Since its inception in 2003 the Second Vermont Republic has been calling for the peaceable return of Vermont to its rightful status as an independent republic and for the peaceable dissolution of the American Empire. Over time two quite different paradigms have evolved as to how Vermont independence might be achieved. One is very similar to the small-is-beautiful, back-to-the-land, sustainable living, radical anti-imperialism paradigm embraced by political activists Scott and Helen Nearing between 1932 and 1952 when they were living in Jamaica, Vermont. The other, promoted by environmental activist Bill McKibben, holds that political independence is unachievable without first achieving agricultural and energy independence. We shall examine each.
The Nearing Paradigm
The fundamental premise underlying the Second Vermont Republic is that the United States government has become the largest, wealthiest, most powerful, most materialistic, most racist, most militaristic, most violent empire of all times. It has lost its moral authority and is unsustainable and unfixable. Therefore, the only morally defensible response for a state like Vermont is peaceable secession.
The six Communist regimes in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union were all brought down by a common nonviolent strategy, namely by demonstrating unequivocally that the leaders of these regimes had lost their moral authority. The Communist government of Poland was not toppled in 1989 by Solidarity leader Lech Walesa whispering sweet nothings in the ear of President Wojciech Jaruzelski. Rather it, as well as the five other Eastern European Communist governments, was brought down by a sophisticated mixture of confrontation, negotiation, and testing of limits spread out over several years. Ultimately it was a question of political will. The political will of the people trumped the will of the government to stay in power. The emperor was found to have no clothes both in the Soviet Union as well as in its Eastern European satellites.
If SVR is to prevail, it must challenge the moral authority of the U.S. government. It must confront the lack of moral authority of the Vermont Congressional delegation – Senator Patrick Leahy, Senator Bernie Sanders, and Congressman Peter Welch and their collaborators in the Democratic and Progressive parties in Vermont.
On 6 August 1945, the day the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, Scott Nearing wrote to President Harry S. Truman that “your government is no longer mine.” A few years later in his book The Conscience of a Radical, he said, “My conscience is aroused, outraged, and anguished by the dangerous drift of mankind toward self-destruction, and by the satanic role which the United States is playing in the fateful drama. I have no choice in the matter – I must speak out.” And speak out he did.
What differentiated Scott and Helen Nearing from contemporary environmentalists, simple living proponents, and back-to-the-land advocates was their commitment to radical politics aimed squarely at the American Empire. All too many Vermont downshifters and newly minted agrarians overlook the fact that the American Empire is currently engaged in the implementation of a series of military horrors including full spectrum dominance, nuclear primacy, the right of pre-emptive strike, the militarization of space, and imperial overstretch. Simple living may make one feel good, but it really doesn’t do a whole lot to curtail the influence of the Empire and its use of high-tech death machines.
Not unlike the Nearings, supporters of the Second Vermont Republic subscribe to the following eight beliefs: political independence, human scale, sustainability, economic solidarity (buying locally), power sharing, equal opportunity, tension reduction, and community.
The Nearings may have lived simply, sustainably, and ascetically, but wimps they were not. They spent their entire adult lives actively confronting the materialism, the injustices, the racism, the militarism, and the violence of the American Empire.
Above all, there was a sense of urgency associated with the Nearings’ concern about the Empire – a sense of urgency that is conspicuously absent in the McKibben paradigm.
The McKibben Paradigm
Globe trotting, self-promoting, evangelical environmentalist Bill McKibben has convinced thousands of would be Vermont secessionists that agricultural and energy independence are necessary conditions for achieving political independence. Nothing could be farther from the truth.
First, Japan, the second largest economy in the world, literally imports every drop of oil that it consumes as well as most of its food. Second, of the two hundred or so independent nation states, only a handful are both energy and agriculturally independent. Third, the chances of Vermont ever becoming self-sufficient in food and energy are virtually nil. Vermont’s short summer growing season precludes the possibility of agricultural self-sufficiency. We currently import half of our electric energy. If Vermont Yankee is shut down, that percentage will increase dramatically.
Since Mr. McKibben, an American loyalist, is not an economist, he makes the common mistake of equating secession with economic isolationism. What he is really asking is, “Where will Vermont get its food and energy, if it secedes?” And the answer is, “Presumably from the same sources that it currently does.”
Extensive trade with countries outside the United States is a very important aspect of the Vermont economy. Imports amount to around $3 billion annually and exports are a little less than that amount. Per capita exports in Vermont are the third highest in the nation behind Washington and Texas. Over 600 firms export nearly twenty-five percent of Vermont’s gross state product, the value of goods and services produced in the state, which is the highest in the nation, and the rate of exports has been growing in recent years. There is no reason why this pattern should not continue after Vermont splits with the United States. While the U.S. government might try to impose a trade embargo on a seceded Vermont, it seems quite unlikely that Canada would abide by it, since Canada is Vermont’s leading trading partner. Canada never honored the American imposed embargoes on either China or Cuba.
A free and independent Vermont could trade with whomever it pleased. It might belong to a trade and economic compact similar to the European Union involving other independent states. Vermont would not necessarily have to have its own currency. For example, tiny Liechtenstein uses the Swiss franc and Ecuador the U.S. dollar. Vermont could simply adopt the Canadian or the U.S. dollar or possibly the currency of Quebec or New York, if either was independent and had its own currency.
Under the influence of McKibben, many simple living, back-to-the-land practitioners have become so self-absorbed and complacent with their newfound ideology that they overlook the fact that the world is still going to hell in a handbasket. They fail to note that the American Empire continues to bear the primary responsibility for the deaths of thousands in places like Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Palestine, to mention only a few places. Buying locally may make one feel good, but it really doesn’t do a whole lot to curtail the influence of the Empire. One’s tax dollars are still used to purchase the Pentagon’s high-tech instruments of death.
Although simple living, localvore, conservation, and back-to-the-land are all worthwhile activities, they may also be forms of escapism, alternatives to confronting the American Empire.
Mr. McKibben should spend more time at home familiarizing himself with the evils perpetrated by his own country and less time traveling around the world trying to persuade others to reduce their carbon emissions. After all, it is we who produce twenty-five percent of the world’s carbon emissions.
So feckless are McKibben’s arguments against secession that he and some of his friends like John Odum and Carl Etnier have to resort to playing the racism card against SVR. Odum, a staff member of the Vermont Natural Resources Council, runs a political blog which, in an act of utter desperation, accuses SVR of racism. Etnier does the same on a weekly Goddard College radio show.
But the real tragedy of all of this is that SVR’s sister publication, Vermont Commons, completely embraces the McKibben paradigm. Vermont Commons editor/publisher Rob Williams not only provides McKibben and Etnier with a media platform from which to disseminate their anti-secessionist venom, but he refers to McKibben as “Vermont’s most prominent intellectual.” That’s a bit much.
The American Empire of which Mr. McKibben is so fond is going down, but he doesn’t know it. If he gets off of our case, we will gladly save him a place in the Republic.
Rebél
Thomas H. Naylor
September 22, 2009
