Re-Inventing Vermont: Towards 21st Century Blueprints

Editor's Note: In 1989, Vermont independent Chelsea Green Press published Frank Bryan and John McClaughry's The Vermont Papers: Recreating Democracy on a Human Scale. Now, close to two decades later, as citizens of the United States empire confront global Peak Oil realities, stupendous corporate corruption, titanic military expenditures, massive electoral fraud, runaway federal spending, and a “war on terror” that Mr. Cheney promises “will not end in our lifetimes,” we need to re-visit Vermont-focused books like this one.

As Chelsea Green Press now brings The Vermont Papers back into print, what follows is a section from the book's opening pages, setting our 21st century stage with uncanny prophetic vision.

To order a copy of the book, visit www.chelseagreen.com.

Chapter 1: Viewing the Pasture Spring

You cannot run away from a weakness
You must some time fight it out or perish
And if that be so, why not now?
And where do you stand?
- Robert Louis Stevenson

For all its inspiring success, the American Dream still lies beyond our reach.

America stands as a beacon to liberty, democracy, and community. But that tradition is under challenge from the forces of centralized power. These forces have never wholly succeeded, but neither have they been decisively repelled. That task still lies ahead. The little green-clad state of Vermont may well become the place to show America how liberty, democracy, and equality can be restored.

We live on dirt roads in the back country of northern New England. As this book goes to print, the shadows of November's sun lie flat on the face of the land. Birds gather against the sky, and the orange needles of the tamaracks fall silently onto the forest floor. None of this has changed in two hundred years. Vermonters have treated this land with relative care. True, like others, we have slashed and hacked and gouged and spilled and spewed. Yet here the planet still breathes as it spins through the galaxy. So far at least Mother Earth has pardoned our sins. So far she has repaired herself. You sense that watching a chickadee sass the cold at twenty below.

There is no such forgiveness in human affairs. There is no self-repair. Like dawn through a drizzle a vision is forming across the political horizon – a specter of a government that no longer works. Senator Daniel Moynihan said it succinctly in his book on Lyndon Johnson's “War On Poverty,” Maximum Feasible Understanding, published twenty years ago. “The government,” he said, “did not know what it was doing.” Things have gotten worse since then. Much worse.

Presidential elections have become empty and even disgusting spectacles by those best prepared to lead. National election campaigns today are an issueless soap opera feasting on scandals and trivia. Their language is the language of horse races or sports commentators awaiting the next play. The news media have become enamored of campaign tactics and bored with substance. They hype the process month after month, insulting the people with their inflated speculations, usually couched in terms of intrigue and deceit – anything to keep the viewer's fingers off the remote-control button…

Back at the grassroots the people have barricaded themselves in interest groups as insurance against defeat in the one or two areas where government action is most important to them. Political parties, once healthy, decentralized, and citizen-based, have become too weak to provide coherence and direction. Congress stumbles along, deferring decisions right and left to the courts and the bureaucracy. The president faces incessant attack by the electronic media, which are most interested in scoring points than in informing the public on key matters of governance. Washington seems more and more remote and irrelevant. The danger is that it is remote but not irrelevant.

National political leaders seem t have a sense that something is amiss, but they lack the understanding to identify the solution or do anything about it if they could identify it. For the solution must push up from below, like wild violets through the dark earth in springtime.

Historian Barry D. Karl puts our condition in brilliant perspective. Centralism may have been necessary at a point in our history, he concedes, but now it has “severed our contacts with the more familiar state and local governments” and has “threatened our sense of ourselves as citizens.” No one has better expressed the politics in the post-modern period: “At a moment in history when the technology of communication is improving by quantum leaps, our suspicions of the truth of what we are told and what we know are greater than they have ever been. These suspicions have their source in our oldest and most profound need: our need to govern ourselves.

The collapse of the American center is a manifestation of a vanishing democracy in the heartland. Jefferson, as Hannah Arendt pointed out, had a “foreboding of how dangerous it might be to allow a people a share in public power without providing them at the same time more public space than the ballot box and more opportunity to make their own voice heard in public than election day.” Jefferson's fears were justified. As the watersheds of community democracy are sucked dry, the rivers of citizenship that fed our great national institutions grow even more shallow, and the American public is withering away.

In short, the republic cannot survive without representative bodies that are credible and competent. Representation is built on citizenship. But citizens cannot be factory-built or found in electronic villages. They must be raised at home. That rearing takes place in real polities: places where community and politics meet, where individuals learn the habit of democracy face to face, where decision making takes place in the context of community interdependence.

This then is the great challenge of the twenty-first century: saving the center by shoring up its parts, preserving union by emphasizing disunion, making cosmopolitanism possible by making parochialism necessary, restoring the representative republic by rebuilding direct democracy, strengthening the national character through a rebirth of local citizenship.

Over the last quarter century there have been many recommendations to save American politics, but they have been cosmetic and superficial, like giving smelling salts to a fighter whose legs have gone. We propose to return to where the roots of democracy are still firmly established and nourish them to new life. We propose to focus on a place where citizenship still lives, where a small pastureland of liberty and community of the kind America so desperately needs still lies intact. There we propose to build a new resurgent twenty-first century politics of human scale. At that promising place which will inspire all America, we suggest Vermont.