This commentary is by Matt Swenson, who is the founder of Omnidex Solutions, a risk diagnostics company. He lives in Vermont.
Vermont is dying by its own hand.
Not dramatically, not all at once, but steadily, in the way ideological rot always works. It hollows things out from the inside while the surface still looks functional. The farms are still here. The mountains are still here. But the people who built this place — who worked it, paid for it, defended it — are being pushed out by a governing class that has never lived with the consequences of a single decision it has made.
That is not governance. That is occupation.
Aristotle understood something Vermont’s progressive establishment has spent two decades trying to forget: that civilization requires its governors to have skin in the game. The Founders built that instinct into the original architecture of American government. Vermont’s current political class has turned it inside out. They inhabit a different Vermont entirely, one where property taxes are an abstraction, energy costs are an inconvenience and the consequences of their decisions land on people they will never meet. They govern like royalty. They legislate from comfort. And they have built an entire system that insulates them from ever having to feel what working Vermonters feel when the bills arrive.
It has created a system engineered to separate the governing class from the governed. The productive class pays. The credentialed ideological class decides. Housing policy written by homeowners protects them through zoning restrictions that price working Vermonters out of communities their families built. The welfare infrastructure grows because dependency generates votes and votes generate power. And Vermont shrinks.
Until Vermont examines structural solutions — flat tax models like Colorado and Pennsylvania, or the no-income-tax approach of Wyoming and Florida — working Vermonters will keep paying a disproportionate price for government that serves someone else.
The Green Mountain Care Board illustrates this perfectly. When UVM Health Network sought relief from a $44 million deficit, the board allowed $14 million. The result: suspension of psychiatric unit expansions, $122 million in cuts, and adults and children in mental health crisis waiting days in emergency rooms for beds that didn’t exist. Vermont has faced a chronic psychiatric bed shortage since 2011. The board’s response has been to make it worse.
Then there are the guns. Vermont once had one of the most honest firearms cultures in the country. The progressive Legislature has dismantled it through legislation that produced no measurable reduction in violence while criminalizing law-abiding citizens. Meanwhile, Vermont’s crime rose. Aggravated assaults were up 42% between 2018 and 2023. There was a 185% increase in firearm homicides in a single year, jumping from seven deaths in 2021 to 20 in 2022, when Burlington’s homicide rate surpassed that of Philadelphia and Phoenix.
Gun Sense Vermont presents itself as grassroots. It is not. But the primary legislative muscle behind Vermont’s gun restrictions is the Vermont chapter of Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, part of Everytown for Gun Safety — bankrolled by Michael Bloomberg, who has committed an estimated $270 million to gun control since 2007. The two organizations coordinate closely and campaign on the same legislation. The progressive movement campaigning against billionaire influence has been taking direction from one of the wealthiest individuals in American history to disarm the working Vermonters they claim to represent.
Law enforcement has been gutted simultaneously. Trauma-informed care — a framework with limited and contested validated data behind its application to serious criminal populations — replaced enforcement because ideology demanded it. The people paying that price are not in Montpelier. They are the officers, transport workers and first responders injured at rates the state has never been asked to account for.
How many lives have these policies ended? How many Vermonters are dead, victimized or displaced because Vermont is governed by ideology instead of evidence? This is not rhetorical. It is an accounting long overdue.
Jill Krowinski is not running for reelection. Phil Baruth is leaving. Both gone in the same cycle. The 2024 Republican legislative gains were not an accident — they were the result of working Vermonters using the only mechanism still available to them.
What Vermont needs is not new leadership operating within the same failed framework. It needs decision-makers who follow the data wherever it leads, even when it contradicts the ideology that got them elected. The data exists. The patterns are visible. What has been missing is the willingness to govern by outcomes rather than intentions.
Vermont deserves better. So does the rest of the country that is watching what happens when a state disappears into its own ideology.
