In his 2000 book Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, author Robert Putnam ranked Vermont above all other states on his scale of “tolerance for gender, racial, and civil liberties.” At about the same time, political scientist Tom Rice ranked Vermont first among states on a “civil society” measure published in Publius, the leading professional journal of American federalism.

Such rankings are not new. Praise for Vermont’s unique civic virtue has been extensively documented. Vermont is an exceptional place regarding values most dear to those who appreciate humankind’s need for a living nexus between liberty and community.         

Why is this?

The answer is critical to all those patriots committed to navigating Vermont’s independence from the federal government. The answer rationalizes our instincts, electrifies our commitment, and sustains our courage. The answer lies deep in our sinews, our genetic code. Established by the Republic of Vermont in 1777, it arose from the first English constitution to outlaw slavery and to allow people without property to vote. The code was evident when Ethan Allen issued America’s first Emancipation Proclamation – a “writ of freedom” for two African Americans (mother and daughter) found at Fort Ticonderoga, when it was captured by Allen in 1775 while gunfire from Lexington and Concord still echoed through the hardwood hills of northern New England. The code was recognized a year later by General John Burgoyne, who wrote in his diary while sailing down Lake Champlain to defeat at a place called Saratoga: “Vermont abounds with the most rebellious race on the continent and hangs like a gathering storm on my left.”

This genetic code is called human-scale democracy.

But how was this code sustained over the two centuries that have since passed? How did it survive the second half of the industrial revolution – the two most vicious centuries the world has ever known, ending with the hierarchical, totalitarian industrial horrors of Hitler and Stalin?

Vermont escaped hierarchy and its attendant authoritarianism because of geography and climate. We were born cold, rocky, and isolated (the only New England state without an opening to the sea). The historian Arnold Toynbee, in his Study of History, dismissed Vermont as being above the optimal climatic area of the continent.

He had a point.

During the heyday of urban industrialism, no American state had more people scrambling to leave than Vermont. This period is called Vermont’s “dark age” by historians. In 1950, Vermont was the most rural state in America. We had a tiny state capital, the population of our largest city was less than 35,000, and a greater percentage of Vermont’s citizens lived in places of fewer than 2,500 people than any other state.

Vermont had been “left behind.”

This turned out to be a blessing.

The ascendant paradigm

At about 10 p.m. on a Saturday evening during the summer of 1973, I was hitching though a particularly lonely stretch of Vermont between Barre and Bradford, a little town on the Connecticut River. The blacktop followed the Waits River, which was dancing along beside me under a full moon. I had just sent the manuscript for my first book on Vermont’s government to the publisher. It contained an introductory chapter on the history of the state. I was unhappy with it. My broodings centered on my lack of a (Frederick Jackson Turner-like) paradigm summarizing the state’s history. How to describe Vermont’s past in a way that would enlighten its future? What was our genetic code?

At the same time that one side of my brain was caught up in this thematic enterprise, the other side was wondering about strange roars coming out of the hills to the southwest. They undulated with intensity – deep, guttural groans and bellows. It couldn’t be thunder, the skies were clear. They competed for my attention with historical paradigms as I walked alone down the road beside the river.

Then it struck me. The sounds came from a dirt race track, the Bear Ridge Speedway near Bradford.  It featured small cars and big engines tearing around and around a quarter-mile oval. Thinking about that, the idea of the “lapped car” crept into my mind. Every such race seems to have a car so slow it is left far behind.  But soon, as it passes in front of the grandstand, it is indeed, ahead. The other cars are behind it. It is out in front – leading the pack.

Suddenly back in the present, the other side of my mind – the side fussing over a paradigm for Vermont – kicked in.

The epiphany struck.

Throughout the urban industrial revolution, Vermont had fallen so far behind the other states on the great America racetrack of “progress” that it had been lapped. And now, by damn, it was ahead!

Years later, in a little book of Vermont humor entitled The Vermont Owner’s Manual, Bill Mares and I put it this way:

“When you [citizens] own Vermont, you own something very special. Sometimes Vermonters lose sight of this. That’s easy to understand. Mass American urban culture has bombarded us with big and fast and rich for so long that it is easy to believe we have fallen so far behind we’ll never catch up.

“Guess what?

“We did. We won’t. And who cares?

“We dropped so far behind the rest of America on the racetrack of progress we’ve been lapped. NOW WE’RE AHEAD.”

In a more serious treatment of Vermont as a model for other American states, published for a national audience some 15 years later (The Vermont Papers: Recreating Democracy on a Human Scale) John McClaughry and I switched metaphors to explain what we called the “leapfrog theory.”

“Vermont never had what most Americans are longing to be rid of. [We] developed a unique set of historical circumstances that pivot around one critical event: the state leapfrogged urban-industrialism, ignoring the astounding transformation of American society that took place in the years between 1830 and 1960. The result is a state that is already free and clear of the twentieth century.”

In short, the Dark Age "cocooned" Vermont. When the state entered the post-war period, it did so with its land green, its civil society preserved, its communities small, its democracy secure. Most important, its human-scale karma, its genetic code (while worn and tattered here and there), is still fundamentally intact.  Vermont was the United States’ best civil society because the variables that shaped it originally survived the 20th century.

Key to a proper understanding of this hopeful possibility is the realization that Vermont's intellectual and creative contributions were ahead of the curve during the urban industrial period. While limited space precludes here a complete documentation of this remarkable claim, it does allow three examples. The two most important inventions of the second industrial revolution -- the electric motor (which allowed Americans to make things with electricity instead of water and steam) and the platform scale (which allowed Americans to sell things by weight rather than bulk) – were Vermont inventions. And our most famous industry, the machine tool industry, built the cutting tools that made the machines that made the urban-industrial revolution. The analogy is not far off: then, as now, we built the “computer chips” of the second wave.

Urban-based biases to the contrary notwithstanding, rural people used, appreciated, and understood technology more than urban people.  And no state was as rural as Vermont. The division of labor (a defining feature of the urban industrial revolution) imprisons (as Marx warned) human genius and creativity. Vermont had plenty of industry throughout the Dark Age but all of it was practiced in what by national standards were tiny establishments and firms. The size and mass of industrialism as practiced nearly everywhere else was its most pernicious characteristic, and Vermont was relatively free of it.  

Civil society and the new paradigm

Computerized electronic intelligence (from town and county planning models to robotic milking machines) will define the new age of human activity just as speedy transportation and production systems (from assembly line work-processing models to the automobiles and trolley cars they produced) defined the old. Moreover (strange as it may seem to those locked in the “urban-first” mentality), Vermont (and other similar places) will lead in the development of this new age.

Here's why.  

First, the notion of “distance and space” has been profoundly reversed. Rural places like Vermont are now advantaged by post-modern electronic technology in the same way cities were once advantaged by machine-age technology. Second, Vermont is free of the residues of the old system, and may therefore immediately apply its energy to creating the future, while the rest of America must first expend its energy cleaning up after the past. In short, rural places are generically receptive, and urban places are generically reactive, to the coming reality.

One need only look at the dramatic increase in “working at home” statistics and the like to appreciate this. And we are only on the threshold of this new age – the “third wave” as it is called. For instance, we now have the capacity (interactive, holographic, visual communication combined with robotic production devices) to allow me to build cars in Detroit from my converted deer camp home in the hills of Vermont where I am now writing these words. And I would have had this article done sooner if I had not the capacity to play poker online in real time, for real money with players from Sidney, Australia, to Moose Jaw, Alaska.

But even these capacities are the Model a Fords of the new wave. Could Clyde Barrow in his V-8 coup – which he claimed in a letter to Henry Ford was the best getaway car he’d ever stolen – have in his wildest fantasies imagined a car equipped with a voice in the dash that could direct him, turn-by-turn, to the exact location of the next bank?  Decentralist revolutionaries must think past the embryonic phenomena we now think are the epitome of technology, and look toward the horizons of possibility, a direction in which the electronic highway is surely leading.

Let us view this horizon in political terms. The concentration of socio-economic life, which was necessary to sustain the urban-industrial era, relied on hierarchy – the classic 20th century pyramid of roles and duties arranged to control organizational activity from the top down. Hierarchy requires authority, which promotes symmetry, which causes rigidity. The result is awkward, reactionary and (most important) insensitive – and thus inhumane.

The new model features a diffusion of life and the politics and governance which follow. Instead of a single (hierarchical) directive, this de-concentration will engender a network of interactions.  Instead of authoritarian directives, democratic decisions from the bottom up will result. Instead of a symmetrical and rigid master plan, a variety of innovative systems will appear, serving in addition, as laboratories through which the networks can self-adjust with time. These systems will be sensitive to the special needs of citizens in the variety of settings in which they live, and thus become humane.

Herein lies the future of the world. And it is hard to name many polities around the globe that are better situated to lead the way toward its most humane promise than the Republic of Vermont. But to make any of this happen, we must first arrest the erosion of power toward the center, a center which remains hidebound and handcuffed by the idiocies of a time long past.