Any time a person takes a deep look into U.S. history, that person is bound to find things that will make them squirm. It’s an unpleasant history, and frankly it’s only a moderately pleasant present-day. And yet, for all the flag-waving and nuanced idiocy of “proud Americans” waving the Confederate flag, there have been plenty of other “attempts” at secession. Of course, they all seem to share that one factor. Racism: the tie that binds.
The list of secession movements includes things like American Redoubt, which is a “safe haven for conservative Christians” in the Idaho/Montana area; Deseret, which is basically just the Mormon corridor; The League of the South, which is a second coming of the Confederacy; and the Northwest Territorial Imperative, which Wikipedia’s description of begins with “proposed white ethnostate.”
You get the idea.
But in the surprisingly long list of semi-seriously proposed secession, there’s one that stands out for its lack of hate speech: The Second Vermont Republic.
What Is the Second Vermont Republic?
To be clear, there is certainly plenty of racism and bigotry in New England, though Vermont has an air of artsy inclusion. But apparently in the wake of the September 11 attacks, a man named Thomas Naylor wrote a book called The Vermont Manifesto, published in 2003. The goal of the movement was to be a nonviolent association that would work against the stranglehold of giant corporations (and by extension the U.S. government). Naylor also, of course, hoped that Vermont would return to its status as an independent republic, and for the peaceful dissolution of the United States as an empire.
It was basically a social club for people who thought the USA was trending in the wrong direction.
The Core Values of the Second Vermont Republic
Here are the eight core values associated with the Second Vermont Republic:
- Political independence
- Human scale
- Sustainability
- Economic solidarity (buy local, basically)
- Power sharing (more on this later)
- Equal access
- Tension reduction
- Mutuality
Honestly, it’s pretty okay on paper when you look at it like that. And while those tenets are fine and well, there’s one point of the “power sharing” aspect that really stands out: They invoke Switzerland.
In short, the goal of the Second Vermont Republic is basically that they want to be the American version of Switzerland.
Throughout the early 2000s there were occasional polls to see what the public thought about a Second Vermont Republic, and it had moderate low-level traction. If I may editorialize, it feels a bit like the general public was saying “Sure. Have fun, kids” and not taking it the least bit seriously.
But proponents were relatively serious. They made the astute point that Vermont did not join the Union in hopes of joining an empire. They endorsed the idea of a new Acadian nation of mainly the New England states, plus portions of southeastern Canada. Naylor even made a pretty convincing case in a CNN article in 2010 when he said that the Second Vermont Republic is “anti-big government, anti-empire, antiwar, with small is beautiful as our guiding philosophy.”
It doesn’t sound terrible!
In 2010, several Vermonters ran for state government positions based on a secession platform. The lieutenant governor candidate got almost 5% of the vote while the governor candidate didn’t quite get to 1%. The rest were equally negligible.
If you’re wondering how the movement is progressing in recent years, the internet archive Wayback Machine shows their site as www.vermontrepublic.org, which in 2007 featured the eight-point set of principles outlined above.
But if you go to that website now, it appears to be an SEO article farm for someone who is trying to improve rankings to score a few dollars in ad revenue (certainly something that would never happen here at AIW – unless you’d like to advertise right here. I can be bought).
Wikipedia shows their website as vermontindependent.net but that is pretty clearly a weird independent newspaper site that hasn’t been updated since March of 2021.
Is the movement dead? Probably not. But is its internet presence dead? Mostly, yeah.
One particularly fun note from the Wikipedia page is that in 2009 the Southern Poverty Law Center did an article about the group and about secession movements in general, pointing out how the Second Vermont Republic was having a hard time distancing itself from “the taint of racism” that was prevalent with the League of the South.
Not exactly the group you want to be associated with.