This commentary is by Nicholas Boke, a freelance writer and international education consultant who lives in Chester.
My wife and I recently returned to Vermont after 15 years in the outside (real?) world. We came back, in part, because the state we had left in 2005 made sense and the state we’ve watched since then has continued to make sense, the most recent example of which being the way the government and citizenry have handled the coronavirus.
Some things have changed, from the fact that there are many fewer dairy farms than there were 15 years ago to the fact that the state is treating its designation as “the whitest state” with the concern it deserves.
But some things have remained the same.
To wit: I had to shovel 3 feet of snow from my driveway in late November, and most drivers still wave back when a passing pedestrian waves to them.
To wit: John McClaughry is still fighting that uphill battle against what he perceives as the liberty-destroying intrusions of liberal and progressive ideas (“Why the Vermont Proposition belongs on the shelf”) into the lives of Vermonters.
His thinking has gotten a bit sloppy, though. The foundation he laid for his four criticisms of the Vermont Proposition was puzzling, especially given the kind of documents he might have cited in his pre-2005 opinion pieces.
“First,” he began, “visionary documents are constructed and promoted by people enthusiastic about grand visions, and who often want to make sure their pet interests are favorably promoted.”
What came to mind as I read this was those visionary words that set much of what McClaughry holds sacred in motion. You know, like the vision articulated in the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”
So all those signatories of the Declaration were just out to make sure that their pet interests were promoted?
And what do you do with McClaughry’s subsequent comment that “most of this subset of Vermonters don’t spend much time thinking about how these grand visions are going to be achieved, who is going to pay for them, or how much the liberties of ordinary people will be diminished”?
Were those the questions Lincoln asked of himself when he concluded the Gettysburg Address by resolving that “the nation, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people by the people for the people, shall not perish from the earth”?
Maybe it’s a just a matter of which visionaries you agree with. But beginning a critique of something as significant and well thought-out as the Vermont Proposition by damning the intentions and proposals of all visionaries, as McClaughry has done, really weakens the rest of his arguments.
So point two, that it’ll cost something to implement the goals of the Proposition, is turned into a matter of who wants to pay for what — McClaughry doesn’t want to pay for a carbon tax, and, he makes clear in his third point, doesn’t want, “the wealthiest,” who “continue to grow their resources.” to share any of those resources with people who’ve been left out of this growth.
Point four, the shortest, somehow turns the proposed support for preschools and college tuitions into giving “the state … control over everyone’s children.”
His final point catapults all these evils into the single threat of “replacing local democracy with a hugely expanded and unaccountable administrative state.”
Just as he narrowed his concept of visionaries in the beginning of the essay, he has concluded by imagining a Vermont governed by a local version of Xi Jinping’s Communist Party.
Oh, well, it’s still good to be back. Part of the reason we came back was because we had remembered Vermont as a place where — horror of horrors — visionaries mattered.
And, of course, where we could count on Vermont’s John McClaughrys to attack them for being visionaries — unless he agrees with their vision.
