Conscious Choice: Influx Redux

April 2000 | Citizen at Large

Influx Redux

by Jay Walljasper

In 1936, Vermont was one of only two American states to reject President Franklin Roosevelt’s reelection bid and throw its support to the Republican party. By snubbing the large-scale liberal reforms of Roosevelt’s New Deal program, this corner of New England earned a reputation for conservatism as solid as the state’s famous granite stone.

Now, more than sixty years later, Vermont sports some of America’s strongest environmental and historic preservation laws. It was one of the first states to elect a liberal woman governor and now sends an outspoken socialist to Washington as its sole member of the House of Representatives.

What happened? Some political observers point to how Vermont has changed, especially after a steady influx of idealistic young people wanting to live closer to the land. Bernie Sanders, the socialist whom Vermont voters have elected to Congress five times as an independent, moved to the state from New York City in the 1960s.

Yet it’s possible that Vermont has changed a lot less than the shape of American politics. Old-fashioned New England virtues like conserving resources and solving problems at the local level are now voiced more often by the left than by conservatives.

As one of the least populated and most rural states in the union, Vermont has always conducted its political business on an informal basis. This is the home of those fabled New England town meetings, where citizens of a community still gather at the town hall or schoolhouse once a year to make many of the decisions affecting their lives. Doing things on a small scale is at the heart of Vermont life.

During the 1930s, Vermonters were skeptical of Franklin Roosevelt’s ambitious New Deal programs, which proposed to revive the American economy with massive projects carried out on a national level. They wondered what would happen to their communities under the weight of government programs implemented in an assembly line fashion. And they suspected that the social engineers down in Washington looked upon rural areas like Vermont as backward and in need of an injection of modern progress.

Vermonters still worry that the comforts of their home might be trampled by outside forces. But now the chief threat comes not from government planners, but from big business. The state’s citizens have seen how chain stores, shopping malls, and unchecked business development rip away at the fabric of local communities, destroy the natural beauty of the region, and suck wealth out of the state.

In response, Vermont has enacted laws that are firm in their protection of the natural environment and local landscapes. Montpelier, the state’s capital, recently rejected McDonald’s plans to open a downtown outlet. Developers proposing new housing developments or shopping malls must show that their projects won’t put a strain on existing neighborhoods or ecosystems. These are the sorts of regulations opposed by the new Reagan-style conservatives, who rail against anything that restricts the activities of corporations. Yet a lot of old-time Vermonters, who once thought of themselves as conservatives, support these measures in the hopes of protecting their familiar way of life.

Vermont’s transformation from conservative backwater to liberal bastion pinpoints one of the great ironies of American politics today: Conservatives, by-and-large, are not interested in conserving things. That role now belongs to progressive activists, who champion protecting the environment, saving wilderness, preserving historical areas, maintaining the vitality of urban neighborhoods, reviving family farms, and keeping traditional communities intact.

Conservatives, on the other hand, zealously promote the restless, relentless machinations of the modern economy. They may occasionally offer a nostalgic appreciation of small town friendliness or old-fashioned family values but their economic and social policies are calculated to tear down anything that stands in the way of expanding corporate profits.

Traditional patterns of life in a small place such as Vermont, where people still want to make the decisions that affect their lives, pose an obstacle to the modern capitalist economy. Conservatives view all human activity as opportunities for corporations to market new goods and services. Community pastimes like visiting the public library or helping an elderly neighbor with chores jeopardize the profit potential of mall bookstores and nursing home chains. Vermont’s old-fashioned way of life clashes with conservatives’ vision of a bigger and bigger economy with more and more consumer goods as the one and only ticket to the good life.

Yet in the realm of mainstream party politics, efforts by the Democrats to preserve environmental quality and restore a sense of community to American life are hobbled by their refusal to challenge the sacredness of economic growth and the power of corporations. Bill Clinton and Al Gore are almost as willing as the Republicans to sacrifice almost anything in the name of a booming economy. They have been ardent advocates of international free trade deals and the genetic engineering industry, despite mounting concern about what price people and ecosystems will pay for these economic breakthroughs.

Farther to the left, activist groups and new political formations like the Greens and the New Party are more consistent in their embrace of environmental and community issues. Yet, as author Charles Siegel points out in his book The Preservationist Manifesto (Northbrae Books, 2140 Shattuck Avenue, Suite 2122, Berkeley, CA 94704 USA), the left still suffers from a certain political schizophrenia when it comes to questions about scale and sustainability.

Although once noted for their zeal in bulldozing urban neighborhoods to make way for huge blocks of concrete apartment buildings and for flooding agricultural communities in order to build hydroelectric dams, the left in America and Western Europe have learned the limits of thinking big. This is due, in part, to seeing the sorry mess created by massively-scaled development projects in the former communist states of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. Nowadays most progressive activists understand that part of their mission is to stop similarly massively-scaled debacles being thrust upon on us under capitalism: nuclear power plants, huge livestock operations, irrigation projects, new highways.

Yet Siegel warns that progressives have not yet learned this lesson in the realm of social issues. They still push for big bureaucracies to dispense health care, child care, and education. These institutions do the same kind of damage to traditional community life as slum clearance projects and motorways did to urban neighborhoods. People do not want to trust their health or their children to large, impersonal agencies that deal with them as clients rather than as human beings. That is why Bill and Hillary Clinton’s plans for national health care garnered so little public support; not because people opposed the idea of universal health care but because they were scared of the massive managed care machine that was being proposed.

Conservatives win many elections based on people’s fear that liberal programs will leave them merciless before faceless bureaucracies. Siegel argues that the left needs to abandon large-scale social engineering schemes just as they’ve repudiated large-scale development projects. To win the hearts and votes of everyday Americans, they need to challenge the fundamental problems created by the modern capitalist economy. "Rather than demanding more daycare and schooling to help families conform to the economy," he writes, "the left should be demanding radical changes in the growth economy to make it work for families. . . .[They should] talk about limiting growth to give parents the time to take care of their own children."

Rather than pressing for more big government programs, which will depend on more economic growth to fund them, Siegel says that left activists should seek small-scale, informal solutions to social problems. They should push corporations to offer their workers more flexible schedules and shorter workweeks, and help set up community clinics where people can receive quality health care from doctors and alternative health care providers that they can come to trust. Once the left understands these things, perhaps Vermont won’t be the only state sending socialists to Congress.

Siegel adds that the labels left and right themselves, passed down from the French Revolution when insurgents were challenging the entrenched power of the throne, no longer make sense in today’s political picture. Leftists once embraced modernization as a way out of royal tyranny. But now modernization, with its multinational corporations and dangerous technologies, has become a new form of tyranny that must be challenged. Siegel suggests that the politics of the future will be a debate between the modernizers and the preservationists, with left activists finding themselves on the same side as many former conservatives struggling to preserve traditional community life, the environment, and the idea that problems are best solved close to home.

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