Why is Vermont so Left?

By Jeffrey Hart | Wednesday, November 19, 1997

To the extent that anyone in the rest of the nation pays any attention to Vermont, the Green Mountain State must be puzzling.

Why, for instance, is Vermont's only congressman, Bernie Sanders, a Socialist? And why are its two senators a leftist Democrat (Patrick Leahy) and a nominal Republican (Jim Jeffords) who votes to the left of Leahy?

And why does Vermont have a stratospheric, virtually Scandinavian, state income tax?

Strange. When you think of Vermont, if you think of it at all, don't images of loggers and trappers, marble quarries, some hardy French Canadians in the north and guys with pickup trucks with shotguns come to mind?

Well, that's where you would be wrong. During the last 25 years, Vermont has been transformed completely. It now represents an interesting movement of the Left away from politics as such and into lifestyle.

There has been an exodus of Lefties from urban areas into rural spots, usually adjacent to universities, where they can create enclaves expressive of their own style and values.

Michael Kelly, the best editor The New Republic has had within living memory — and who was recently fired for insufficient servility to Vice President Al Gore — caught the flavor of Vermont in one of his recent columns. Kelly experienced culture shock:

'Recently I spent a weekend in Vermont. Vermont's prospects could hardly please more; the place is stuffed with verdant vistas, mountain views, bosky dells, bubbling brooks, and limpid lakes. But there is a man, and he is vile. You cannot swat a black fly in Vermont without disturbing the vacant-eyed rest of a pallid, hairy and purposefully ugly white person. Hippies are everywhere, in every variety and of every age: ancient bedspring-scared veterans of the summer of love, dreadlocked ingenues still plowing through the mire of their first Chomsky, preschoolers with names like Cypress and Che.'

Yes, yes, but Kelly on his weekend really missed the point. Some of these 'hippies' are millionaires. Many of them are professional people. That gray-haired guy with the ponytail, tie-dyed shirt, jeans and Birkenstocks probably has a cellular phone in his backpack and a nice fat bank account for his software company or his alternative-medicine store. In the Sept. 15 Weekly Standard, David Brooks looked more deeply than Kelly into the culture and especially the economics of Burlington, Vt. Brooks spotted an important phenomenon:

'For years, progressives have condemned white flight, but now they've created liberal flight, in which socially concerned families and individuals leave the urban world for pastoral, predominantly white communities,' he says.

Such liberals are no longer much interested in politics in the usual sense. Or, rather, politics has become an aspect of lifestyle.

'The furniture, fashion and furnishing stores are confronted with a common problem: How to manufacture and sell superficial items for consumers who want everyone to know about their psychological and spiritual depth,' Brooks writes. 'Wind chimes and Intuit art seem popular. At Burlington's many high-minded toy stores — Discovery Toys, Learning Materials Workshop, Timeless Toys, Toys by Nature, Learning Quest — you can stock up on children's playthings that are developmental, whimsical and non-violent all at the same time.'

Well now, I have a nice pair of Birkenstocks myself and am strong on conservation issues, but don't little kids in Burlington get to have electric trains? Toy soldiers?

In that atmosphere, I'd want to open a store called 'Uzis for Tots.' It is Brook's insight that Burlington, which houses the University of Vermont, is anything but unique. He compares it with such enclaves as Boulder, Colo.; Napa, Calif.; Northampton, Mass.; Missoula, Mont.; Wilmington, N.C.; and Ithaca, N.Y. Universities play an important role in such places.

Why has there been liberal flight from the cities? Because the cities are not very attractive to white liberals anymore. Martin Luther King Jr. was a long time ago; today the black figures are Al Sharpton, Louis Farrakhan and Spike Lee. As Brooks sees it, the Burlington-type towns represent 'an archipelago of progressivism that doesn't seek to confront or transform national politics, just offer an alternative to it.'

Progressives can escape to a place where the mayors and town councilmen are progressives, where gay and feminist concerns are at the top of everyone's agenda, and 'where liberalism is a dominant lifestyle as well as an unchallenged ideology,' he says.

Whereas Ithaca does not influence New York state, Burlington culture and population are sufficient to make a difference in such a small state as Vermont.

While there might be some good ideas in the Burlington lifestyle Brooks describes so well, taken as a whole it is suffocatingly conformist and predictable. Its moralism — being seen to be moral — pervades every cranny of existence, and deviation certainly would bring down condemnation. One could never wear a three-piece suit, for example. Could you watch football or boxing on television? Probably not. Nuclear power, land mines, the music of Richard Wagner? Certainly not. The number of sins you could commit by eating a Big Mac is incalculable.

Vermont's Pecksniffian moralism has an authoritarian feel to it. I'll have a Big Mac with fries.

Why is Vermont so Left?

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