Vermonters To Use New England Town Meetings to Deliberate Secession from American Empire: Online Movement Underway

The “Free Vermont 200 Towns” Campaign is well under way and, if successful, could change the course of America’s future.  It may also point a new way for other “secessionist” movements around the world to move away from violence and toward “public deliberation” as a useful instrument. 

A Radical Vermont Movement Based on Its Tradition of Real Public Deliberation and Binding Voting In Town Meetings..

According to an article written in The Washington Post on April 3, 2007 by Ian Baldwin and Frank Bryan (a member of JPD’s academic Board of Editors and a professor of political science at the University of Vermont), there is a serious and potentially successful movement in that state to secede from “The American Empire”, one entirely consistent with Vermont history and the U.S. Constitution. 

The method of choice will be public deliberation through one of the most famed and effective traditional and historic American institutions: The New England Town Meeting--as still practiced in Vermont.  The goal is to loosely coordinate a movement to get 200 or more Vermont Town Meetings to “debate” and vote on the following resolution: 

“We the citizens of the (undersigned town) call on the Vermont state legislature to convene a special session to debate the following one sentence resolution: 

“Be it resolved that the State of Vermont peacefully and democratically free itself from the United States of America and return to its status an an independent republic, as it was between January 15, 1777 and March 4, 1791”. 

They are convinced that a fair public discourse will produce a near unanimity of passage and thus it will be incumbent on the elected stated legislature to call such a special session.It may be a radical idea, but the organizers go to great lengths to show that it is based on undisputed American history, an increasing federal intrusion into traditional state affairs, and the destructive direction and financial risks the U.S. government has taken in trying to dominate the rest of the world militarily. 

A New, but Old,  Declaration of Independence 

Both in The Post article, and on the “Free Vermont” homepage www.freevermont.net, there is a new declaration of the wrongs some people feel that requires them to declare themselves independent of  “The American Empire.”, one they believe is putting the nation and their state in harm’s way.  Thus, they are saying that this is about their, and their children’s, survival as well. 

As Baldwin and Bryan write it: “…the 350 year swing of history’s pendulum toward large, centralized imperial states is…reversing itself.  Why? First, the cost of oil and gas.  According to urban planner James Howard Kunstler, ‘Anything organized on a gigantic scale…will probably falter in the energy-scarce future.’ Second, third wave technology is an inherently democratic and decentralized as second-wave technology was authoritarian and centralist.”

As in the original Declaration of Independence, there are many other peoples’ grievances against the central imperium.

What Spurred This Movement and How It Operates

So, how did this start, what got the momentum going? In 1991, then Lt. Governor Howard Dean—now Chair of the National Democratic Party—chaired 7 Vermont Town Meeting where this issue was discussed as part of Vermont’s “Bicentennial” Celebration.  After discussion, the overwhelming number of citizens at all of these Town Meetings (they averaged over 250 per town meeting) were in favor of secession (62%). 

It’s been brewing ever since. Then, in 2005, according to the Washington Post article, there was a conference in 2005 that was attended by approximately 300 Vermonters to discuss secession from what they believed had become an extremely overbearing and arrogant nation of the United States of America.  Following that, the annual “Vermont Poll” found that 8% of Vermonters were in favor of “peaceful secession.”  This translates into about 38,000 residents of that state.  With that as a potential base, the organization “Free Vermont” began and set up its website at www.freevermont.net  where it has all the information needed to inform about what it is about and how it is going about accomplishing its ultimate goal: The Free Republic of  Vermont…just as it was before it ratified the U.S. Constitution in 1791.

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