The Daily: 5 November 2024

We are electing the next President today. I wish we lived in a world where things like Donald Trump did not happen. I wish that we lived in a world in which there was absolutely no question about the outcome of this election now that he has. I wish we lived in a world in which there was no possibility of violence no matter which way the election turns. But here we are…

I am lucky to live in a place where people aren’t terribly motivated to express their views with guns. Flag-waving, yes. Chest-beating. Loud black trucks. These things happen. But there is more grumbling than noisy posturing. And really, this is a rather nonpartisan state. We have a long-time Republican governor, but we are as crunchy as the Left Coast. Actually, our governor is pretty crunchy also… As are the chest-beaters. Which is confusing to an outsider, but whatever. The thing about Vermont, the thing that suppresses violence and tends to moderate extremity, is that it is small. We know our neighbors. Our kids grow up together. We celebrate Thanksgiving and birthdays and anniversaries with people who don’t share our political ideology. It is not unusual for crunchies to marry conservatives and be perfectly happy for decades. Or as grumblingly happy as Vermonters get anyway.

We are also sort of romantics, or should I say, Romantics. We have these Ideas about Nature and Truth and Art and Good Living and Humanity. We don’t like tension and make no room for it in our lives together. We don’t much value wealth or status, preferring health and conviviality and true independence —which we know is dependent upon a strong community. And we are rather touchy-feely, for all the gruff exterior put on for the tourists. We care about each other and care about what we do to each other. We care about our lands and our cows and our traditions and our life-crafting. We care about the world. We love it.

This is equally true of all of us, no matter the politics. We are Vermonters first, and fiercely so. And Vermonters do not shoot each other over stupid shit like the reigning president of the outsider country we barely deign to tolerate. And that, mostly so that we can have leaf-peeper and ski-tourism income. Which is less of a thing as biophysical collapse goes on… so maybe we’ll soon just turn our backs entirely? We have before…

Bill McKibben wrote a tongue-in-cheek novel about Vermont secession. At least Radio Free Vermont sounds tongue-in-cheek until you live here. Now, I wonder if the story isn’t meant to be more of a prediction, the natural progression of Vermonters when pushed too far by nonsense from the outside world. Of course, Sinclair Lewis also set It Can’t Happen Here in Vermont, and that tale of underground escape into the wilds sounds equally likely. (Both books center on older, white, male journalists, by the way… A bit of autobiography, perhaps?) The point is Vermonters are only tenuously tethered to the rest of this country and have few qualms about leaving it. Though that would take effort…

It would be much easier just to ignore it. Which seems to be the modus operandi in Montpelier (our capital). We are seceding mostly by refusing to engage, turning a deaf ear to the shenanigans, keeping our heads down, and maintaining the appearance of perpetual preoccupation so that the crazies will lose interest and leave us alone. And, if it’s true in the capital, it is all the more true in the rest of the state — which, it should be noted, largely ignores Montpelier also. Mainly because that perpetual preoccupation is not just an act. We actually have got quite enough to be going on with right here…

Our local politics keep us busy. Today, we are electing a president — though we have no influence over that outcome, all of us together being exactly three electoral college votes. But the most important thing on the ballot in my town is the school budget that has failed three times. We’re over a quarter of the way into the school year and still do not have operational funding. This is largely due to the rising costs of insurance and disaster remediation, which older, childless, voters are unwilling — and sometimes unable — to shoulder through increased property taxes.

This is real politics, and the President of the United States does not have any effect on it whatsoever. Does not matter which party is in power. Ideology has no meaning in realpolitik… which is not something that ever happens in Washington. Even in places where the government is representative, rather than direct (as it is in Vermont), decisions over the things that affect lives are made and implemented locally. The only effect Washington has on local politics is in divvying up federal money — including our income taxes— the vast majority of which does not go to local politics…

So why bother? Why should we even care who is president? What does this country do for us? What can it do… For most of us, the answer is nothing. (If not worse…)

This country was never meant to represent diversity. It was never meant to foster equality. It was not designed to meet the needs of people. It was designed to protect property, meaning to keep it in the hands of those who created this country. It can do nothing to help communities negotiate or fund a school budget. It does not build or maintain housing. It does not feed us or ensure that there is healthy food available. It no longer even manages all the many things that fall outside the purview of localities, like maintaining interstate roads or a health care system. We live under a system that funnels wealth upwards. That is all that this sociopathic political system is designed to do… and it works very well.

It will never work for us. It can’t. Trying to force it to meet human needs is futile. That is the opposite of what it was designed to do. You might make this centralized system more representative by eliminating the electoral college and the Senate, both of which exist explicitly to keep the rabble out of government. You might make campaigns exclusively state-funded with funds being spent equally among all candidates. You might make it easier for other parties to field candidates and eliminate gerrymandering so that no party or group ever has an advantage. You might make it illegal for representatives to come from or be heading back to the industries they are elected to regulate. You might enact term limits on all elected and nominated positions and make professional bureaucratic positions more transparent and responsive to public need. You might do all sorts of things… but you will never make a centralized governing body that is capable of creating a school budget in your town.

Not only that, but with these changes, you will be unmaking the US Constitution and its resultant system of government. So why bother with tweaking it. Just get rid of it. It is unwieldy and deeply dysfunctional and very much not worth fixing. Not if the goal is to meet human needs.

Just consider the undemocratic ideas that led to the creation of this system.

Centralized government of a large population or geographic region… is not democratic. This should not need exposition…

Representational government… is not democratic. It is, at its rarest and best, sometimes representative of some of the needs in a community. It more often serves to select the elites.

Hierarchy… is decidedly not democratic. Hierarchy — inequality — will never create an egalitarian system of rule.

And while we are at it… Property… is not democratic. Property is the material expression of artificial and enforced inequality. It is the tool by which resources are kept from people and the basis of hierarchical rule.

These are the foundations of our country and, not unrelatedly, the ways we keep people from regulating themselves and ruling their own lives. This country was made by and for elites, and this is how elites retain their status. This is, also not unrelatedly, how our needs are not met and our lives are not lived. It should be fairly clear that this system is not a democracy, which means “rule by the people”. Not over the people. Not in place of the people. Rule by the people. One person, one voice, for every body in the community. True democracy would be devastating for the tiny minority who currently rule over the people.

If we want to live in a democracy then, at a minimum, every vote is equal. However, a true democracy is rule, actual governance, by all the people. There is no representation. A true democracy makes its own rules.

Now, a democracy may appoint representatives to do the daily work, and there is room in democracy for nominating a spokes-person for a group that can’t be present for whatever reason (including disinclination…). But when there are laws to be enacted and budgets to be funded, when there are novel situations and new needs, when it is time to rule, then every body votes. For the rule. Not for someone else who will create and codify the rule, not for someone else to govern. But for the actual school budget. For the bond issue that will fund public works on waterways and wetlands. For the tax credits that will be given to clean energy. For the tenets that define clean energy.

Obviously, a democracy is much more involved — and more work — than showing up at the polling station once every two to four years. In my town, we vote just about every season. We have policy and proposals published publicly — which is mandated by law — and we acquaint ourselves with it. We talk about it at work and at family gatherings. Businesses grant time off to go vote on it. And we go to Town Meeting every year to discuss issues at length and vote as a community. We are also inveterate writers of letters to the editor and creators of employee owned businesses and cooperative ventures. In many ways, we are democratic. Vermont is what democracy looks like… to steal the crunchy marching slogan.

Now, democracy is not the implementation of law and regulation. (Though it does often step in on interpretation.) Democracy is merely deciding as a group what will be done. To do the actual work that keeps the bills paid and the lights on, democracy relies upon officials, sometimes elected, sometimes nominated or hired. This doing the work is a problem even in Vermont — primarily because it does not pay and even in Vermont you can’t live without income. (Though we are working on that…)

So what could we do to create a true democracy from this mess? The first step is to break up everything into chunks that are manageable on human scale, so we can actually do the work. It should be obvious that democracy is impractical if not impossible on any scale larger than a few thousand people or a half dozen square miles of geography. We need to keep the focus small. Really, we need to do this in every aspect of our lives. We need to live small and local, un-supersizing everything from food to governance. We can’t rule ourselves if we have no contact with the production of our needs. We need to be able to touch things, understand processes, smell our own waste. Democracy works best at that goldilocks balance between too many needy bodies and too few hands to do the tasks.

Downsizing will go a long way toward making true democracies out of this mayhem. It will also have the happy side-effect of eliminating things that require scale and centralization, most of which are extremely harmful, all of which are unnecessary drains on this planet. For example, the military-industrial mess that sucks up a quarter of your income every year — and takes even more from the rest of the world — would collapse. It is unneeded in a world of small sovereign communities.

Not that squabbling will end… there will still be assholes, and a large portion of those assholes currently have guns… but there are a few things about that. One, traditional communities do a really good job of policing themselves with social norms and taboos, with very little recourse to violence at all, though there is banishment and ostracism and no little shaming (which are all deeply unpleasant, but somewhat preferable to corporeal punishment). Two, if there is need for defense from outsiders, traditional communities are pretty good at raising the barricades too, with or without modern weaponry. Three, with less transport, it will be harder for outsiders to cause problems. And last but not least… a point that people who think about dystopias rarely ever think about… guns, being rather fiddly things that require a good deal of resources to manufacture and maintain, are going to be in much shorter supply. And the more advanced the weapon, the less likely it will still work as collapse ensues. This is true whether we localize or not. Because all manufactured things that require resources and transport are going to be in short supply as collapse ensues… that’s sort of the main feature of collapse… So there will be assholes. But they will not be as heavily armed as they are today. And we will probably be watching them more closely. Because small communities do that.

But there’s another step we can take to improve democracy and make the work more manageable. Make everyone do it. This is how harvests happen in traditional farming communities. This is how acequias are kept clear and flowing. This is how community celebrations are put together. Everyone does the community service work. Now, this works only if people are free from wage work, free to do the work necessary to their own lives. But as collapse ensues, wage work will fall apart… because again, that’s sort of a feature of collapse. Where are the wages coming from? In any case, community service will replace wage work over time. We will go back to working for ourselves.

As to the actual governance and keeping the bills paid and the lights on… make that the job of the elders in a community. Every couple years, draw lots from the pool of healthy and able elders who have not yet served. When the laws are made by the people and in favor of the people, there is no need for specialization in law, so a wise crone is a capable justice of the peace and an elderly farmer is a competent town manager. Of course, when property is less of an obsession, then there will be much less need of management or judgement. But there will always be need for counsel and arbitration, and old bodies with hale minds are perfectly suited to the task, having plenty of experience and far less bias — because they just don’t have that much to gain or need of gain.

There will be some form of union or agreement on larger scales than the community, though I suspect that some places, once removed from the federal system, are going to go their own way. This is true regardless of what paths we choose to follow into collapse. The federated system will fail. It is failing. It is too big to manage. And there will be portions of this country that will not choose to continue being in a relationship with the rest. This will probably be true at all scales and maybe in every part of the country. There will be communities with closed borders. But then… transport being expensive and more difficult, will it matter?

Still, there will be need of larger political bodies with representation from many communities, probably several levels of such bodies. A watershed. A traditional state. A geographic region. Even up to a federation of states or bioregions. These larger bodies will be needed to smooth trade and transport such as is possible. There will also still be need for communication and exchange of ideas. But rather than elect representatives or have specialized professionals, send people, mostly elders, who are selected by lot. The work gets done both at home and at the congressional meeting, and there is no room for partisanship in the selection process. (Also… just consider the trade deals made by a room full of old women…)

So there are some ideas to have on the table as things fall apart. Small, sortilege rather than election, elder councils, and every body participates. These are some of the hallmarks of true democracy.

I know I will not live to see changes like this. I am not sure that all of them will happen. But I am fairly sure that this is the general trend. Because this is how humans have lived for most of their existence. True democracy is the natural state of humanity. It is the most effective state. It is the state in which the most of us live our best lives — and do so without harming the places we inhabit. It is also the easiest state. It already exists. We know this. We’ve done this. We, in Vermont, are pretty much there. And there are plenty of able teachers in the rest of the world, showing us how to avoid the pitfalls and make it all work. There are many examples right on this messed up continent. Most Native communities are managed just like this.

You know the one bright lining about this election?… if it’s bright… no, that’s not the word… but the one possibly positive effect of a really horrible disaster… that’s better… is that I don’t know that this country will survive it. Neither way. Trump has declared that to be his specific intention… I think this might be the last time we participate in this sham democracy… whichever way the vote goes, Trump has ensured that the country will fall apart. And I don’t know that that would be an entirely bad thing… consider it the catalyst, the ugly crucible, from which something better for all of us might be created.

If that does prove to be the case… well, read Radio Free Vermont… and hope against It Can’t Happen Here…

Either way, maybe remember that Vermont is what democracy looks like…

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©Elizabeth Anker 2024