by Ron Miller
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Adapted for this volume from an article published in Issue no. 32 • Stick Season 2009

In October 2007, the Declaration of the Second North American Secessionist Convention began by asserting “The deepest questions of human liberty and government facing our time go beyond right and left, and in fact have made the old left-right split meaningless and dead.” I would argue that the first part of this claim is undoubtedly true. The massive consolidation and expansion of power by the U.S. government during the past 150 years, which would have troubled most of the found­ers of the republic, has served the purposes of both ends of the politi­cal spectrum. Both the mainstream right and mainstream left seek to manipulate the political system to achieve their goals—economic expan­sion and globalization on the one hand, or greater social equality and economic opportunity on the other. Aside from wherever we might stand on the goals themselves, it is the extent of national power, and the enormous distance between the governing and the governed, that the critics of this system abhor, no matter whose agendas are being served.

We decentralists also come from both the right and the left; we share some basic principles, such as community, democracy, and sense of place, that “go beyond” more specific partisan agendas. Both serious conservatives and radical democrats (with a lowercase d) now agree that the “liberty” promised by the American Revolution and Constitution is deeply threatened today by the massive expansion of the powers of trans­national corporations and the federal government. All of us, regardless of our specific political and cultural preferences, have much reason to worry about the enormous control that the national government now exerts over so many aspects of society, and the enormous influence that elite institutions and cliques (corporations, lobbyists, Wall Street, think tanks, the media, and so on) wield on policymaking. Our culture, community, and liberty are being overwhelmed by this political jugger­naut that controls the economy for the benefit of corporate elites, tells us what our children must learn, oversees hundreds of military bases around the globe, and alienates millions of citizens by its heavy-handed actions.

However, the second half of the secessionist Declaration, claiming that distinctions between left and right are “meaningless and dead,” is not really accurate because genuine philosophical and cultural differ­ences do exist among us. Were we to actually free ourselves from impe­rial domination and policies imposed from above, it is clear that there would be much diversity among the communities and regions that currently comprise the United States. Our specific grievances are consid­erably, sometimes radically, different. Those on the right are bothered by different manifestations of national governance than those on the left.

On one hand, the Vermont secession movement gained traction during the Bush years because most of us were horrified and outraged by the naked imperialism of the Iraq war and every other facet of U.S. foreign policy, by the trashing of due process and other Constitutional rights embodied by the USA PATRIOT Act, by the encouragement given to war profiteers, private security forces, corporate raiders and gamblers, and other results of neoconservative rule. There is a definite libertarian streak in the Vermont approach, but, philosophically and culturally, we tend to be “progressive” on issues of civil rights, social justice, and economic fair­ness, and for us the Bush administration represented a disaster.

On the other hand, many other state sovereignty and secession move­ments that have arisen in the United States are motivated by a quite different worldview, by moral and political concerns associated with the “right.” Free marketeers and cultural conservatives, who were relatively comfortable with the Bush presidency, view the Obama Administration as a mortal enemy of American liberty and identity. The tea party move­ment and radicalization of the Republican party do not simply reflect a decentralist critique of federal power, but a deep-seated antipathy to cultural change represented by an African American president, who (at least rhetorically) calls for greater public responsibility for healthcare and economic justice, constructive international engagement, and a truly multicultural society. Aspects of Obama’s presidency that seemed most encouraging to liberals are the very causes of right-wing rebellion.

A very real cultural and political gulf separates decentralism of the left and right. For instance, the Second Southern National Congress, which met in 2009, proclaimed allegiance to a “Southern culture” that is “founded on the enduring and permanent: trust in God, family, tradition, manners, property, community, loyalty, courage, and honor.” It is not that progressives reject all these qualities out of hand, but this emphasis on the “permanent” reflects a different set of priorities from an agenda of social progress and equality, of expanding human and civil rights, of nonviolence and multiculturalism, that motivates liberal decentralists. And then there is the question of racial justice. The Congress did not explicitly mention race, but in the context of the South’s history, liberals are surely justified in wondering which “tradition” they mean.

Some progressives in Vermont have denounced the independence movement here because some of us have discussed secession with these southern—as well as equally conservative western—activists. Our critics label the southern decentralists “neoconfederates”—implying that they are inherently racist and might even bring back slavery if they could. Employing guilt by association, they suggested that we in the Vermont movement must therefore condone racism ourselves. The charge is completely erroneous. No one among the Vermont secessionists is sympathetic to racist views or policies, and their willingness to dialogue with more conservative decentralists does not blind them to such morally repugnant attitudes. The fact is that the southerners themselves have disavowed racist intentions in conversations with Vermonters as well as with journalist Bill Kauffman, who documented the emerging move­ment in Bye Bye Miss American Empire. Secession is admittedly a radical and controversial strategy, but not because it endorses any regression to Jim Crow or antebelleum racial norms.

It is true, however, that liberal decentralists, unlike conservatives, have to wrestle with the paradox that social progress has often been achieved in the United States through the expansion of federal power. Slavery and legal racial discrimination were abolished by the overwhelming force of the national government, not voluntarily by the southern states. Other achievements that the left believes improved life in this country, such as workers’ rights and child-labor legislation, food and drug safety laws, social security, banking regulations, the jurisprudence of the Warren Court, policies promoting equality and opportunity for women, and environ­mental legislation, to name a few, owe their success to federal authority. It is understandable that progressives would be alarmed by a movement that wants to curtail this authority, but the charge of “racism” is an unfor­tunate and misleading substitute for a serious, genuine dialogue about the benefits and costs of decentralizing governance in the United States. We urgently need to engage in that dialogue in these times; we need to work through the paradox of liberal decentralism.

I am myself a green/civil libertarian/progressive as well as a decen­tralist, and it troubles me to think of the Bill of Rights, environmental protection, civil rights protections, and other social and political advances now enforced by the federal government seriously compromised if that authority is dissolved. However, it troubles me even more to see the national government itself compromise those advances! Between the post-9/11 regime of surveillance, covert operations, and military inter­vention, and the relentless consolidation of corporate power (Citizens United and the “bailout” of Wall Street being recent manifestations), the U.S. government is evermore committed to an imperialist path that seri­ously jeopardizes progressive values. We are not only losing the gains made in the last century but (as the battle over our aging nuclear power plant, Vermont Yankee, so clearly demonstrates) closing off political options for challenging the corporate state as federal authority over­whelms state and local decision-making.

Decentralists—and secessionists in particular—have come to the conclusion that the costs of granting authority to distant and coercive governing bodies are now too high to tolerate or ignore. Progressives may be pleased when a New Deal or Great Society is inaugurated, but the same government, in other hands, pursues policies that are milita­ristic, tilted toward corporate interests, and threatening to civil liberties. Even a “progressive” leader obeys the logic of empire: For all his accom­plishments in the realm of social justice, Lyndon Johnson saddled the nation with the imperialist war in Vietnam. Barack Obama, the erstwhile community organizer, is hardly the “socialist” the right portrays him to be and has proved to be a good friend of the corporate and Wall Street interests that underwrite his campaigns. So we ask: Are the benefits of expansive federal authority worth the sacrifice of participatory democ­racy? The spread of military power and secret intelligence operations around the planet? The irrepressible influence of well-funded lobbyists and corporate interest groups? Do we entrust an empire to promulgate liberal values?

Furthermore, is the triumph of a progressive agenda worth the divisive pitting of region against region, one set of values against another? When one central government in Washington, D.C., amasses so much author­ity over the lives of so many people, communities, and cultures, the stakes around its policy decisions are extremely high: Large segments of the population come to believe that they cannot afford to lose. Thus we have political gridlock. The fact is that large swatches of America prefer their traditionalist culture and bitterly resent the imposition of progres­sive values by “elites” from the east and west coasts. (For a provoca­tive treatment of this cultural divide, see Chuck Thompson’s Better Off Without ’Em: A Northern Manifesto for Southern Secession.) The progressive legislation that has managed to take hold in the United States since 1900 has failed to convert southern culture or conservative populism to the version of social democracy that some of us favor. Why not let the “red” regions of America live by the values they prefer, instead of driving them into a frenzied hatred of liberalism imposed from above? The federal civil rights laws, Warren Court decisions, and other achievements of the 1960s proved to be monumental, but they provoked bitter resistance, a major political realignment that produced today’s uncompromising and solidly entrenched Republican party. The result is that progressive legis­lation is forestalled throughout the nation, even in places where it might be welcomed. It is not certain that the gains of earlier generations can be preserved in an increasingly hostile and conservative political climate. Ask organized labor.

The proliferation of sovereignty and secession movements can be seen as a signal that neither the left nor the right can tolerate the imposi­tion of the other’s agenda by a distant government controlled by inac­cessible and unaccountable elites. What is the cost to democracy when the ascendance of one side so deeply disturbs and threatens the other that civil dialogue is no longer possible? Perhaps, we suggest, it makes sense to trust local people more than the technocrats and war profiteers who run the empire. Decentralism is based on the belief that people will act more rationally, more compassionately, more democratically, when they feel that their voices matter, that the system is responsive to their concerns. True, some regions and communities will use this democratic process to choose values, practices, and policies that other communities disdain. As decentralists, we hold that in the long term this diversity is far more beneficial than the imposition of one subgroup’s ideological preferences—even if we happen to belong to that group. Decentralists do not claim to have all the answers to deeply rooted social pathologies, like racism. But surely imperialism, even if it is able to force communities to change some of their behavior, does not provide the answers either.

The decentralist position advanced in Vermont Commons goes beyond, and deeper than, conventional “left” and “right” ideologies. We acknowl­edge regional and cultural differences, even as we represent and describe what most would consider a “progressive” culture rooted in Vermont’s distinctive history and political climate. Our state motto is “Freedom and Unity”—a pairing that cogently blends the often competing values of diversity and common values. Extreme individualism is tempered by responsible participation in community. Coercive authority is tempered by trust in human-scale democracy. We believe that the freedom to fash­ion community and culture at their roots nourishes a democratic society.