The Vermont Manifesto: The Second Vermont Republic

By Thomas H. Naylor

Not unlike other states, Vermonts quality of life, political independence, and sustainability are threatened by Corporate America, the U.S. government, the war on terrorism, homeland security, American imperialism, and globalization. This is a call for Vermont to reclaim its soul to return to its rightful status as an independent republic as it once was between 1777 and 1791. In so doing, Vermont can provide a kinder, gentler, more communitarian metaphor for a nation obsessed with money, power, size, speed, greed, and fear of terrorism. Long live the Second Republic of Vermont.

Reviews

Vermont Manifesto is a serious examination of our God given right of self governance and that rights implication for secession. Dr. Naylor has made a persuasive case of the identical response to todays train of abuses that lead the Founders to secede from King Georges tyranny.

--Walter E. Williams
John M. Olin Distinguished Professor of Economics,
George Mason University

In 1991 the Soviet Union was peacefully dissolved by the secession of 15 states. It had become simply too large and centralized. So has the American Union. Thoughtful people from every side of the political spectrum are beginning to realize that the only check to the tyranny, insecurity, and spirit numbing mass culture that continued centralization would bring is to seriously consider breaking the American empire up into alternative unions and/or smaller polities. Professor Naylor is part of this debate, and has made a compelling case that little Vermont would be better off out of the Union than in it.
--Donald W. Livingston
Professor of Philosophy,
Emory University

I must assure you of my pleasure in, and approval of, your views on the Second Vermont Republic. The assertion by Vermonters of a sensible foreign policy is wonderfully to the good. You have my agreement and my admiration.

--John Kenneth Galbraith
Retired Harvard Economist

In the idea of the three American states ultimate independence, whether separately or in union, I see nothing fanciful, and nothing towards the realization of which the efforts of enlightened people might not be usefully directed. It is, to my mind, neither fanciful nor unjustified for us to
hold in mind at this time the whole problem of the future development of the relationship with the northern parts of this country and their immediate Canadian neighbors.

--George F. Kennan
Former Ambassador to Russia
and Professor Emeritus, Institute
for Advanced Studies, Princeton

Thomas Naylor makes a powerful case for an independent Vermont. I think folks may soon be ready to consider the kind of wise and humane radicalism he recommends.

--Bill Kauffman
Author of Dispatches from
The Muckdog Gazette

There are very few radical thinkers. Thomas Naylor is one of the most courageous of these. Distinguished, deeply moral, genius wild man.

--Carolyn Chute
Author of The Beans of Egypt, Maine, Merry Men and Snow Man

Tom Naylor makes a serious case for an independent Vermont, a Second Vermont Republic that could immediately enter the world of nations and thereby begin the peaceful, democratic, and indeed moral process of disuniting the United States.

--Frank Bryan
University of Vermont Professor
and Author of Real Democracy

From the standpoint of puppeteers and their subversive papiermch, the Vermont Second Republic sounds like a very good idea to fight the megalomania of the globalizers.

--Peter Schumann
Founder, Bread & Puppet Theater

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Oct 7, 2003
• ISBN: 9781465330222

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Copyright © 2003 by Thomas H. Naylor.

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Contents

PREFACE

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

APPENDIX A

APPENDIX B

APPENDIX C

Dedicated to

George E Kennan

We are, if territory and population be looked at together, one of the great countries of the world—a monster country, one might say along with such others as China, India, the recent Soviet Union, and Brazil. And there is a real question as to whether bigness in a body politic is not an evil in itself, quite aside from the policies pursued in its name.

Ambassador george f kennan

Around the cragged hill

PREFACE

As a child of the Depression, I grew up in conservative, racially segregated Jackson, Mississippi during the 40s and early 50s. As a dyed-in-the-wool contrarian, I never bought into the South Shall Rise Again movement and used to refuse to stand up when Dixie was played at Ole Miss football games. When I went away to New York City to Columbia University, I began to drift to the left and became a Kennedy-Johnson Democrat which I remained until the early 1990s.

Eor thirty years I taught economics, management science, and computer science at Duke University and consulted with Eortune 500 companies and governments in over thirty countries scattered throughout the world including the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. As a result of this experience, I became disillusioned with big business, big technology, and the governments of both the United States and the U.S.S.R. Indeed, I was struck by the similarity of the U.S. and Soviet governments rather than by their differences.

Even though I spent over twenty years working with large IBM mainframe computers, I have not touched a computer since I sold my 50-person computer software firm to a group of German investors in 1980—the happiest day of my life. I have no cell phone, no telephone answering machine, and no e-mail address and still write the old fashioned way.

My view of the Internet is not unlike Henry David Thoreau’s view of the magnetic telegraph. We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas, but Maine and Texas may have nothing important to communicate. We are eager to tunnel the Atlantic and bring the Old World nearer the New, but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad, flapping American ear will be that Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough.

In 1993 my family and I moved to Vermont in search of community. Almost from the outset, I began to have the uneasy feeling that perhaps Vermont had made a big mistake back in 1791 when it gave up its independence to become the fourteenth state in the Union. I began to speculate on what it would have been like, if Vermont had remained an independent republic as it had been between 1777 and 1791.

Much to the chagrin of some Vermonters, I began calling for Vermont independence. Some were enraged by the idea. Others ridiculed it, but most chose to ignore it.

What few Americans, including Vermonters, realize is that the series of events beginning with the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington on September 11, 2001 have completely destabilized the United States. The war on terrorism, the loss of civil liberties, the annihilation of Afghanistan, the trashing of international arms control agreements and environmental policies, the pre-emptive invasion of Iraq, and the alienation of most of our closest allies, millions of Muslims, and much of the rest of the world have left the United States very vulnerable.

Our nation has truly lost is way. America is no longer a sustainable nation-state economically, politically, socially, militarily, or environmentally. Our states have all lost their political independence. The Empire has no clothes.

The only way America can possibly save itself is by becoming smaller, less centralized, less powerful, less intrusive, less materialistic, less high-tech, less globalized, less militarized, less imperialistic, less violent, more democratic, and more responsive to the needs of individual citizens and small communities. Big corporations, big political parties, big political unions, big technology, big computer networks, big security systems, and big military are all part of the problem. They are all committed to making us all the same.

Democrats like big government, big cities, and big social welfare programs; Republicans big business, big military, big security networks, and big prisons. National and Congressional elections are bought and sold to the highest bidders.

Our states, cities, towns, and villages assume too little responsibility for the solution of their own social, economic, and political problems. Like experimental rats on an electric floor after experiencing learned helplessness from repeated shocks, many Americans sit silently and motionless on the sidelines as though frozen in time. They are all too willing to abdicate to the federal government their responsibilities for public education, criminal justice, employment, environmental protection, and social welfare.

With its unprovoked, illegal, unilateral, pre-emptive conquest of Iraq, the United States not only sacrificed its credibility and legitimacy but its moral authority. It is no longer a nation governed by the rule of law, but rather by the law of the jungle.

What are our options, if we reject American imperialism, both internal and external? We can write to our Congressman, join a peace demonstration, run for public office, pray, meditate, or peacefully rebel—rebél against the American Empire.

Is there any moral alternative for an independent-minded state such as Vermont other than reverting back to its rightful status as an independent republic as it once was between 1777 and 1791? This is a call for Vermont to reclaim its soul, and in so doing to provide a role model for the rest of the nation.

As Thomas Jefferson pointed out in the Declaration of Independence, Whenever any form of government becomes destructive, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to institute a new government.

Thanks largely to Abraham Lincoln, disunion has been viewed as a political pariah by most Americans since the Civil War. But in Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union, and Quebec it is associated with freedom, democracy, and the aspirations of the oppressed. Our government encouraged the independence of six Eastern European countries from the Soviet bloc and the breakup of the Soviet Union. When Yugoslavia began unraveling, America blinked. The Czech-Slovak split was a non-event, as was Scotland’s pullback from England.

What if self-determination were once again viewed by Americans as it was back in 1776? Suppose the notion that Just as a nation or a state has a right to form, so too does it have a right to disband, subdivide itself, or secede from a larger unit were to become as politically correct as it was in the early nineteenth century? What if the political independence movement were to become as virulent as Reaganism and Thatcherism?

Pushed to the limit, states’ rights lead not to devolution but to disunion. If a state wants to be independent of Washington, it should be free to leave the Union—an act clearly not prohibited by our Constitution.

Brilliant though the crafters of the U.S. Constitution may have been, they could not have foreseen the precipitous decline in sustainability experienced by the United States in recent years.

It’s time for the United States to begin planning its own peaceful, orderly disunion. States should be allowed to split without hassle from Washington. Megacities like New York and Los Angeles should have the right to break up or become independent city-states.

Shouldn’t tiny, idyllic Vermont lead the way? It is smaller, more rural, more democratic, less materialistic, less violent, and more egalitarian than most states. It is larger than Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, and Iceland, three of the richest countries in the world. Since Vermont has no military bases or strategic resources, it is a threat to no one.

With its plethora of small towns, small farms, small schools, and small churches Vermont shares a number of Swiss values including independence, democracy, hard work, and a strong sense of community. Hundreds of small, high value-added, socially responsible businesses work in harmony with the local environment—a kinder gentler approach to business. These firms cooperate with local governments to preserve a sense of community and environmental integrity. Unlike many transnational megacompanies, they are neither trying to destroy or take over the world nor drive local merchants out of business.

Can Vermont provide a communitarian alternative to the dehumanized, mass production, mass consumption, narcissistic American lifestyle? Might Vermont help save America from the debilitating effects of big government and big business by helping us regain control of our lives and by teaching us how to take care of ourselves again? Calvin Coolidge once thought so. If the spirit of liberty should vanish in other parts of the Union and support of our institutions should languish, it could all be replenished from the generous store held by the people of this little state of Vermont.

Although I have no illusion that Vermont will soon leave the Union, the image of tiny Vermont facing down the most powerful nation in the world is a poignant metaphor for laying bare the dehumanizing nature of American technofacism—affluenza, technomania, e-mania, megalomania, cipherism, globalization, and imperialism.

At the very least, Vermont provides a radically different alternative lifestyle for a nation obsessed with money, power, size, speed, greed, and the fear of terrorism.

When I call for Vermont to extricate itself from the American Empire, I speak only for myself. It is