Bernie Sanders has lost Vermont Working-class voters are fleeing the state

A large, bearded man in a bandana strides out of a cabin surrounded by rusted trucks and spare car parts. He waves and points to a large sign on his roof, which reads: “Muslim Free Zone”. Looming over the nearby train-tracks, it is well placed to shock commuters and tourists hurtling by on their way to more appealing destinations.

Welcome to Rutland, a small city in one of Vermont’s beautiful mountain valleys. Here in so-called “Old Vermont”, the people are poorer and more conservative than in the liberal and wealthy city of Burlington. Rutland is a world apart from the pampered lands of “New Vermont”, with its affluent college towns, weed dispensaries, ski resorts and lakeside houses. Rural people here have been left behind, and their politics are growing more radical by the year.

For a long time, Vermont’s golden boy, US Senator Bernie Sanders, kept the peace between the state’s rural working class and liberal transplants from the coast. Despite a raging “Take Back Vermont” movement in the early 2000s, Sanders’s Left-wing populist policies settled tensions between the “woodchucks” and “flatlanders”. Sanders was and still is a contradictory figure, which suited his constituency perfectly. He is hesitantly pro-gun rights, but against the billboards that market them; fiercely libertarian while also supporting “big state” welfare policy; vocally pro-LGBT and veterans’ rights.

Yet the Sanders compact between Old and New Vermont is growing increasingly fragile. The gap between the poorest Vermonters and wealthy new arrivals is widening, as inflation, deindustrialisation, farming constraints and high property prices squeeze rural populations. Though the Green Mountain State is often considered a bastion of liberalism, it is no longer immune from the political fury poisoning the rest of America.

To get a sense of Vermont’s delicate political situation, I travelled to Burlington: the birthplace of New Vermont. In the late Sixties, refugees from the hippy movement, including Sanders, pitched up here and refashioned themselves as socialists. These hippy exiles — along with the expansion of college education — are credited with transforming Vermont from a Protestant Republican stronghold into a liberal Democratic one.

“This used to be a very Republican state up until the Sixties” says Janet Metz, Chair of Chittenden County Republicans. “You had a lot of people coming to study at the University of Vermont and staying here. A lot of the hippy generation came up here too — not going to school, but living on communes.”

Eventually these starry-eyed bohemians would grow up, start businesses and buy houses. Politics became pragmatic as the Progressive Party replaced New Left radical movements such as the Liberty Union. Sanders’s former comrades in the Liberty Union would go on to disavow him in 1999 as a “bomber”, “imperialist” and “sell-out” over his supposed support of Nato’s intervention in Yugoslavia. At one point, they even occupied his Burlington congressional office. But it wasn’t enough to stop the rise of Vermont’s new Progressive nobility.

From Burlington I head to the small farming town of Hinesburg. When I arrive, Vermont’s Progressive Lieutenant Governor, David Zuckerman, picks me up in a rundown car he uses for farming organic chickens, pigs and CBD. Zuckerman has known Sanders since the Nineties, and the two are cut from the same cloth: like Sanders, Zuckerman is a Vermont expat hailing from the Boston suburbs; a progressive, but also a pragmatic, straight-talking social democrat. You can see glimmers of Vermont’s old New Left libertarian ethos in his opposition to mandatory government vaccination among other things. And there is talk that he might one day succeed Sanders as a Vermont senator.

For now, Zuckerman believes Vermont’s communities haven’t yet been ruined by polarisation. “People are respectful to their neighbours,” he tells me. “It’s still a value, because you might go off the road in the middle of the night in a snowstorm. Everyone’s going to help — it doesn’t matter what bumper stickers are on your car. Compared to the rest of the country, it’s a strong ethic.” Yet, Zuckerman admits that this compact between Vermonters is less strong than it was decades ago.

Perhaps the state of local politics in New England explains this relative harmony. Where national politics divides the state, respect for local democracy unites it. I’ve arrived on Town Meeting Day, an annual event where townsfolk come together to debate and vote on local issues. It’s a New England tradition dating to the colonial era: for 24 hours, ordinary voters turn into legislators and scrutinise the town budget. These small, rural community meetings have “empowered us to demand authenticity in our relationship with leaders”, says Susan Clark, a writer on Vermont politics and co-author of Slow Democracy: Rediscovering Community, Bringing Decision Making Back Home.

The stubbornness and eccentricity of Vermonters is on full display at the meeting. Citizens vote on everything from fire trucks to pavements. One woman stands up several times and asks: “Why do we need four snow ploughs and seven cops? We can do with two ploughs and five cops.” The officials chairing the debate provide justifications for the numbers, and the woman blankly refuses to concede her point. Between votes, the chair of the meeting mills around and chats with residents about Donald Trump and the dangers of the next presidential election.

The gap between politicians and the citizenry feels smaller here than elsewhere, with retirees and young police officers stopping to chat with, or lambast, Zuckerman about small-town and global issues alike. Here, political conversation is often infused with wider American anxieties about class, power and economics. The culture war is never far away.

By contrast, Town Meeting Day in Burlington is a lethargic affair. There is the odd road sign and a dozen picketers huddled against the rain. The people I stop in the street are apathetic, shrugging me off while muttering “they’re all the same, aren’t they?” The political energy of Hinesburg appears to have dissipated in the city. All the Progressive Party activists I talk to seem quietly dispirited: it was only four years ago that their candidate was poised to take the White House.

The Republican chair, Metz, is similarly disillusioned. “If you look at who’s in the Vermont house and legislature as Democrats and Progressives, it’s trust-fund babies, people with spouses who make a lot of money.” Moreover, Metz points out that, increasingly, it is not the Progressives who are threatening her base, but widespread apathy and distrust of party politics. “I’m competitive in the northwest part of my county, in Milton, but it’s changing,” she says. “If you look, district by district, people identified as independents often now outnumber Democrats and Republicans combined.”

Metz explains that a lot of the “Old Vermont” crowd, those who traditionally made up her Republican base, are leaving. “What’s really driving populism in Vermont are the people who have lived here for generations and can’t pay their property taxes anymore… A lot of our people are leaving the state — they’re just up and leaving. They’re moving to New Hampshire, Florida and the Carolinas because they can’t afford to live here anymore.”

Their exodus is symbolic of the wider breakdown of the Bernie Sanders compact. His vision of an affordable, independent and proudly democratic Vermont, in which Old and New coexisted peacefully, now appears a fruitless daydream. In its place is anger and resentment. The home of radical Left-wing populism has finally succumbed to the now-familiar American rot of polarisation.

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