This commentary is by Robert Wood, a retired resident of Holland, Vermont.
The original slogan for independent Vermont and broadly touted for its 1991 bicentennial was “Prima Res Publica — Stella Quarta Decima”: First Republic, Fourteenth Star.
The ultimate irony is today’s Legislature has completely abandoned the concept of a republic in favor of the overseer state, arrogance and majority rule, as aptly pointed out by John LaBarge. Mr. LaBarge’s valid criticism can actually trace its roots back to 1787 and James Madison’s Federalist Paper number 10, in which he explored majority rule with respect to minority rights.
Madison viewed a republic as a government of laws, which prevents the tyranny of the people (democracy) from deteriorating into anarchy:
“The friend of popular governments never finds himself so much alarmed for their character and fate, as when he contemplates their propensity to this dangerous vice. He will not fail, therefore, to set a due value on any plan which, without violating the principles to which he is attached, provides a proper cure for it. The instability, injustice, and confusion introduced into the public councils, have, in truth, been the mortal diseases under which popular governments have everywhere perished; as they continue to be the favorite and fruitful topics from which the adversaries to liberty derive their most specious declamations.”
“… The public good is disregarded in the conflicts of rival parties, and that measures are too often decided, not according to the rules of justice and the rights of the minor party, but by the superior force of an interested and overbearing majority. “
Madison recognized that, left unchecked, “the most numerous party, or, in other words, the most powerful faction must be expected to prevail.” Given that enlightened statesmen will not always be at the helm and knowing the obvious, “that neither moral nor religious motives can be relied on as an adequate control,” “The regulation of these various and interfering interests forms the principal task of modern legislation, and involves the spirit of party and faction in the necessary and ordinary operations of the government.”
His argument was that a confederacy of states or districts would offset and nullify the majority of any one particular faction, state, county or district. “The influence of factious leaders may kindle a flame within their particular States, but will be unable to spread a general conflagration through the other States; in the same proportion as such a malady is more likely to taint a particular county or district, than an entire State.”
Madison reasoned that, in a republic, groups (factions) would be forced to negotiate and compromise among themselves, arriving at solutions that would respect the rights of minorities. Further, he argued that the size of a state would actually make it more difficult for factions to gain control over others.
The reasoning of Vermont’s founders’ may have been applicable to the colonial “First Republic,” but as Mr. LaBarge points out, it has long been discarded by the heavy-handed legislature of the country’s “Fourteenth Star.”