In her letter to the Editor in this issue of Vermont Commons, Lisa
Nash makes a number of sensible arguments regarding Vermonters and
Americans, Vermont and empire, and the general readiness of Vermonters
to embrace their own independence. In particular I was struck by Ms.
Nash’s assertion that “Vermonters, like most Americans, are far from
coming to terms with the reality that the U.S. is an empire.”

The UVM Center for Rural Studies just ran its annual Vermonter
Poll a week before the March 4 primaries, when the hopeful gaze of
Vermonters was fixed on the U.S. presidential candidates. The poll
asked, had the U.S. government lost its moral authority (77 percent,
yes); was the U.S. government unsustainable (49 percent, yes);
ungovernable (almost 13 percent, yes); unfixable (more than 6 percent,
yes).

What do these numbers tell us?

They indicate most Vermonters, like most Americans, are dismayed
by America’s loss of moral integrity and standing. While this is true
for three out of four of us, only one of every two of us believes the
federal government is unsustainable (politically and otherwise). And
only a bit better than one in ten of us believes the government cannot
govern, regardless, while a very small 6.4 percent believe it is, in
the end, unfixable.

In other words, Ms. Nash is right. Vermonters still believe in
America, if not in the captains currently steering the ship of state.
All but 11.5 percent of them are not ready for secession — according to
the same 2008 Vermonter Poll.

The real core of any empire is non-material: neither military,
economic, or technological, but cultural, moral, and spiritual. It is
foolish to pretend America does not still have, however lingeringly,
such a core. It still does, or rather its citizens do. And if it did
not, secessionism would be a rampant political movement here. An
empire’s non-material core is its vital life force, its animating
principle, the basis by which it endures and rallies peoples and whole
countries to its side. The U.S. attracts an unending stream of millions
to its shores, constantly swelling its already burdensome population of
more than 300 million. Whole nations themselves — from Estonia to
Macedonia to Azerbaijan — beg to be admitted to America’s European
military and economic shelters, NATO and the EU.

America is still the beating heart of the West. It is what has
made the world continue to cohere — even as we enter the waning hours
of the Petroleum Age. As William Rivers Pitt has written: “No other
nation on … earth uses the words ‘Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of
Happiness’ as the premise for their foundation in government.” Those
are not “mere words,” but the living engines that churn a million
hearts and mobilize multitudinous minds to struggle to realize the
global promise of what we Americans, ever since the Great Depression,
have called The American Dream.

But, as so many writers have observed, and not just recently but
for a long time, there is a dark side, running all the way from the
English settlers’ very first encounters with their territorial hosts,
the indigenous Indians, to the fatal agreement the Founding Fathers
made to postpone the issue of slavery for a generation and get on with
the business of making a nation, to the forcible acquisition of half of
Mexico, to the final extermination of all the continent’s Indian
cultures, to the conquest of the Philippines across the Pacific Ocean
and the illegal usurpation of the kingdom of Hawaii, to the genocidal
wars in Indochina and now Iraq and Afghanistan.

As the hard-headed enthusiast for empire Zbigniew Brzezinski has
wryly observed in The Grand Chessboard: “Democratization is inimical to
imperial mobilization.” A nation that seizes the mandate for empire
surrenders its status as a democratic republic. This tension — between
the exigencies of empire and those of a democratic republic —was
tolerated with varying degrees of success for almost 50 years, until
the Cold War ended. America, first under the leadership of Bush I and
Clinton I and then impelled by the imperial mandate of the Project for
a New American Century under Bush II, unequivocally opted to maintain
“imperial mobilization.”

The U.S. conduct of its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will not
only cost us a currently estimated $4 trillion to $5 trillion (Stiglitz
& Bilmes) we Americans do not have, but, as well, our moral
standing in the world. That latter cost cannot be quantified. On the
order of 4 million souls have been displaced in Iraq and 1.2 million
Iraqi lives ended. It is a grievous fact we Americans tend not to
notice or count these losses of the “the other,” and focus obsessively
on our own. But even our own losses far exceed those of the 9/11 “new
Pearl Harbor,” with more than 4,000 American dead, 30,000 grotesquely
wounded, and untold tens of thousands psychologically scared for life.
For what end?
Thus the American Dream lies in tatters. It is not only the
recommitment of the nation’s increasingly scarce resources to
war-making and endless violence, but much else besides that is sinking
the titanic ship of empire.

Of course there are many millions of Americans who hope to
reverse, in 2009, the moral damage done to their country in the past
five years. They do not understand the immense blood-soaked
“obligations” we have built up that will keep us in Iraq and
Afghanistan for as long as there’s still recoverable oil in the great
basins of the Persian Gulf and the Caspian Sea. Neither Hillary nor
Barack will alter these obligations, made for the sake of the entire
West’s “American Way of Life.”
That way of life depends on cheap oil and ever-expanding credit. Cheap
oil peaked in May 2005 and even with the tragic misallocation of
croplands to bio-fuels and the destruction of vast swaths of Alberta’s
pristine land for tar-sand oil as added supply sources, world oil
production has remained constant since 2005, at about 85 billion
barrels, despite an over 100-percent increase in price. We are
simultaneously “maxed out” on the debt-based credit front, according to
the same dumbfounding laws of exponential growth (www.oildrum.com and
www.chrismartenson.com). The days of the ever-expanding growth of
people, fuel, food, wealth, and CO2 (and other pollution) are finally
drawing to an end in our beautifully finite world.

Empires expire. And while Ms Nash worries, with cause, that most
Vermonters and most Americans “are far from coming to terms” with that
reality, its time is upon us.

Let us therefore reclaim the human-scale. Let us dream a new
dream, a dream that once again honors and enhances all life. And let us
begin where we can. Here, in Vermont.

According to the latest Vermonter Poll, more than 70,000 of us are ready to begin
-- independent of the empire that once claimed our allegiance.

Ian Baldwin
Publisher