Someone Needs to Brush Up on Their MLK

This is kind of random, but I was just reading the Vox.com "cards" explaining the whole Nevada rancher controversy/standoff/thing and I saw that some Tea Party types have attempted to label the efforts of one Cliven Bundy to keep the federal government from seizing cattle he's been illegally grazing on federal lands for many years "civil disobedience." If you accept the basic premise that the federal government is wholly illegitimate, I guess that could almost make sense. Except there's a wee problem: it completely ignores everything political philosophers have worked out about the theory of civil disobedience. Because, see, there's a reason we have laws, and there's a reason you'd like to think that people have a moral obligation to follow laws, even if they think those laws are wrong. Everyone just acting according to their own view of what the law should be, rather than what the law is, would be, well, anarchy, or something very nearly resembling it. And yet it seems fairly obvious that, in the extreme case, one cannot be under an obligation to follow a truly unjust law. Reconciling the two requires limits on the manner of civil disobedience, as well as limits on when it is appropriate. To my mind the best single expression of the theory of civil disobedience comes, not surprisingly, from Martin Luther King, in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail. And perhaps the best passage from that majestic tract is this:

In no sense do I advocate evading or defying the law, as would the rabid segregationist. That would lead to anarchy. One who breaks an unjust law must do so openly, lovingly, and with a willingness to accept the penalty. I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for law.

The point is to break the law, and get arrested and punished for it. That's the whole point. Civil disobedience would be if Bundy had grazed his cattle on federal lands, gone around saying he thought federal ownership of those lands was illegitimate, and then let them confiscate his cattle and raised an almighty stink about it, attempting to rally public opinion. Any claim to immunity from punishment for one's act of disobedience is inconsistent with the theory Dr. King lays out. 

Of course, no one is bound to accept MLK's words as binding authority as to the limits of civil disobedience But you don't even need to bother reading Letter from a Birmingham Jail to realize that, of course, the single most defining characteristic of civil disobedience is that it be civil, i.e. nonviolent. What's happening in Arizona is described as an armed stand-off. That is, perforce and in and of itself with no possible counterargument, enough to defeat a claim to legitimate civil disobedience. If Bundy's actions are to be justified, they are to be justified as revolution, nothing more or less. It is quite possible to have a regime so unjust that violent revolution is eminently justified (see South Africa, circa 1948-1994), and of course there's been a disquietingly prominent proto-revolutionary strain in Tea Party politics. But there should be no confusion over what's going on here. Civil disobedience it ain't. Domestic terrorism it is, even if it's the justified kind, like that of Nelson Mandela against the apartheid government.

But, y'know, it isn't. It's just an idiot with some guns looking to get a whole lot of people killed for really no reason whatsoever. What a hero.