[Peace-discuss] The Rise of a Green Tea Party

[C. G. Estabrook]

  September 2, 2010
Undermining the Empire From Within
The Rise of a Green Tea Party
By CHRISTOPHER KETCHAM

The most radical antiwar candidate in the US is not Dennis Kucinich or Rand or 
Ron Paul or any of the usual suspects. It’s a 42-year-old Vermonter named Dennis 
Steele, who is running for governor of his state as an open secessionist. From 
what I can tell, Steele is just an average dude. He wears Carhartts and a 
baseball cap and drives a pickup truck and lives with his wife and two kids in a 
little Vermont village called Kirby (pop. 500), off in the wild hills of 
Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom. On occasion, he feeds his family by hunting deer 
and butchering the meat himself. He served three years in the US Army – working 
for “the Empire,” as he puts it – and he tells me his main reason for running is 
that he doesn’t want his kids serving in the Army. Or any other branch of the 
Empire. He wants the Empire to drop dead. And he thinks the best way to start 
that process is by getting Vermont to secede from the union. Destroy the empire 
by undermining it from within. That’s the goal.

Steele is no Tea Partyer, not a Palinite, not a Paul drone, not a liberal or a 
conservative, not a Democrat or a Republican, is endorsed by no official party, 
has no corporate donors. He’s the kind of candidate who, spending his own money 
and taking time out from his work and family, drives around the state crashing 
gubernatorial debates to which he is clearly not invited. Last April, organizers 
for the Democratic Party in Barre, gathered in that town’s Old Labor Hall, 
called the state police after Steele repeatedly shouted out from the crowd to 
his fellow candidates on the rostrum: “$1.5 billion dollars – our pro-rata share 
of a failed foreign policy – the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan – what could be 
done with all that money right here in Vermont?” The cops grabbed him by the 
arms and hauled him away, amid fearful yells from the crowd that he might be 
tasered. He wasn’t, but instead was booked on disorderly conduct – for saying 
something no one among the Democrats wanted to hear.

So much for the vaunted political tolerance in granola-eating, tree-hugging, 
gay-marriage-condoning Vermont.

The liberal progressive machine that runs the state – its chief beneficiaries 
Senators Bernie Sanders and Patrick Leahy – tends to have a lighter view of 
empire. When Vermont National Guardsmen are called to arms to be killed or 
maimed in the wars, Sens. Sanders and Leahy are there for the send-off, the 
photo-ops, the patriotic gibberish and the bowing of heads. When it is proposed 
that squadrons of killer drones and the newest F-35 fighter jets, costing 
taxpayers $115 million each, are to be deployed out of the military airfields at 
Burlington International Airport, they’re for it. When nuclear weapons developer 
Sandia Corp. expresses interest in setting up operations in the state, bringing 
to Vermont good jobs in service of the imperial arsenal, Sanders lobbies in favor.

Unsurprising that Steele, who views Sanders and Leahy as “collaborationist,” is 
shut out from the debates about the political future of Vermont. Still, he’s not 
so lone a voice as might be expected. His running mate, for the position of 
lieutenant governor, is an ex-Subaru salesman named Peter Garritano, who keeps 
it short and simple in his campaign statement: “I do not want my tax dollars,” 
says Garritano, “being used for war and killing.” Seven other secessionist 
candidates are contending for seats in the state legislature (these include a 
consultant to Oracle, a former U.S. Army lieutenant, and an executive from one 
of the largest solar energy companies in the Northeast). A professor emeritus of 
economics from Duke University, Thomas Naylor, 74, a Southerner by birth and a 
bombthrowing contrarian by nature, is the white-haired intellectual voice of the 
movement, founder of the thinktank Second Vermont Republic (the name is homage 
to the fact that there was a first Vermont republic, founded in 1777 as an 
independent nation and enduring for 14 years, until 1791). The secessionists 
have partnered with a successful publishing base, the Chelsea Green Publishing 
Company – the company’s founder, Ian Baldwin, is a raging secessionist – and 
they have a bi-monthly newspaper, Vermont Commons: Voices of Independence, with 
a circulation of 11,000, the latest issue of which features on its cover a pig 
attempting to fornicate with a sheep (the caption reading “Wall Street Hog 
Jumping Main Street Sheep”). They even have their own silver “independence 
coin.” And they have a surprising degree of support from the street: when last 
polled on the matter of secession, in 2007, 13 percent of Vermont voters were 
for it.

The Vermonter secesh, particularly Thomas Naylor, have been hammering for 
political disunion for more than a decade – Naylor was converted, he says, when 
Bill Clinton in the mid-‘90s completed the sale of the Democratic Party down the 
river to the corporatocracy. The point is: These people aren’t the playthings of 
the two-party game, and they’re smart enough to understand that a violent, 
racist empire functions today just as nicely with a dash of melanin in the Oval 
Office. (By contrast, as recently as last April, 80 percent of typical liberals 
approved of Obama.)

Granted, we’ve all heard the secessionist jabber from the right-wing, mostly as 
tantrum in the wake of Obama’s election. You hear it from Glenn Beck and the 
9/12ers and the Tenthers and the Oathkeepers and the neo-Confederates and even 
from Christian separatists, and you hear it as a kind of sepia-tone sentiment 
among Texans like Gov. Rick Perry and Ron Paul, who, Saran-wrapped in the 
Constitution, won’t dare take it beyond sentiment (the good Dr. Paul, for his 
part, gets re-elected year after year to continue not seceding during his 
service in the imperial city). No one knows where the right-wing secesh, 
clutching the sacred parchment, were hidden during the eight years of George W. 
Bush. Apparently the Patriot Act, the Military Commissions Act, the Homeland 
Security superstate, massive increases in federal spending and debt, warrantless 
wiretapping and executive secrecy, the institutionalization of torture, the 
erecting of our very own gulag archipelago, state-sanctioned kidnappings sweetly 
dubbed “rendition,” state terror unleashed overseas in the form of two illegal 
wars, Congress whored out more than ever to corporate America, corporations 
preying more than ever on Americans with the help of government – none of this 
was enough to inspire a rebellion against federal power. Then Obama was elected. 
And everything changed: The military budget for 2010 climbs to $1 trillion from 
$700 billion, the wars go on and on (and get expanded in Afghanistan), big 
government and big business are undisturbed in their marriage vows, the empire 
unfazed except for some inklings about money troubles. But now a Democrat, and, 
worse, what they call in some parts “a nigger,” was chieftain of the empire. 
That was simply unacceptable to visionaries like Glenn Beck. Wake up, people! 
Let’s secede! The upshot is that secessionism has been captured by the mindless 
right as a talking point on Fox News.

What the Vermonter secesh present is something altogether more serious, a new 
paradigm in American politics: the rise of a left-wing populist peacenik 
secessionist movement, a leftism that rejects big government, that seeks not a 
take-over of the federal center but an end to centralized power altogether. Call 
it a kind of Green Tea Party, shorn of the gun fetishism, the blind rage, the 
know-nothingism. Or call it the thinking man’s secession, arising as a 
reasonable answer to the cold facts of our national impasse. What’s gone wrong 
with the US government, argue the Vermonters, is that it has been totally 
captured by the corporatocracy, corrupted to the core, a lost cause, 
unreformable. Its laws are written by and for the rich and the powerful, whose 
predatory business models – Walmart, Monsanto, Goldman Sachs et al – operate 
against the interests of average Vermonters. It blows Vermont’s precious tax 
dollars in bailing out insolvent banks and piratical financiers, bombing 
children in Pakistan, kidnapping and torturing foreigners, slapping military 
bases on every continent (over a thousand of them across 153 countries), etc. 
etc. ad nauseum. The Vermonter secesh see no good future for the US. Instead, 
the country will likely flush itself down the toilet of its own corruption and 
hubris – ruined by unsustainable debt, unwinnable wars, military overstretch, 
pathologic dependence on cheap oil.

So what’s a proud Vermonter to do? “Rebel and say hell no,” says Dennis Steele. 
“The gods of the Empire are not the gods of Vermont.” Kicking the U.S. out of 
his state, in Steele’s view, is a matter of life, liberty, happiness for 
himself, his family, his community. In the short term, it’s about ending 
Vermont’s involvement in the wars, bringing home Vermont soldiers – who happen 
to suffer the highest per-capita casualty rate of any state – cutting off the 
tax base that helps fund the wars, ending the moral support of war that tacitly 
defines the continued association with the empire.

Objectors will say that Steele and his ilk are treasonous and crazy, that 
secession is illegal and unconstitutional, that Vermont would shrivel and die as 
a free republic, that it couldn’t survive on its own. To which the secessionists 
answer that they’re no more crazy than the colonists who founded the United 
States, who asserted a natural right of revolution, and who didn’t wait for 
English parliamentarians and courts, the established law-givers of empire, to 
rubber-stamp their revolt. They just went ahead and did it and damned the 
consequences. The Vermonter secesh stand for a return to an aboriginal American 
idea: the right of revolution against unaccountable power. As Steele tells me, 
“Let’s always remember that the Declaration of Independence is a secessionist 
document.”

Christopher Ketcham, a freelance writer in Brooklyn, NY, is writing a book about 
secession movements. Contact him at cketcham99 at mindspring.com

http://www.counterpunch.org/ketcham09022010.html