US Out of Vermont!



by Christopher Ketcham
The
American Prospect



Last September,
about 60 Vermonters met in the chambers of the house of representatives
in Montpelier to celebrate the state’s “independence spirit”
and to discuss the goals of “environmental sustainability,
economic justice, and Vermont self-determination.” The speaker
of the house had given up the space free of charge for the one-day
conference. First at the podium was a Princeton-educated yak farmer
and professor of journalism named Rob Williams, one of the organizers
of the event, who at 9 A.M. opened the proceedings by acknowledging
what he called “some unpleasant and hard truths.” Amid
the twin global crises of peak oil and climate change, the United
States was “an out-of-control empire.” It was “unresponsive
to the needs, concerns, and desires of ordinary citizens.”

Williams, who
wore a T-shirt that said “U.S. Out of Vermont,” did not
advocate revolution. He was looking for a divorce. He wanted Vermont
to secede. “Nonviolent secession,” he said, “the
detaching from empire and exercising our rights to independence,
a deeply American right first expressed in the Declaration of Independence,
is a right that demands re-exploration today.” Williams noted
that Vermont is one of only three states, along with Texas and Hawaii,
that ever existed as an independent republic – in Vermont’s
case, from 1777 to 1791 – and that as “a national leader
on progressive political issues,” the state was “uniquely
poised to lead this national conversation on self-determination.”

The murmuring
response from the crowd suggested theyÂ’d heard it before. Williams
and his fellow travelers – who constituted not quite a movement,
he said, but more “a network of critical observers” –
had been calling for separation from the U.S. since 2003. They had
gathered in the ornate rooms of the state house to spread the word
in 2005 and again in 2008 and now in 2012. Vermont had not yet separated,
but the secessionists who were calling for a “Second Vermont
Republic” had gained notoriety, and some small influence, across
the state.

The conferenceÂ’s
attendees included an ecofeminist named Lierre Keith, co-author
of Deep
Green Resistance
, who reported that “capitalism is
literally insane” and urged the collapse of industrial civilization;
a man in a kaffiyeh who enthused over a recent story about a rural
Vermonter who, faced with police harassment over his use of marijuana,
mounted his tractor, drove into town, and crushed seven sheriffÂ’s
cruisers under the treads of the behemoth machine; a musician who
sang a tune called “Totalitarian Democracy”; a thespian
garbed in 18th-century blouse and boots and cravat who re-enacted
Ethan Allen, the farmer-soldier who led VermontÂ’s war of secession
against New York in 1777; and a troupe of female dancers from the
radical Bread and Puppet Theater, dressed all in white, who chanted
a series of poems about “upriser calisthenics.”

The morningÂ’s
keynote speaker, historian and author Morris Berman, drew on his
latest book, Why
America Failed
. As he writes, “The principal goal of
North American civilization is and always has been an ever-expanding
economy – affluence – and endless technological innovation
– ‘progress.’” That’s made us “a nation
of hustlers … a people relentlessly on the make.” The
hustling mentality, seeing no limits to acquisitiveness, founded
on the delusion of permanent growth – otherwise known as the
American Dream – produced permanent instability and crisis.
A nation of hustlers, argued Berman, was bound to fail. It could
do nothing else.

Williams was
nodding along. “Only in Vermont,” he told me, “would
a legislature allow this sort of thing on its floor.”

During the
Obama years, secession has mostly been an antic folly of the political
right, courtesy of Texas nationalists, Dixie nostalgists, white
supremacists, “sovereign citizens,” and gun nuts. There
was no small amount of hypocrisy, of course, in this conservative
rebellion. When Texas Governor Rick Perry in 2009 spoke publicly
about a possible Lone Star secession, he billed it as a constitutional
right in the face of overreaching government – though Republicans
mostly hadnÂ’t complained when George W. Bush was demanding
profligate budgets and stabbing the sacred document with pencil
holes.

Yet here in
granola-eating, hyper-lefty, Subaru-driving Vermont was a secession
effort that had been loud during the Bush years, had not ceased
its complaining under Barack Obama, did not care for party affiliation,
and had welcomed into its midst gun nuts and lumberjacks and professors,
socialists and libertarians and anarchists, ex-Republicans and ex-Democrats,
truck drivers and schoolteachers and waitresses, students and artists
and musicians and poets, farmers and hunters and wooly-haired woodsmen.
The manifesto that elaborated their platform was read at the conference:
a 1,400-word mouthful that echoed the Declaration of Independence
in its petition of grievances. “[T]ransnational megacompanies
and big government,” it proclaimed, “control us through
money, markets, and media, sapping our political will, civil liberties,
collective memory, traditional cultures.” The document was
signed by, among others, its principal authors, a professor emeritus
of economics at Duke University named Thomas Naylor and the decentralist
philosopher Kirkpatrick Sale, author of Human
Scale
. “Citizens,” it concluded, “lend your
name to this manifesto and join in the honorable task of rejecting
the immoral, corrupt, decaying, dying, failing American Empire and
seeking its rapid and peaceful dissolution before it takes us all
down with it.”

Midway through
the event, a bespectacled lawyer named Steven Howard, describing
himself as a “liberty activist,” took his turn at the
podium and shouted, “Free Vermont!” The response was lackluster,
so Howard cried louder: “Free Vermont!” There was yipping
and clapping, and when it died down, Howard asked, “How?”
Answers were not forthcoming, though this was the key question.
No compelling mass of Vermonters favored secession; no marchers
in Burlington or Montpelier were burning the American flag. In polls
taken over the previous five years, no more than 13 percent of registered
Vermont voters had expressed support for the idea. In 2010, nine
secessionist candidates ran for state office and were rejected by
the public. Their best showing was the candidacy of a 19-year-old
college student named James Merriam, who received 14 percent of
the vote for a seat in the state house of representatives. Until
recently, Williams had published and edited a newspaper, Vermont
Commons: Voices of Independence
, which at its height in 2011
had a print circulation of 12,000 but was now, for lack of funding
and advertisers, only a website. His network of critical observers
briefly did a brisk business in selling the “U.S. Out of Vermont”
T-shirts. The group even had its own silver “independence coin”
embossed with a portrait of socialist agrarian Scott Nearing, forebear
of the back-to-the-land movement in Vermont.

When the proceedings
broke for lunch, I asked Morris Berman, who had been invited from
his home in Mexico, what he thought of the conferees and their intentions.
“There’s no chance in hell that a secession is going to
happen under current conditions,” he said. “I’m a
historian. I look at whatÂ’s possible. If Vermont seceded, there
would be troops in Burlington in two hours.” Yet Berman was
also hopeful. The Vermonters were reinventing secession. It would
not be a mere political revolt, not simply a regional separation,
but also, and probably more important, a revolt against the economy
of empire, a move toward economic independence. “These people
here,” he told me, “are experimenting with a kind of monastic
withdrawal that has political implications. Capitalism is eating
itself alive, but as the system unravels you have all these little
flowering buds appear.”

VermontÂ’s
first modern-day proponent of secession was a professor of political
science at the University of Vermont named Frank Bryan, who in 1987
published a comic account of the stateÂ’s departure from the
union, titled Out!
The Vermont Secession Book
. The book imagined a covenant,
signed in secret by Ethan Allen and George Washington, that suggested
Vermont had not joined the Union; the Union had, instead, joined
Vermont. Now, “after two hundred years of bureaucracy, federal
mismanagement, and un-Vermont-like actions, Vermont wants out,”
wrote Bryan and co-author Bill Mares, a state legislator.

In 1991, on
the 200th anniversary of VermontÂ’s joining the empire, the
legislature gave Bryan funding to travel the countryside with a
state supreme court judge to debate the benefits of secession at
seven town hall meetings, including one in Montpelier. “It
was all in good fun,” Bryan says. The judge took the pro-Union
position. All seven towns voted against remaining in the United
States. “The reasons for not needing the federal government
are pretty clear,” Bryan says. “The only wild card is
defense. But weÂ’re on the northern border with Canada. Who
the hell is gonna bother us?”

In Vermont,
Bryan says, there is “a commonality of people opposed to large
distant bureaucracies telling them how to live their lives. ItÂ’s
the decentralist commonality of the libertarian right and what IÂ’d
call the communitarian left. The right opposes big government, the
left opposes big business. ItÂ’s really about governing on a
human scale.”

As Bryan notes,
Vermont has radical genes, a history rife with alternative thinking.
Ethan Allen fought against the British Crown as fiercely as he would
fight the Americans. Vermont under Allen produced, in 1777, the
first constitution in English to outlaw slavery and allow citizens
without property to vote. Nearly two centuries later, Scott Nearing
chose Vermont to escape what he called “the American Oligarchy,
the American Way of Life, the American Century, the American Empire.”
When he published Living the Good Life in 1954, it became a touchstone
for the first generation of the simple-living movement, the hippies
and Luddites who in the 1960s flooded into the state to follow NearingÂ’s
example. Vermont went almost overnight from a right-wing backwater
to a leftist mecca that eventually put in office AmericaÂ’s
only avowedly socialist senator, Bernie Sanders.

Another college
professor, Thomas Naylor, who in 1993 had retired to a village near
Burlington after 30 years of teaching economics at Duke University,
took up BryanÂ’s idea of secession. In 2003, he founded a think
tank and citizensÂ’ network called Second Vermont Republic,
its purpose to oppose “the tyranny of the United States government,
Corporate America, and globalization.” Second Vermont Republic
would soon have several hundred members. “The time has come,”
Naylor wrote in his 2008 book, Secession, “for us peacefully
to rebel against the American empire [by] regaining control of our
lives from big government, big business, big cities, big schools,
and big computer networks.”

Naylor, who
died at the age of 76 last December, was a native Mississippian,
raised in Jackson in a family of what he described as inveterate
racists. Revolting against the South of his forefathers, he had
founded in 1969, with future Tennessee Attorney General Mike Cody,
the L.Q.C. Lamar Society, whose purpose was to promote, as Naylor
wrote, a “humane civilization” in a new South that had
shaken off slavery, racism, and segregation but perhaps would keep
something of the civility, the courtoisie of the Old South –
its slowness, its opposition to hurried industrialism and the quick
buck. The Lamar Society found its lineage in the Southern Agrarians
of the 1930s, led by poet John Crowe Ransom and novelist Robert
Penn Warren. Their co-edited anthology, IÂ’ll
Take My Stand
, featured some of the SouthÂ’s greatest
living writers denouncing the “convulsions of a predatory and
decadent capitalism.” “The latter-day societies,”
Ransom wrote, “have been seized – none quite so violently
as our American one – with the strange idea that the human
destiny is not to secure an honorable peace with nature, but to
wage an unrelenting war on nature.”

At Duke, Naylor
was known less as an economist than as co-creator, with theologian
William Willimon, of a popular freshman course, “The Search
for Meaning.” He taught Camus, Kafka, Tolstoy, Faulkner, Erich
FrommÂ’s To
Have or To Be?
and Ernest BeckerÂ’s The
Denial of Death
, among others. When he arrived in Vermont,
he found in the far North what he had loved about the Old South:
life “lived at a slower, more deliberate, more casual pace.”
He wrote of “the classic red barns, the covered bridges, the
picturesque patchwork pattern of small farms, black-and-white Holsteins,
tiny villages, little rivers, ridges, hollows, and dirt roads.”
There were “no cities, no big buildings, few shopping malls,
no military bases, few big businesses.” Vermont, as Naylor
saw it, was not only tiny and rural and beautiful. It was humane.

Naylor became
the face of Vermont secession. His friends said that with his longish
white hair, his bald spot at the crown, his jowls, red cheeks, and
horn-rimmed glasses, he resembled Ben Franklin. On cable news and
on NPR he carried the banner. During an interview with the Iranian
state television network in 2009, wearing his usual forest-green
suit-coat and green dress shirt to honor Vermont as the Green Mountain
State, Naylor assured the Iranians, who were glad to hear an American
inveigh against the Great Satan, that the U.S. was “owned and
operated by corporate America and Wall Street.” He was joined
on the program by the head of a Texas secessionist group called
the Texas Nationalist Movement; both men agreed that they did not
want to be part of the same nation. Naylor had issued similar proclamations
while on Fox News with Bill OÂ’Reilly, who offered him bus fare
to Canada. Once, Naylor attempted to hold a meaningful conversation
with Glenn Beck, an experience he described as “mentally debilitating.”

He wanted to
lead his movement beyond the confines of the political left and
right. “What liberals and conservatives have in common,”
Naylor told me last fall, “is that they are both all about
bigness and power – big government, big business. They are
about owning, possessing, controlling and manipulating money, people,
material wealth.” Barack Obama, he said, is George W. Bush
with a tan and diction and without the smirk. The “socialist”
senator from Vermont, Bernie Sanders, is a “prostitute of empire”
and a “collaborationist,” because he took no firm stand
against war and defense appropriations. National security was a
shared delusion in service of homicide. “Left or right,”
Naylor asked, “who wants to be associated with such a shabby
creature as the United States?”

In 2007, after
seeing him on Fox News, a fifth-generation Vermonter named Dennis
Steele, the son of working-class parents in the stateÂ’s remote
Northeast Kingdom, wrote Naylor that he wanted to join the secessionist
cause. Steele had served in the U.S military, was tall and burly
and handsome, wore Carhartts, drove a pickup truck, drank maple
syrup for breakfast, and hunted deer for his meat. A master at chess,
he had founded a successful website, Chessmaniac.com. At NaylorÂ’s
urging, Steele declared his candidacy for governor in the 2010 race.
“The gods of the empire,” went his campaign slogan, cribbed
from Ethan Allen, “are not the gods of Vermont.” The eight
other candidates on the secession ticket that year included a car
salesman for Subaru, a former ACLU executive who had worked in the
New York Legislature, a businessman in solar energy, and an ex-Army
lieutenant who had been court-martialed for resisting the Vietnam
War. “For the first time in over 150 years,” Naylor announced
at a press conference for the ticket, “secession and political
independence from the U.S. will be front and center in a statewide
New England political campaign.”

Steele polled
less than 1 percent. Naylor was embittered and exhausted. “I’ve
been at this for close to seven years. Print promotion. Telephone
calls. Money. I’m tired,” he told me. At the secession
conference in Montpelier, Rob Williams had introduced Naylor as
the “reason most of us are in this room.” But privately,
Naylor wondered whether his approach to taking on the empire had
been wrong all along. “I may have made a fundamental strategic
error in bringing secession north,” he said. “The paradigm
was what I knew growing up in the Deep South, the language of secession,
the process of secession that the South championed.” Three
months later, he was dead.

In the summer
of 2010, I rented a room at a tiny Vermont boardinghouse called
the Gather-ing Inn, in the town of Hancock at the foothills of the
Green Mountains. The proprietor, a mirthful 67-year-old named Kathleen
Byrne, had hosted three Vermont independence fund-raisers in recent
years. “God, can’t we just leave already?” she said
when I asked her about secession. “It feels so right.”
On her property she kept chickens and tended fruit trees and a vegetable
garden that fed the household and guests. She had a greenhouse for
year-round production. It was a modest kind of independence, she
said, meaningful because it was palpable.

A few days
later, during the July 4 parade in Montpelier, I followed about
two dozen secessionists – Thomas Naylor and Rob Williams leading
the pack – as they carried a banner that said “200 Years
Is Long Enough” and tossed copies of Vermont Commons
into the crowd. Behind the secessionists were the Shriners in their
go-karts and funny hats, and in front was a tall red, white, and
blue layer-cake truck float representing the interests of Community
National Bank, whose employees were dressed as Betsy Ross, Lady
Liberty, and George Washington. I asked Washington, whose real name
is Steve Gurin, bank vice president, what he thought about the gang
of “seceshers” lurking behind him. Gurin laughed mightily,
then peppered me with accusatory questions that were by now familiar:
Where would revenues come from? How would we survive? “We’d
be all alone,” Gurin said. “We can’t eat snow!”

I had often
asked Naylor about these legitimate concerns. He wasnÂ’t interested
in sweating the details of the divorce. “I imagine a free Vermont
would be very much like the old Vermont,” he said, “except
that we wouldnÂ’t be involved in murdering women and children
and supporting the empire.” What kind of currency would the
new republic use? “Oh, we’d stick with the dollar, or
perhaps go with the euro, or the Canadian loony.” What about
Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, or the infrastructure
currently funded by the federal government – the bridges, the
roads, the interstate highways? Free Vermont would figure it out
in the fullness of time. The state would get to keep its $2 billion
per capita share of the cost of imperial upkeep and war-making,
Naylor said, but Vermont would owe the federal government for the
takeover of U.S.–owned property. It would owe its share of
the national debt. It would face as well questions about the legality
of secession. Nowhere in the Constitution is secession prohibited,
Naylor said, and the colonist-rebels of the 1770s did not seek permission
from the Crown to leave. They just did it.

That afternoon,
when the parade was over, I visited Williams at his yak farm outside
the town of Waitsfield in the Mad River Valley. The yaks lowed and
moaned, and Williams, who is tall and lanky and fast-moving, carried
a long wooden staff to herd them along a green hillside that seemed
to steam from the summer heat. The independent Vermont, as Williams
described it, would not descend into autarky. It would not shut
the borders, stop trade. The idea was first to practice more independence
where practical. If secession from the U.S. were not possible, its
proponents would find other ways to secede from the corporatocracy.
“The three legs of functional independence are food, fuel,
and finance,” Williams said. “Given peak oil, it might
be smart to think of how to lessen dependence on energy-wasteful
and socially wasteful systems. More food and more energy produced
locally – which is to say independently. More local banks for
local credit and capital for local food and energy production.”

We herded the
yaks down the hill to the evening pasture near the barn, closed
up the gates, and ate dinner: yak steaks and produce from his garden.
A yak, Williams told me over our meal, consumes less grass per acre
per animal than a cow and ends up producing the same amount of nutritional
energy. This was independence meat at the end of my fork.

The next day,
to stave off the terrible humidity, we went for a swim in the Mad
River, climbing a path through pines to a series of ledges where
kids were leaping into the emerald water. We got to talking about
the concept of the commons, which is central to WilliamsÂ’s
notion of economic independence. He motioned at the water, at the
sunlight, the air, the tall trees: “This is the commons.”
The idea dates back to Roman civil law, codified in the Institutes
of Justinian, which stated that “by the law of nature these
things are common to all mankind – the air, running water,
the sea.” Who owned the water we swam in, and together shared
with the kids? No one and everyone.

How to measure
it as a social good was the question Williams and others in the
movement had been asking. Under current law, the value of the commons
was not assessed to benefit Vermonters. In a 2008 study, secession
advocate Gary Flomenhoft, a research associate professor of ecological
economics at the University of Vermont, found that a system of fees,
taxes, and other measures imposed on common resources – such
as timber, spring water, and minerals – could raise $1.2 billion
in state revenue. Vermont was a resource colony. Its hydroelectric
energy plants, producing power for export, were controlled by Canadian
shell corporations. Its timber was shipped to China so that residents
could buy back shoddy furniture on credit. Most of VermontÂ’s
milk was exported, its cheese churned and packaged out of state.
Its drinking water, worth hundreds of millions of dollars but handed
over to Nestlé and Coca-Cola for a fraction of its worth,
was bottled in other states and sold back to Vermonters at twice
the price of gasoline.

The first step
toward functional independence, then, was to secure the commons
for the people of Vermont. The secessionists had helped to draft
legislation toward that end, House Bill 385, which would have established
a Vermont common-assets trust to set limits on the use of those
assets and assess user fees in the form of resource rent. The bill,
introduced in 2011, defined the commons in broadest terms: “undisturbed
habitats, entire ecosystems, biological diversity, waste absorption
capacity, nutrient cycling, flood control, pollination, raw materials,
fresh water replenishment systems, soil formation systems, and the
global atmosphere.” The law stipulated that resource rent –
presumably as much as $1.2 billion, a quarter of the stateÂ’s
operating budget – would go toward health care, public libraries,
education, “start-up grants” for Vermonters reaching the
age of 18, and a citizen dividend similar to the payout Alaskans
receive from oil revenues under the Alaska Permanent Fund. Rob Williams
described House Bill 385 as “revolutionary stuff.”

A few months
after the Montpelier conference, Williams invited me to attend a
strategy meeting of the ten-member board of Vermont Commons, a nonprofit
citizens cooperative. The board included a software consultant to
Oracle named Robert Wagner; a marketing expert named Gaelan Brown,
who was employed with the nonprofit 1% for the Planet; Flomenhoft,
the principal author of the Vermont common-assets bill; and a housewife
named Juliet Buck, who edited the Vermont Commons website.
The subject of the meeting, which took place around a meal of string
beans, feta cheese, and wine at BuckÂ’s house, was the food-fuel-finance
triad.

“My people
in Addison County are in survival mode,” said Wagner, who had
run for a seat in the state senate in 2010, lost badly, and was
running again in 2012. “They know what’s wrong with capitalism.
TheyÂ’re hungry for something to do about it. What does independence
mean?”

They talked
about preparing for a transition society, a “Vermont lifeboat.”
They talked about the portent of climate change in Hurricane Irene,
which devastated wide sections of Vermont. They cited lines from
a Wendell Berry poem, “The Mad Farmer, Flying the Flag of Rough
Branch, Secedes from the Union”:

From the
union of self-gratification and self-Annihilation
Secede into the care for one another
And for the good gifts of Heaven and Earth.

They talked
about food sovereignty. Vermont imports 95 percent of its food,
but the secessionists vowed they could invert that figure, producing
tens of thousands of new farm and food-distribution jobs and 75
percent of all Vermont food in-state. They offered a litany of reforms:
End price pressure on Vermont agriculture by removing the tax incentives
and subsidies currently extended to those who speculate on agricultural
land. End the federal regulations that burden small-scale raw milk
and bread producers and those agrarians who survive by on-farm animal
slaughter, processing, and distribution. Invest in regional centers
for composting and food processing.

Vermont imports
100 percent of its fossil fuels, including $700 million a year in
propane and heating oil. Gaelan Brown told me that the 250,000 homes
in the state could be heated entirely with wood, using 1.2 million
cords annually from a renewable supply of 117 million standing cords
in VermontÂ’s forests. He calculated that Vermont could produce
some 70 percent of its electricity by 2020 through a combination
of solar, wind, biomass, and hydropower. The state, Brown said,
was already positioned for local energy production: upwards of 30
percent of schoolchildren – more than any other state –
attended schools heated with locally sourced wood chips, which had
cut fuel costs by 50 percent. Vermont was a leader in renewable
energy. It was the only state that had attempted (albeit without
success) to wrest control of nuclear power plant relicensing from
the federal government.

The secessionists
also envision a near-interest-free banking and credit system through
a state bank along the lines of the state-owned Bank of North Dakota.
A state-run bank, writes Hartwick College research scholar Adrian
Kuzminski in Vermont Commons, would “provide low-interest
capital to citizens [while] breaking the monopoly by private usurious
lenders.” Legislators floated a bill in 2011 to study the feasibility
of a publicly owned bank. The bank bill awaits a committee hearing.

The urtext
of the Vermont independence movement is E.F. SchumacherÂ’s 1973
book Small
Is Beautiful: A Study of Economics as if People Mattered
.
It was the product of SchumacherÂ’s experience in the 1950s
as the chief economist at the British National Coal Board, when
he came to the quite reasonable – but at the time unthinkable
– conclusion that energy supply, including the coal that Great
Britain was so ravenously burning up, could not satisfy unlimited
growth. Growth for growthÂ’s sake, Schumacher concluded, was
a suicide pact with planet Earth. We couldnÂ’t just keep growing.
New paradigms were necessary. He offered a “Buddhist Economics,”
a middle path to develop economies along Buddhist principles, with
“a new direction to technological development, a direction
that shall lead it back to the real needs of man, and that also
means: to the actual size of man.” He wrote:

Production
from local resources for local needs is the most rational way
of economic life, while dependence on imports from afar and the
consequent need to produce for export to unknown and distant peoples
is highly uneconomic. Â… The Buddhist economist would hold
that to satisfy human wants from faraway sources rather than from
sources nearby signifies failure rather than success.

In Vermont,
you can see an inchoate Buddhist economics. It is happening outside
the purview of government, beyond the stamp of lawmakers. ItÂ’s
there on Rob WilliamsÂ’s yak farm as he wraps hay bales into
his barn for feed and packs yak burgers for sale at his stall at
the Waitsfield Farmers Market. ItÂ’s there in the Vermont Sustainable
Exchange, a system of credit among Vermont businesses. It can be
found, secessionists say, in the fact that Vermont has the most
organic farmland in use per capita of any state, the most widespread
locavore food movement in America, the largest “sustainability
focused” association of local businesses, the most microbrews
and brewpubs per capita of any state. You can see it in businesses
and organizations like Vermont Family Forests, the Vermont Land
Trust, and the Biomass Energy Resource Center.

I asked writer
and activist Bill McKibben, a neighbor of Robert WagnerÂ’s in
Addison County – they live down the road from each other in
the village of Ripton – what he thought of these Schumacherite
models in practice, given the resource shocks that Vermont can expect
in coming years. “Small and distributed will fare better than
centralized and oversized,” he said. “Places with strong
communities will fare better than others – the wake of Irene
demonstrated powerfully that simple fact.”

Yet it seemed
to me the secessionists were demanding a shift that went beyond
mere re-localizing, and this was the historic challenge they presented.
Growth for growthÂ’s sake is a suicidal delusion, the seceshers
were telling us. The solution is relative austerity, which implies
a life lived within our means. The American Dream, in other words,
would have to die, and Americans would have to do the killing. But
this language runs against the grain of the entire Euro-American
experiment. It is the language of scarcity, and by their honest
speech I wondered if the seceshers would hang themselves.

Still, resource
stress is not some oddball fantasy. “Historically speaking,”
Morris Berman told me, “it’s the last 200 years of industrial
expansion and uncontrolled fossil-fuel consumption that have been
aberrant – sort of like a drunken sailor out on the town. Really,
what are the choices at this point? Sustainable society or no society
at all.”

Toward this
end – a sustainable society that is also politically realistic
– Kirkpatrick Sale, no small fan of Schumacher, suggests a
middle path: Vermont, embracing the doctrine of statesÂ’ rights,
might pursue nullification of federal laws that go against its interest
as a transition society. StatesÂ’ rights would no longer be
the exclusive province of the gun nuts and anti-abortionists. “Vermont
won’t secede,” Sale says. “It’s just not happening.
Yet, as a decentralist, I do appreciate the move toward independence
in as many spheres as you can. WeÂ’re likely to see more examples
of nullification than secession. Look at whatÂ’s been nullified
so far. Real-ID is virtually dead because itÂ’s been nullified.
Marijuana laws in the states have effectively nullified federal
prohibition laws. With Obamacare, states are just not setting up
their own statewide exchanges.

“The more
serious Vermont gets about being self-sufficient, the more they
might run up against federal regulations. ThatÂ’s a good way
to go – to see if they have power to nullify. Because ultimately
when you combine all the powers to nullify, you come up with secession.”

On the day
before the balloting last November 6, secessionist candidate Robert
Wagner went looking for votes in the village of Hancock. When he
rang at one of the homes, an old man came to the door and told the
candidate that his nephew had been killed in Afghanistan. “We
get sucked into these wars halfway around the world, when thereÂ’s
no sense to it,” said the man. “It’s not about terrorism.
ItÂ’s all about the oil. These people in D.C. are not thinking
about their own people. Maybe weÂ’d be better off as our own
country.”

Wagner, being
wary of the word when door-knocking, hadnÂ’t mentioned secession.
“I don’t push it,” he told me. “I’ll let
them get there themselves.”

Wagner described
to me what had happened when Hurricane Irene hit Hancock in 2011.
The White River rose, swept away entire homes, and disinterred the
corpses in nearby cemeteries. A wall of water out of the mountains
shredded Route 100, leaving 20-foot canyons, isolating the village.
National Guard helicopters were slow to arrive. The Federal Emergency
Management Agency was nowhere to be seen. The residents held potluck
dinners and planning sessions by candlelight, deputized a leadership,
heaved pebbles and gravel in backhoes to begin the repair of the
roads – they had no permits to do so – and sent emissaries
on foot to outlier settlements, checking on the old and the infirm.
Rick Gottesman, who lives with Kathleen Byrne at her inn and who
told me he was a “quiet secessionist,” wrote about Irene
in an e-mail: “There was palpable pride in the town and its
people and a distinct we-ainÂ’t-waitinÂ’-for-no-gubmint
attitude. With rivers bursting with water, forests full of firewood,
abundant gardens and most of all each other, we could have easily
continued for several more weeks and longer.”

A week after
the ballots were counted, I called Wagner to get the results. He
had lost for the second time. But he had snagged 18 percent of his
district – more than four times his votes in 2010 – and
had won the village of Hancock. He vowed to run again in 2014.

Reprinted
from
The
American Prospect

with permission from the author
.

March
27, 2013

Christopher
Ketcham [send him mail]
has written for HarperÂ’s, Vanity Fair, GQ, and many other magazines.
He is currently working on a book about a secessionist movement
in Vermont. More of his work is available at ChristopherKetcham.com.

Copyright ©
2013 The American Prospect