Daily Archives: November 27, 2024

A Rising Tide Lifts All the Flotsam

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This month’s Republican wave deposited some worthy members who can bring a socially moderate, fiscally conservative perspective to the Statehouse with some measure of dignity and open-mindedness. Not that I agree with them politically, but they should not be dismissed as extremists or nay-sayers. (Lookin’ at you, incoming Senate Minority Leader Scott Beck.)

But others who floated in on the tide will bring some truly out-there positions to Montpelier. There have always been a few of these folks, but too few to feel comfortable about spreading their wings and exposing their views. They have limited their participation to grumbles and grimaces and often departed after a term or two because they couldn’t stand being in a tiny minority. Or because the voters got wind of their views. (Lookin’ at you, one-term state rep Samantha Lefebvre.)

In the new biennium, there might just be a critical mass that will give them license to fly their freak flags. I can give you five names of far-right figures previously featured in my posts about “stealth conservatives” who won their elections and will take office come January. There are another eight on my suspect list who campaigned on the standard-issue “affordability & common sense” Phil Scott word cloud but showed signs of dog-whistling. I haven’t had a chance to dig into their histories. Yet.

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Two Vermonts, Again, Again

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The phrase “Two Vermonts” has a long and storied history. Its roots run deeper than the origins of Vermont itself. Way back when, our B.L. Not Yet S. was the tattered rope in a tug-of-war between New Hampshire and New York. And then, for much of the Vermont Republican Party’s 100-year-plus hegemony, a governor from the eastern side of the state was inevitably succeeded by someone from the west. There was a very clear division between the two Vermonts tracing the spine of the Green Mountains.

If you do an Internet search for “Two Vermonts,” you get a staggering quantity of hits. It’s been a long time since the line was about east versus west; instead, various divisions are drawn by a writer or speaker in service of the argument they are making. The two Vermonts have been defined as, among other things: The places, rural or urban, where people are prospering versus those whose inhabitants are struggling to get by; The places where real people work hard at real jobs versus the realms of the picture-postcard; The locales struggling with drugs and crime versus the enclaves of the well-to-do and the tourists; Rural/parochial areas versus urban/cosmopolitan ones.

There are also non-geographical conceptions of Two Vermonts: A simple divide between prosperity and poverty, or between a Vermont that seriously engaged with climate change and another where harmful emissions are still on the rise.

I’ve got a new spin on this concept based on this month’s election results. If you follow I-89 from Burlington to White River Junction and I-91 from there to Brattleboro, you will have traversed one Vermont. The rest of the state, or most of it, is the other Vermont. Neat, eh?

You can see this most clearly in the incoming state Senate. There are 17 members of the Democratic/Progressive caucus, and fourteen of them hail from counties on that freeway corridor: Chittenden (6), Washington (3), Windsor (3), and Windham (2). The other three hail from Bennington (2) and Addison (1).

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