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The Greenest Mountains

In the words of Frank Bryan, the University of Vermont professor whose Real Democracy is the best book ever published on the vital New England practice of town meeting, “Vermont’s genetic code”…
Bill Kauffman
April 4, 2013

In the words of Frank Bryan, the University of Vermont professor whose Real Democracy is the best book ever published on the vital New England practice of town meeting, “Vermont’s genetic code” is “human-scale democracy.” Bryan is among the contributors to Most Likely to Secede (www.vtcommons.org), a new collection of almost 50 essays from the pages of the thoughtful and humanely feisty decentralist journal Vermont Commons. The vision herein is of peace. Secure civil liberties. Family farms. Healthy communities in which each person matters. The flourishing of local arts, music, and letters. Political, cultural, and economic decisions made by neighbors rather than distant rulers. Independence. If this last-named seems whimsical, something out of The Mouse that Roared, feel free to argue with the authors all you want. But this is what participatory democracy looks like.

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A stack of three Local Culture journals and the book 'Localism in the Mass Age'

Bill Kauffman

Bill Kauffman is the author of eleven books, among them Dispatches from the Muckdog Gazette (Henry Holt), Ain’t My America (Metropolitan), Look Homeward, America (ISI), and Poetry Night at the Ballpark (FPR Books). His next book, Upstaters, is due from SUNY Press in 2026. He is a columnist for The American Conservative and The Spectator World. Bill wrote the screenplay for the 2013 feature film Copperhead. He is a founding editor of Front Porch Republic and has served as a legislative assistant to Senator Pat Moynihan, editor for various magazines and publishers, and vice president of the Batavia Muckdogs, a professional baseball team that was euthanized by Major League Baseball. He lives with his wife Lucine in his native Genesee County, New York.

3 comments

  • D.W. Sabin
    12 years ago

    One of the most enjoyable nights of my life was when a packed Town Hall in my Litchfield Hills rejected two State Mandates in one night. It can be done.

    Nothing packs the local Town Hall like a notice of State Mandates. When our town Garage burnt to the ground, it was local neighboring towns that came to our aid with equipment way before any State assistance arrived.

    Somehow, we have abdicated citizenship with our most intimate fellows in favor of being a member of a larger, rather inchoate “society” within a so-called “Superpower”.
    Hilariously, we chronically complain about this larger society we blithely surrender to.

  • Brian
    12 years ago

    I’d be interested in knowing if/how VT towns may have retained any semblance of real local sovereignty. In NY, pretty much everywhere has become a complete ward of the state somehow in the last few decades, so that Albany gets to dictate every little action of the smallest towns, and even small cutbacks from the state result in apparent existential crises for which there is nothing to be done save crawl to the capitol for restoration and salvation.

  • Russell Arben Fox
    12 years ago

    I’m a big fan of the collection of essays he edited, The Vermont Papers. I use it in classes of mine on occasion.

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