 years, even 50 years, Western States were willing to tolerate such large scale federal ownership, in part because the federal government was providing investment in the States that they needed.
The States could not afford to invest the way the federal government did. There’s an environmental historian, Richard White, who says that the States viewed the federal government like a scratchy wool sweater in the winter. It’s uncomfortable, but it’s the only thing that’s going to keep you warm and let you survive.
And what’s always struck me is as Western States, and there have been plenty of protests against federal ownership, but that as Western States have become increasingly more vocal and even kind of vitriolic about federal ownership.
I hear that but I never hear a parallel complaint against the market economy, against corporations. There is built into our culture this idea that what government does is a choice, and we can question those choices. We can make different choices, whereas what the markets do is it’s like nature, it’s like evolution.
[00:16:37.530] – Grumbine
The invisible hand.
[00:16:38.970] – Skillen
Yeah, you don’t question that. So if we look at the Pacific Northwest and what happened to the timber industry there, the timber industry collapsed in the 1990s in Western Washington, Oregon, and Northwest California. And there has been rightfully a lot of blame put on federal environmental law, the Endangered Species Act.
See, it’s the federal government that stops selling timber and that’s what’s putting loggers and mill workers out of work. There has never been a comparable critique of the fact, the way in which corporations shed employees through automation and technology, the way jobs are lost because companies were shipping whole logs to Southeast Asia because, again, it’s this notion that, well, the market is kind of like nature.
It can be lamented, but you can’t get angry at it for doing what it does. And I think that has really then added to this sense that if we can only blame government, then we’re going to blame government for all that ails us even if government wasn’t the source of those problems. What I do in This Land is My Land is actually look at the last three what are often called sagebrush rebellions.
These are kind of concerted periods of protest against federal land ownership and Federal Land Management Authority. And the first rebellion period that earned that title was the Sagebrush Rebellion from 1979 to 1982. And then I look at a period in the 1990s and then most recently, the period that corresponds with the Obama administration.
And the large trend that I see over that time is if we go back to 1979, that rebellion was a regional rebellion. It was waged by people who had a material interest in federal lands, and that rebellion was bipartisan. So it was Western legislators and congressional delegations, not evenly Democratic or Republican, but certainly both Democrats and Republicans in places like Nevada joined this fight.
What I see over the last 40 years is that the rebellions in the West that focus on the land are really no longer regional at all. They’re part of the national polarization that you just described. And it just happens to focus on federal land in the West because that’s the most visible symbol of federal authority in the region.
So the reason Cliven Bundy could feel such support is that he is now serving or served kind of as a symbol, an icon of conservative America under attack by the federal government. You have to ask, why was Sean Hannity in New York City flying out to spend a week with Bundy to stand with a real American?
Hannity doesn’t care about cows. He doesn’t care about public lands. But it is the nationalizing of that debate that has brought real reinforcements and real power on the conservative side to Westerners who are struggling for greater control over federal lands.
[00:20:08.250] – Grumbine
As a member of the proud left, I’m almost jealous of them because all you have to do is say something like “government bad” and you’ll have 1000 people at the event ready to stand up. They’re incredibly organized and committed, to be fair. And you’d like to believe we’re fighting for a better world for all, including those we disagree with.
And you couldn’t get that many people to show up. This mindset of government bad, you can see the effects of it from the great financial crisis when Wall Street basically shorted the mortgage industry and did a lot of nefarious elite control fraud and nobody batted an eye.
[00:20:50.070] – Skillen
Right.
[00:20:50.970] – Grumbine
I can understand why they don’t trust government, but government has been kept intentionally small and largely incapable based on the way things are structured and funded, to really do anything meaningful, the Cliven Bundys of the world, they’ve been able to get away with this kind of thing with impunity.
[00:21:11.070] – Skillen
Yeah. In my scholarship, the goal that I have is would say critical empathy. What I do try to do to the best of my ability is enter in to the story of someone like Cliven Bundy and ask, what would I have to assume in order for what he’s doing to make sense.
And I would say that particularly with the Trump administration, with some of the other standoffs that have taken place with militias like Oath Keepers, we see with the Proud Boys, I have found the limits of my empathic capacity, right? There is a point at which I, like you, just can’t enter into the kind of context in which protest, particularly potentially violent protest is in any way, a meaningful expression of professed values.
I do want to add two things. One, that your point about how organized some of the protest on the right is. There’s a wonderful book by Jefferson Decker entitled The Other Rights Revolution. And he writes about the progressive rights revolution of the 50s and 60s, which gives us civil rights and some movement and failed efforts at gender equality.
And that in the 70s, you have these two movements that integrate. One is business interests who say, we’re getting killed by OSHA. We’re getting killed basically by the success of the Progressive Rights Revolution. With all of their grassroots organizations, with all of their highly organized lobbying in Washington, we need to come up with what one conservative, Paul Weyrich called comparable weapons system. And they did.
This is a remarkable period in the late 70s, where virtually every conservative think tank, advocacy organization that I can think of. That’s unfair. Most of them were formed about 1975 to 1982. So there’s this surge of organizing power and also conservative foundations. People like Joseph Coors, this is as we move past their kind of Koch Brothers. And then the other piece of this is what I would call the family movement.
So this is people who are really concerned about, they would say, is the breakdown of the family and concern that some of the new equity that federal government is protecting is going to destroy the American way of life. So this is particularly true of conservative evangelical Christians and Mormons. And so a lot of the big family groups that you might have heard of also form during this period, including in like, Focus on the Family.
[00:24:07.170] – Grumbine
Yep, James Dobson.
[00:24:08.970] – Skillen
Absolutely. And so there really is a difference between the early 70s and beyond. When we look at how conservative voices can mobilize and can win politically. I think there is no greater example of this than the Federalist society formed in this period. They’ve been playing the long game. And now you can look at the Supreme Court and see, oh, yeah, they’re winning their long game. And that level of organization just shouldn’t be underestimated.
[00:25:15.850] – Intermission
You are listening to Macro N Cheese, a podcast brought to you by Real Progressives, a nonprofit organization dedicated to teaching the masses about MMT or Modern Monetary Theory. Please help our efforts and become a monthly donor at PayPal or Patreon, like and follow our pages on Facebook and YouTube, and follow us on Periscope, Twitter, and Instagram.
[00:25:42.030] – Grumbine
One of the things that really stands out. And I hear the left talk about this to get rid of money in politics. They want to have a constitutional convention. And I think to myself, oh, silly rabbit, your friends across the aisle are hoping that you beg for that. They’ve been preparing for this day now for 50 years, maybe longer. They’ve been getting their governorships tidied up.
They’ve been making sure that gerrymandering has taken place. They’ve got things stacked in such a way that they hope to do a constitutional convention because they are desperate to put a balanced budget amendment in and do things that, once done, would eliminate a progressive agenda in any way. They were so close to having enough governorships locked up to make that a real threat.
And I think that a lot of us on the left aren’t aware of how incredibly organized they are. The think tanks like the Pete Peterson Foundation that seemed to straddle the fence on both sides of this. But they’re all targeted toward one thing, austerity. And by making everyone believe the government is broke, it can’t do these things… But I’m curious what your thoughts are on that?
[00:27:00.450] – Skillen
Well, it’s not my area. I would say that I question, even though the desire to get money out of politics, regardless of ideology, because I haven’t heard someone who is really prepared to do it, maybe in an individual campaign. But as I see it, the arms race, which is now leading to multibillion dollar election cycles. Let’s just take the amount of money spent in the 2020 election.
Think about what could have been done with that in education, in other areas. It’s a meaningful amount of money. And so I do think you are at this point of brinksmanship where let’s say that progressives really said we’re going to get big money out of politics. We’re going to just go with a populist movement. We’re just going to go with small donations or we’re going to require public funding.
That would be to lay down your arms, as you’re saying and to basically accept defeat. So there is a kind of mutually assured destruction at this moment in our campaign financing that it’s a great idea. I just don’t see how, well I shouldn’t be so pessimistic, but I don’t see how meaningful steps could be taken, particularly at this moment of polarization.
[00:28:21.390] – Grumbine
The thing that jumps out at me if you follow the money, if you follow where the money is coming from, you see these big corporations with their hand in the middle of this. And so who do you think would be fighting the government for the opportunity to drill in Alaska and offshore in these marine areas where the potential for catastrophe is so great?
It’s probably not your rank and file voter. It’s a lobbyist. It’s a major fossil fuel Corporation backing that effort. And so what would be bringing those folks to bear in fights on public land? And this is where I’m coming back to with regards tying it together with your work. It seems like there’s got to be more than just some rank and file voter dissatisfaction with the federal government.
There has to be big money behind it, which tends to point towards big corporations. The funding of this right wing cycle in terms of the Cliven Bundys of the world. Is this just a Koch Brother machination? Are these wealthy individuals who decided that they could do it or is money not an option? People just there for the cause.
[00:29:36.330] – Skillen
Well, I think you’re going to find a range. I think that I’ll back up and say it’s essential to understand how political coalitions function in our country. When I look at most democracies around the world, they have some form of proportional representation that allows for 5, 6, 10 meaningful political parties. So you have an election, the parties win their seats, and then they form a majority coalition to govern.
That means that the parties can be clearer about what they stand for. You have a better sense as you vote what the Green Party’s for and what the Fascist Party’s for, et cetera. I think that in our system, those coalitions, since we only have two parties capable of winning national elections, the coalition building is happening behind closed doors.
We don’t see it happening. And so if we look at the conservative coalition of today, there’s really no inherent reason why it’s made up of the people in it. In other words, libertarians and religious social Conservatives, why they joined forces. And this leads to all manner of hypocrisies. And this is true on the right and the left.
But what that does mean is that as something like public lands, mining policy, as something like that comes up, it can’t be separated from this larger coalition that includes all kinds of unrelated interests. And what that means, I think, is that you have huge money and Koch Brothers are a good example that are funding all kinds of PACs, all kinds of think tanks, university programs around the West because they see opportunity to further that coalition.
I don’t think the Koch brothers care at all about marriage equality acts, but what they recognize is if they don’t show an interest in that, they can’t continue to build the power of their coalition. And what that coalition then does is it provides the center of power that the true believers tap into. So I’m not so cynical to think if I look around at the protests, these are all just paid actors.
But what I do think is that the true believers, whether you’re talking about Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, is that without that big money that will further their voice, that will actually translate their complaints into real lobbying in DC, they would just be people shouting out in the desert. And so it’s somehow the linkage from genuine grassroots anger to a kind of corporate interest. And it’s linking those that gives the coalition its power
[00:32:42.810] – Grumbine
I remember the 60s and 70s, you had the quote/unquote cloth coat Republican, and it was largely blue collar, and were a regular rank and file person. They weren’t radical. They were largely slightly different centrists, if you will.
[00:33:01.450] – Skillen
Sure.
[00:33:02.170] – Grumbine
But here we have a new strain. And you brought up Focus on the Family and I remember Table Talk and all the other shows that the Christian radio would put out for years. And most of what they were talking about tended to trend into religion-meets-politics. And so people were listening to whatever pastor or voice they had started to develop some sort of bond with, and that became their marching orders.
But even that wasn’t quite as crazy as it’s become. Just the standoff alone that we talked about with the Bundys. And I think that your book lays this out as well. The extreme right. These Western States that have different mindsets, and it’s become very extreme. How has that extremism become a thing?
[00:33:59.690] – Skillen
Yeah, in This Land is My Land, that’s one of the arguments of the book is that the extreme has always been there. If we go back to the 60s and early 70s, there were plenty of militias. A lot of them in Idaho, and the militias then were explicitly racist, Christian Identity Movement, Aryan Nations. They wanted nothing to do with society.
They were going to build their Aryan Utopia in Idaho. So how did we go from that where those militias were fringe, genuine fringe, to today, when not only are some of the explicitly racist views mainstream, but where the kind of celebration of political violence is now mainstream. And to me, I think one of the most disturbing developments in our politics.
There are a couple of pieces that I think are important to this. The first is the longer historical piece, and that is the nature of American civil religion, civil religion being this idea that certainly draws on Christianity, comes out of some Christian teaching and Mormon teaching. But it is the idea that America is a special nation.
It’s set apart by God, that it is exceptional in world history and that it was founded erroneously as a Christian nation, and that so long as it stuck to those moorings, it would remain the dominant economic and political power in the world. If we look at the 70s and early 80s, the kind of civil religious narrative of a James Dobson, of Pat Robertson, it sounded rhetorically a little more plausible, right?
What they were saying is we want to deal with the moral degeneracy of society. We want integrity in our elected officials. We’re trying to address the moral failings in society, and that’s why we’re seeking political power. Somehow we move from that to what Donald Trump exposed, which is the reality that the concern about moral integrity is simply gone.
Even among the majority of evangelical Christians voted for Trump and continue to support Trump. Well, it’s not because he embodies Christian character or virtue. It’s not because the policies are really expressions of the formal religion. What Trump is is an expression of a kind of nationalist anger.
And I think what Trump revealed is how thin the formal religious veneer was, or at least is for many people, and that civil religion is just bald nationalism. I should also add that it’s hard to separate that from what would be called just status politics. The reason to retell the story, the history of America as a Christian nation.
The reason to gloss over slavery and racism is that the driving fear and anger is that a kind of white Protestant patriarchal culture is fading. And there’s this rear guard action to try to restore that culture. And if you look at the enemy, if you look at who they’re battling, it’s the federal government. Why? Well, the federal government is the one that forced integration to public schooling, and we could go on and on as if we just get government out of here.
The United States will reset to this earlier culture. And not only I disagree with it, but I also just think that’s a fallacy. The more proximate cause, I think, or if we want to see the extremism in near term, this really does go to the Tea Party movement and the Patriot movement, 2009 and the anger at big banks being bailed out. But I also think we can’t separate it from anxiety about an African American President.
These things come together, and I think you’re seeing, too, a repackaging of militias not as racist but as defenders of the Constitution. And we have to go into the roots of this, but the celebration of the Second Amendment as the principal amendment, protecting all the others, the celebration of the Revolutionary War.
So all the rhetoric about we need another revolution like that one where we overthrow the tyrants. It’s been twelve years of that. And I think we’re seeing now the fruits of that effort, which maybe for many people, was simply rhetoric in 2009. I don’t know, but certainly it’s not just rhetoric today.
And this is what gives us January 6, where if you look at some of the images, you see these curious symbols of the Gadsden flag, you see the American flag, you see crosses. If we look closely, I’m sure we’ll find someone dressed up as King George. But the way in which all of these symbols mobilize and create a credibly dangerous environment in which to try to do politics.
[00:39:40.430] – Grumbine
There’s tons of literature and historical references to when people rose up against an unjust government and did, in fact, overthrow or change that government through direct action, demonstrations, taking to the streets. All of these are distinctly American values. I don’t stand against that per se. Even the French Revolution.
You have rights of men and the restructuring of society and ending the religious rule, if you will, and fundamentally changing power dynamics. Then you have the Haitian Revolution, where people got tired of being slaves. And the American Revolution is one that I don’t really point to typically because it tends to be glossed over.
But this was largely a rich man’s revolution where the people that were already wealthy land owners didn’t feel like paying money back to England, and they got the poor people to fight with them. So largely that isn’t even told correctly. But the point, I guess, is revolutions do happen. But what we’re watching with these folks. It’s a weird bastardization.
They take things like masking. I know everybody can have different opinions on things, but they take these wedge issues and build an entire case around this to add legitimacy, add numbers, et cetera. But it takes something so small, so innocuous and turns it into this toxic, festering wound that everybody’s got a rally around. It’s genius in its own sick way. But the public private lands coming back to that.
[00:41:24.770] – Skillen
Sure.
[00:41:25.250] – Grumbine
How does this organization behind the scenes, the political collaborations between right wing Christians who want to control social standing and right wing libertarians that want any kind of control over social constructs completely eliminated as long as you protect private property. How does that collaboration between odd bedfellows translate into the fight over public lands?
[00:41:58.590] – Skillen
I could take that in a number of directions. I think one of them is it leads to some of the remarkable inconsistencies and downright contradictions of our public lands debate. So the Republican Party’s platform in 2016 and again in 2020 because it didn’t have a new one, that included a pledge that they would work to pass new legislation that would get rid of public lands.
Not all of them probably keep national parks, but transfer most of these public lands to the Western States. And this is the kind of symbolic issue that even when Marco Rubio, Senator from Florida, was running in the primaries, he was railing against public lands. No one in Florida hates public lands. They have the Everglades.
It’s not an issue, but recognizing that you have to stand against government wherever government can be found with obviously certain exceptions. But when Chaffetz from Utah in 2017 introduced legislation to actually sell 3 million acres of public lands in Utah, which by the way, were acres that the Bureau of Land Management had long identified as not really appropriate for federal ownership.
I mean, these were the lands they had said should probably be sold. And when he introduced that legislation, it was crushed. By whom? Well, certainly not by Progressives. It was crushed by Republicans, because if you live in Utah and turns out outdoor recreation is not a partisan issue, it doesn’t matter how conservative or Liberal you are.
You like being outdoors. And so hunters and anglers, off-road enthusiasts, all of these people who use public lands said, “Absolutely not. You’re not going to really sell public lands, right?” And I think that we then get trapped in these wars of the kind of symbolic debate.
Which, part of what’s unfortunate is that it means it will never lead to a meaningful policy change, because that’s not the purpose of it. The purpose is really just issue signaling to people that you’re on the right side, which is the side that’s against the government.
[00:44:33.930] – Grumbine
So this land battle is largely a symbolic gesture, as yet again, another poke at the federal government. Is that what we can boil it down to?
[00:44:47.670] – Skillen
I think that it’s a symbolic gesture. And if we want to think about strategy and tactics, for a number of Western States, it’s really reframing a debate. As far as I can tell, the majority of elected officials in Western States don’t necessarily want ownership of the federal lands because it would come with an enormous cost. Right now, the federal government spends over $2 billion a year on wildfire suppression.
The States can’t pick up that tab, but what they do want is they want to reframe this as a justice issue in order to gain political leverage in decision-making about public lands. So I think there is something sincere, it just has nothing to do with ownership.
[00:45:40.350] – Grumbine
It’s interesting, and I know this is not your area of specialty, so I’ll just take a second to add that the federal government is the currency issuing entity. It is the monopolist on the money side, so it can afford anything available for purchase in US dollars. States have always been constrained. This is why trying to do bold public programs is so impossible at the state level. You laid it out eloquently.
Billions of dollars would have to go into maintaining those public lands if it was transferred from the Feds to the States. That federal funding actually is counted on by each state. They must have that infusion of cash because a lot of them don’t have huge amounts of income coming into the state to begin with.
So I guess the question becomes, what is the end game here? They can’t afford the land even if they gave it to them. So this would be giving it to a Bill Gates Foundation or something like that?
[00:46:45.270] – Skillen
It’s a great question. States have studied the cost, the economics of it. Utah did a study that showed if it got all federal minerals and developed all the oil and gas and coal, it could probably afford those lands. But you’re right. It really is a battle over the monetary value of those lands to the states. One of the real sticking points, I think in a lot of the economic debates over federal lands is that the federal government doesn’t pay property tax to the states.
That doesn’t mean the federal government isn’t giving money to the counties and the States. There are a host of mechanisms whereby the federal government does just that. There are programs for payment in lieu of taxes. But the principal way in which federal land ownership has benefited, particularly counties, economically, is that historically, the federal government has been in the business of developing oil, gas, coal, timber, and then also a range for livestock grazing.
And in all of those programs, the federal government gives generally half, depending on the program, of all revenue directly to the counties in which they’re located. And what that means is when new federal restrictions come in and there’s less timber harvesting, that’s not just about jobs, though it is, it’s also about a fundamental funding mechanism for those counties.
But, to your point, the federal government can simply choose to do a kind of payment in lieu of taxes to support counties financially, more like a property tax instead of relying on resource development, always as the tool to economically support.
[00:48:50.130] – Grumbine
Very well stated. So let me close this out. I love the fact that you’ve got several books to dig into on this, but the most current one, This Land is My Land, what do you want them to get from this book more than anything?
[00:49:08.190] – Skillen
Well, if I could pique their interest in federal public lands in the West, that would be great. I think that the two things that are most important to me in the research and writing are, one, appreciating the way in which formerly regional political conflicts, which were different in the West and the Southeast than the industrial Northeast, have been homogenized through a number of forces leading to the kind of simple national polarization that we have today.
And also seeing that if we look at the battles over federal lands in the West, what we’re seeing is, I think some of the earlier shifts from mainstream to extreme, particularly with armed conflicts that now has become mainstream within our national politics. And in that way, it’s the public lands issue, and there are several others.
But the public lands issue is a microcosm of our politics generally. Both what is dysfunctional about it, but also, I think and there aren’t many, but some of the opportunities, some of the kind of hopeful opportunities. If we look carefully.
[00:50:30.570] – Grumbine
Very good. Full disclosure. I purchased the books. I can’t wait to dig into it and read it myself. I encourage everyone else to do that as well. On our website, we will be adding your books to our library. We put all their books in there, so really excited about getting them out there for you.
But with that, Mr. Skillen, thank you so much for joining me today. It was a real pleasure to have you on and for everyone out there listening. This is Steve Grumbine, Jamie Skillen, Macro N Cheese. We’re out of here.
[00:51:28.630] – Ending Credits
Macro N Cheese is produced by Andy Kennedy, descriptive writing by Virginia Cotts, and promotional artwork by Mindy Donham. Macro N Cheese is publicly funded by our Real Progressives Patreon account. If you would like to donate to Macro N Cheese, please visit patreon.com/realprogressives.
Mentioned in the podcast:
This Land is My Land: Rebellion in the West by James R. Skillen
The Nation’s Largest Landlord: The Bureau of Land Management in the American West by James R. Skillen
Federal Ecosystem Management: Its Rise, Fall, and Afterlife by James R. Skillen
The Other Rights Revolution: Conservative Lawyers and the Remaking of American Government by Jefferson Decker
Recent Articles by Jamie Skillen
Conservative Hate of Public Lands Morphed Into Hate Of Gov w/ James R. Skillen – MR Live – 5/13/21