Book Review : The Utopia of Democracy in Miniature

The Vermont Papers: Recreating Democracy on a Human Scale by Frank Bryan and John McClaughry (Chelsea Green Publishing, P.O. Box 283, Chelsea, Vt. 05038: $18.95, 308 pages).

On my desk is a marvelous little toy: a set of tiny wooden arches, columns, lintels and beams in the classical style, all of which are designed to nest in a wooden box like the pieces of a puzzle. I can spill these exquisite building blocks on my desk, idly create some miniature Greek temple, and then put the pieces back in the box, every block in its assigned place. Here is order, balance, harmony, tradition and grandeur, all in miniature.

“The Vermont Papers” by Frank Bryan and John McClaughry appealed to me in many of the same ways. The authors have imagined a future in which their home state of Vermont is transformed into a laboratory of direct democracy, a sturdy paradise of town meetings and local militias and neighborhood courts, “a civic model for the rest of the world to envy and emulate.” And, like my box of classical building blocks, it will all be done in miniature.

I hasten to point out that “The Vermont Papers” is an impressive and compelling book, truly a pleasure to read and contemplate, and the authors have put across their vision of democracy-in-a-box in a delightful and winning way. The prose is sometimes magisterial, sometimes down home, but always invigorating. The authors are clear thinkers and clear writers, even if their imagination does not reach the meaner streets of New York City or Los Angeles. At its best, “The Vermont Papers” is nothing less than the L. L. Bean catalogue of political science.

The centerpiece of “The Vermont Papers” is a detailed proposal to recast the government of Vermont into “a democracy on a human scale.” The process will begin by breaking up the largest units of government (“giantism is corrupting our political institutions,” the authors warn), and replacing Vermont’s 246 city and town governments with 40 so-called “shires”--”independent polities, accountable directly to their own people, governed by a body elected by the people, having their own independent revenue base adequate to their needs.”

Each “shire” will be governed by a “shire-moot,” a kind of mini-legislature where township representatives (or “reeves,” in the curious parlance of “The Vermont Papers”) will conduct the business of government. The judiciary, too, will be replaced by “shire” courts whose judges are elected directly by the local citizens. A “shire” militia will provide emergency and disaster relief services. Welfare will be left to the compassion and imagination of the good folk of the shires. State government will be transformed into a federation of “shires,” where decisions will be made by “citizens, not public-sector technocrats.”

“The shires will build the kind of community that integrates the individual into a matrix of land, society, custom, belief, and hope without which he or she is prey to alienation and despair,” write the authors, who sometimes almost glow with true belief.

Significantly, the authors draw most of their nomenclature--”shires,” “moots” and “reeves”--from the obsolete usages of ancient England, and they repeatedly salute what they call “the spirit of Saxon liberty.”

Although “The Vermont Papers” draws knowledgeably and gracefully on a rich variety of sources--everyone from Aristotle and Lao Tzu to Robert La Follette and Hannah Arendt--the fact is that Bryan and McClaughry are enchanted with a kind of post-industrial version of Jeffersonian democracy that is rooted in the sturdy myths of an earlier era. And they are willing to admit that Vermont--a small, pastoral and homogenous place--is an ideal setting for their theories precisely because its history and its destiny are different from the rest of America.

“In Vermont, the green shoots are not covered by the cement of the urban-industrialism period. We have a head start, a long one,” the authors write. “Vermont can be a twenty-first century model for the nation because it has . . . a ‘civic culture’ of shared norms and self-consciousness. It has a special history. It has heroes like Ethan Allen. This is the stuff on which communities thrive. Our history is a backdrop against which we can act, not just talk.”

In a very real sense, “The Vermont Papers” is the “Small Is Beautiful” of American politics, and Bryan and McClaughry are utopians whose vision consists of solving problems of American democracy by rendering them in the Land of Counterpane. Of course, the authors of “The Vermont Papers” do not consider themselves or their book to be utopian.

“(T)his is not merely a theoretical model,” they insist. “It is as well both a plan and an appeal for action.” But we cannot contemplate the pretty pictures of pastoral democracy in “The Vermont Papers” without thinking of places where the problems of government are much more complex, troubling and even dangerous: How would the system of “shires” work in the South Bronx or Watts?

I am happy to commend “The Vermont Papers” as a refreshing and, in many ways, an enlightening work of political speculation. But I invite Messrs. Bryan and McClaughry to leave the lovely haven of Vermont and come to New York or California, where they can spill their exquisite theories on the table, and apply them to the real challenges of American democracy: families and neighborhoods in distress, public schools under siege, pervasive drug abuse and open gang warfare, an institutionalized underclass, a fear-ridden middle class, gridlock in transportation and housing, a despoiled environment, a population that continues to grow in size and diversity, a government that barely manages to govern, and leaders who cannot or will not lead.