Vermont Secession: Beyond the Straw Men

Probably the biggest blow to the Vermont independence movement came in 2007 with the League of the South controversy. Sparked by a Southern Poverty Law Center report on Second Vermont Republic’s ties to the League of the South, and fanned by an anonymous blog and an assortment of Vermont bloggers, the controversy focused most of the Vermont political blogosphere discourse around whether or not SVR founder Thomas Naylor is a closet racist and whether SVR is a front for the a modern white supremacist/neo-confederate agenda.

This controversy has had the unfortunate (or intended?) effect of closing off discussion of the many important issues that Naylor and others in the independence camp have brought up. The accusation of racism is one of the most effective ways to delegitimize an individual or idea in modern American society, and in this case it has been utilized to effectively narrow the range of acceptable discourse around sustainability and decentralism among Vermont’s intellectuals. It’s okay to discuss buying local, and maybe even peak-oil; but heaven forfend one brings up the unsustainability of the Federal Government (both in terms of its scale and its fiscal policies). Only racists like Thomas Naylor talk about that stuff.

The thing that strikes me as most disappointing about this whole state of affairs is that it seems that some those most eagerly attacking SVR are actually folks who value decentralism. Therefore, I’d be curious to know what people (particularly the GMD crew) think of the independence question divorced from personality-based attacks on Naylor. For anti-Naylor folks who support it in principle, it seems to me that the intellectually honest thing to do is to start a rival organization that takes the critiques of the last few years into account; for those who oppose secession in principle, I urge you to argue the real meat of the issues at hand rather than fixating on a thoroughly beaten straw-man.

What I personally understand SVR and the Middlebury institute to be doing is working to build a sort of meta-secessionist movement with the purpose of legitimizing the idea of secession in America, divorced from any particular set of political values. Because of the Civil War, we have the knee-jerk reaction of associating secession with slavery, but anyone with more than a cursory knowledge of world history know that there have been countless example of justifiable and progressive political dissolution (the breakup of the Soviet Union being but one instance). This total association of the Civil War with secession in the American political consciousness has become a source of Federal Legitimacy which reifies the narrative of American History as a story of continuous centralization. As a result, Americans seem to have forgotten that, in our own case as in the case of other countries, governments and nations are merely structures created by human beings. The knowledge of this means that, when they become abusive or decadent, we have the responsibility to deal with those issues head on rather than retreating into the comfortable myths of nationhood. It’s really easy to play the guilt by association and character assassination games; it’s much harder to take on the immense problems we now face and attempt to determine through discourse what needs to be done.