I am unsure of the exact date but the fall of 1957 will do. Forces
in Montpelier were (and had been for some time) making war on the small
schools of Vermont. I was a sophomore at Newbury High School which, on
a good year, graduated about a dozen students. I was to graduate in
1959, a very good year indeed. My class had seven students.

I was 15 in the fall of '57 and, like most of the students, was opposed
to the "consolidation" of Newbury High with schools from another town.
The issue was now critical because the state had threatened to close us
because we lacked a school library. No matter one of the oldest and
finest small town libraries in Vermont was within shouting distance of
the schoolyard, which doubled as one of the most beautiful town commons
in Vermont. The town library was open to the public only on Tuesday and
Thursday evenings and Saturday morning. Arrangements could have been
made.

So, with the support of the four teachers and the principal (the entire
staff of the school) a group of students along with other adults in
town decided to build a library in an abandoned room in the basement.
Over several weekends we cleaned, shelved, and painted. The community
kicked in books to go with those on shelves in the four rooms that
comprised the high school in a nine-room, twelve-grade school building.

I will never forget the day the man came to inspect our new library, or
his condescending officialdom. But I especially remember his goddamned
tape measure that concluded: well,  the room was, unfortunately
(the man sighed), several square feet too small. Besides (gee) it was
too poorly lighted, ventilated and (darn it) carpeted. And, of course
(gosh), it was unsafe. We'd need to jackhammer a hole in the
foundation, put in a door, and pour cement steps up to ground level.

Newbury High School hung on for another decade or so, but finally—to quote Joseph Heller in Catch 22 – they "disappeared" it.

In effect, the man had said our library failed to meet state standards,
and for this (and lots of other reasons) our school was unsustainable
in the modern world. To which we muttered "bullshit." Today after a
half century of reflection, study, and involvement in public education
(at the high school as well as college level) I would make only one
minor editorial change to my reaction of so long ago.

I would hit the caps lock and embolden it to read: BULLSHIT.

In case you might be thinking the educational product there must have
been pretty good because it produced a college professor like me who
has published more peer-reviewed and well-published social science
about Vermont than anyone else in the 20th Century, you'd be dead
wrong. This little school, sustained on a human scale by a civic
society of practicing democrats (small 'd' – Newbury was overwhelmingly
Republican in those days) produced an excellent educational experience
because it judged me as I should have been judged. It judged me unfit
for college. And I was. My grades were awful.

I was turned down at UVM when I applied. My GPA my senior year was 2.0.
I dropped Latin. Earlier I had gotten Cs in my two years of French and
dropped Algebra II. Scott Mahoney, a great Democrat and teacher, gave
me a C- in world history! When it was over I finished third in a class
of seven. (A couple of percentage points and I'm in the bottom half!)
In short, I didn't measure up to the standards set by Newbury High
School, even though every teacher there did everything humanly possible
to help me. They knew my family, my strengths, my weaknesses, and me.
They cared – not  because they were more "caring" than the
teachers in today's big, regional schools, but because it was
impossible not to care. The school and the town were too small.
Institutional size and personal proximity – these are the variables
that matter.

But they couldn't compete with the hunting, hell raising, and hormones. (I wish I could go to them now and apologize.)

Right next to the high school building in Newbury was the town hall where the people held town meetings.

And still do.

Town meetings have not been disappeared.

Yet.

But trust me on this: there are people everywhere with tape measures.

Through their action and strategic inaction, these people are
destroying our democracy.  They believe that we are as incapable
of governing ourselves as we are of seeing to the education of our
children.

Fundamentally, of course, the fault is not theirs. It is ours. We are letting them get away with it. We don't care enough.

And that's a shame, because we can save Vermont's democracy. Compared
to establishing a Second Vermont Republic it would be so easy. What
does this say about us -- we who claim we can lead Vermont to
independence in the face of the most powerful nation the world has ever
known -- if we cannot convince our own state to let its citizens
practice their own democracy in the communities in which they live?
Those of us who a fed up with the federal government are sometimes
accused of indulging in a quixotic charge against windmill America
while we let our own democracy slip through our fingers.

At this point, a defense against that charge is hard to come by.

What follows is my take on what must be done to insure such a defense
would be as easy as it was unnecessary. For it is my belief that if we
are to plan for sustainability in an environmental, economic, social,
and cultural sense, we must first recognize that our democracy is the
engine that sustains sustainability.  

(1) The fundamental forces at work undermining town meeting are the
same core forces that have already destroyed representative democracy
in America: uniformity, centralism, arrogance, and greed. From our
communities to our governance, from our farms to our factories, from
our needs to our capacities, indeed from our understandings of our own
surroundings to the very values by which we live, human scale is being
replaced by system scale, community is falling to hierarchy, democracy
to authority, variety to symmetry, creativity to rigidity, civility to
rudeness – and in the end, humanity to inhumanity.

And the hell of it is this need not be the case.

(2) The extent of the problem: Town meeting attendance has been on a
downward slope for (at least) 35 years. I have provided a chart (Chart
I) that demonstrates this. Based on a yearly sample of about 50 towns a
year, the average attendance of the registered voters in each town who
attended town meeting has dropped from about 26 percent between 1970
and 1979 to about 15 percent between 1996 and 2006. For the town
meetings I sampled in 2004, 2005, and 2006, turnout averaged 13
percent.

This is a huge loss. Even if the decline has bottomed out and the 13
percent figure holds up in the future, town meeting attendance will
have been cut in half since the 1970s. (Note: For those who think that
13 percent represents a far weaker commitment to civil society than
voting at the polls in state and national elections, consider the
findings Susan Clark and I reported in our book All Those in Favor: "In
the average community with a town meeting, Vermonters spend in the
aggregate about 2,240 hours at town meetings taking care of local
business during a typical four-year presidential election cycle. (And
this doesn't count any special town meetings that may be held during
the year.) In contrast, when we add up the time spent voting in the
presidential election, off-year elections and primaries, the aggregate
citizens of our typical town will give up 908 hours of their personal
lives over four years. Vermonters commit nearly two and a half times as
many hours to governing themselves at town meeting as they do to
choosing others (from their local representative in the House of
Representatives in Montpelier to the president of the United States) to
govern them."

(3) What to do? Several levels of solutions exist. First, many
more-or-less technical improvements could be made to improve town
meeting attendance. These involve issues like scheduling (such as
rethinking night meetings, which lower women's attendance) and voting
procedures (never -- as in NEVER – adopt the Australian Ballot). For a
thorough listing of these kinds of measures see: All Those in Favor.
Second (at the other end of the spectrum of possibility), are
fundamental cultural re-orientations. It gets down to this.

We have to learn to be happy living small.

I have written before in these pages on why I believe these cultural
changes are in the works already, based on information technology that
allows us to work, play, and govern ourselves in a relatively small
place.

In between these extremes are two projects, which are critical. The
first is very difficult and will take time. The size of our communities
must be reduced or (at a minimum) kept small. The most inhibiting
variable to a healthy democracy is size. Using sound statistical
devices it is possible to be clear about this. Attendance at town
meeting drops profoundly as community size increases. Most of the
decline in attendance since 1970 is attributable to town size. As a
matter of fact, this relationship is one of the strongest in all
political science. To demonstrate its power I have included a second
chart showing the relationship between community size and town meeting
attendance for the most recent sample of towns I have studied.

By taking a quick squint at this chart we can judge each town on the
extent to which it met its "size-predicted attendance quota." The heavy
curved line represents the percent of a town's registered voters that
could be expected to be at town meeting, given the town's size.
Williston and Hinesburg, for instance, pretty much exactly meet their
size-based predictions. St. George and Burke drop substantially below
theirs, while Strafford and Peacham do a lot better than predicted. But
overall, it is abundantly clear that smaller towns have much higher
attendance at town meeting than larger towns. We could increase
citizens' participation in town meetings dramatically if we could keep
the size of the towns small.

But it is very difficult for towns
to strengthen their democracy this way, for they lack the authority to
do so. And this fact brings to the table the second powerful instrument
available to us to revitalize our local democracies. Empower them. Why?
Because the second most influential factor increasing participation at
town meeting is the presence of a controversial item on the warning.

Chart II provides dramatic evidence of this. The town that exceeded its
size limitations the most was Sheffield. A town of 402 registered
voters like Sheffield can generally be expected to have about 72 people
at town meeting on any given year, 18 percent of its registered voter
list. But in 2006, Sheffield turned out more than twice that amount –
169 voters, 42 percent of its potential turnout. Residents of the
Northeast Kingdom know why. A plan to bring wind generators into town
as an alternative energy source was hugely controversial.

(4) The Basic Plan: Power to the Towns
I have studied more than 1,700 town meetings in Vermont over 37 years.
And over and over again this incandescent truth emerges: give the
people the right to decide issues that matter and they will respond.
Again and again and again the puzzle of high (or low) attendance
becomes clear. Let the people govern. Controversy is good for
democracy. As long as people are different and interesting and in
control of their lives, controversy will arise. The role of democracy
is to resolve conflict, not stifle it. The role of democracy is to deal
with it where it is, not package it up and make off with it to
Montpelier or Washington where local variants evaporate, where human
scale is lost in an aggregated statistical mist.

The definitive study of local control published in the 1970s
showed conclusively that Vermont has one of the very weakest systems of
local government in America. Among other indicators, G. Ross Stephens
found that between 1957 and 1974 no state centralized its government
more quickly than Vermont. It is odd and deeply disturbing that the
government of the state with the best system of local democracy,
Vermont, has systematically stripped its citizens of the right to
practice this democracy on matters of importance in their lives. The
Kennedy School's Jane Mansbridge, a leading American political theorist
(author of "Beyond Adversary Democracy", "Why We Lost the ERA" and a
slue of other remarkable works) addressed this situation in 1981 in her
classic, two-year study of a real Vermont town she fictitiously called
Selby. She reported, "The diminishing power of the town has inevitably
had an effect on town meeting attendance."
Things have gotten remarkably worse since that time.

“Power to the people” is a hollow cry if the people are but a mass. But
where the people live closely to each other and the land in enduring
democratic communities, no admonition is more powerful. Without it all
attempts to create sustainable economies linked to sustainable physical
ecologies will soon crumble under the mass imperatives of distant,
rudderless, fearful, indulgent majorities.

Those who cherish individual liberty as it is worked out in
Aristotelian terms – that is, liberty outside the context of the polis
is a sham – have a profound opportunity to establish such a vision in
Vermont. We already have the structure: town meeting. We already have
the place (a larger percentage of our population residing in towns of
less than 2,500 people than any other state). We already have a cadre
of democrats left and right who understand that our cherished
representative republic called America is deeply in trouble; who
understand with Jefferson, DeTocqueville, John Stuart Mill, Hannah
Arendt, Lewis Mumford, and so many others that without the "little
republics" where citizens are trained, where civility becomes a habit,
where voters have the space to tie their hearts to the commonweal, no
representative republic can long endure.

Town meetings are the best hope for such a truly communitarian space.

It is the first thing we must shore up against the flood of mass
society and its inhuman politics that has crested over the republic.
Let us be about it. Let us strengthen town meeting by returning to it
its right to decide important issues that effect people's lives. Then
let us sustain it.

Perhaps it is not too late for the nation. As America slips away into
the civic horrors of mass politics, perhaps Vermont can be what L. S.
Stavrianos called “The Promise of the Coming Dark Age.” Perhaps we can
become a beacon to lead the republic back to its roots.

If not, we can at least make it more difficult for men with tape
measures to package up what Benjamin Barber called (in reference to the
Swiss Cantons) our communal liberties and then carry them off. For if
that happens, take a good look at the United States. We will look just
like it, independent or not.

Perhaps we owe America the effort. We certainly owe it to ourselves.