The American Conservative has a write-up by Bill Kauffman on the Second Vermont Republic – a secessionist movement aimed at getting Vermont out of the U.S.A., which I’ve mentioned before (The first Vermont Republic existed from 1777 to 1791 according to the SVR’s website.).
Kauffman describes the ideological orientation of the group:
Although SVR members range from hippie greens to gun owners—and among the virtues of Vermont is that the twain do sometimes meet—[founder Thomas] Naylor describes his group’s ideological coloration as “leftish libertarian with an anarchist streak.”
The SVR lauds the principles and practices of direct democracy, local control of education and health care, small-scale farming, neighborhood enterprise, and the devolution of political power. The movement is anti-globalist and sees beauty in the small. It detests Wal-Mart, the Interstate Highway System, and a foreign policy that is “immoral, illegal, and unconstitutional.” It draws inspiration from, among others, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who in bidding farewell to his neighbors in Cavendish, Vermont, where he had lived in exile for 17 years, praised “the sensible and sure process of grassroots democracy, in which the local population solves most of its problems on its own, not waiting for the decisions of higher authorities.”
Naylor likes to say that Wal-Mart, which is “too big, too powerful, too intrusive, too mean-spirited, too materialistic, too dehumanizing, too undemocratic, too environmentally insensitive, and too unresponsive to the social, cultural, and economic needs of individual citizens and small communities,” is the American metaphor in these post-republic days. Perhaps it is. So why not a new metaphor, suggests Naylor: that of Vermont, which is “smaller, more rural, more democratic, less violent, less commercial, more egalitarian, and more independent” than its sister states?
A Thinking Reed 
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