BRATTLEBORO — With Town Meeting Day approaching, I am contemplating how Vermont's direct democracy tradition tends to moderate political opinions expressed publicly and how a shared cultural experience means everyone is starting from the same set of assumptions about the nature of reality and knowledge.
In a world in which first motor vehicles and then global communications in the palm of our hands every waking and sleeping moment have resulted in massive cultural upheavals and mobility, it's not hard to understand why those of us who live in the populated centers which are too large to practice that tradition of direct democracy have far-more-contentious politics and far-more-authoritarian leanings.
When what you have to say on civic matters has to be said in person, directly to the faces of your fellow townspeople, civility is easier to conjure, and when the ideas you wish to present may be utterly foreign to a relatively isolated community who share perspectives all forged in common circumstances, it tends to deter radicalism.
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Vermont needs to find a way to bridge the divides and rifts between the uphillers and the downhillers, between the flatland transplants who are seeking to import their politics and the born-and-raised who are seeking to preserve their politics.
I'm sure nothing I'm saying here is new, but I'm feeling it keenly and gaining new understandings of the maxim, “that government governs best which governs closest to the people.”
Civilization cannot exist without two essential factors: the division of labor and the abstraction of trust.
The larger our domains extend, whether physically or virtually, the more we require a finely-grained, complex, and interdependent specialization and the further we are required to extend our civic and public trust to people of whom we lack sufficient personal and intimate shared experiences to trust implicitly with our safety and succor.
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I've often pointed out that the real divide in our country is not between “red states” and “blue states,” it's between rural districts and urban districts - and the country is becoming steadily more urban.
We need a new way of thinking about our relationship to the land and our relationships to one another that respects the differing needs of the town and city folk and the hinterland dwellers.
It's not the Second Amendment of the Constitution that is outdated and needs to be viewed with modern culture in mind, it's our entire representative republican structure.
We need to be more flexible, so that cities can pass laws that make sense for cities without unduly affecting the lives of rural citizens.
That is what federalism was intended to accomplish in the first place.