Rural America has long been home to progressive champions and history is rife with stories of rural people banding together to fight systems of oppression and injustice, a tradition which has carried forward to this very day. In fact, the current progressive movement owes a lot to the people of rural Vermont.
In 2016, Senator Bernie Sanders surprised the world when he launched a longshot bid for the presidency and won 43% of the vote in the Democratic primary against former Secretary of State and eventual nominee Hillary Clinton. While Sanders lost the battle, he won the ideological war. Some of the core tenets of his campaign – free college, student loan forgiveness, increased taxation of billionaires, Medicare for All, and a $15-20 an hour minimum wage are no longer considered fringe ideology. In 2020, many of his establishment opponents even adopted some of his core stances. The rise of Sanders and his ideology on the national level is the capstone of a progressive movement that began in the hills of rural Vermont in the late 1960s.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 64.9% of Vermonters live in rural communities, making it the most rural state in the country. Until the 1960s, Vermont was also reliably Republican. In fact, it was one of only two states (the other being Maine) to have voted against Franklin D. Roosevelt in all four of his presidential campaigns. That started to change, however, when young people from across the Northeast began moving to Vermont in the “back to the land” movement that was part of the counterculture.
Between 1960 and 1980, Vermont’s population increased from 389,881 to 511,456, a 31% increase, the largest since the turn of the 19th century. Many of these people formally migrated as part of the “back to the land” movement, while others came independently. Many were politically active and engaged, traits they brought to their new home. In June of 1970, these newcomers found a political home in West Rupert, in the southwest corner of the state, when New York transplant Peter Diamondstone (who had moved to Vermont to take a job at Vermont Legal Aid), former U.S. Representative William H. Meyers (in whose home they had gathered), and others founded the Liberty Union Party, an explicitly left-wing party.
A 29-year-old Brooklyn transplant named Bernie Sanders joined the party a year later.
Sanders ran repeatedly throughout the 1970s as a third-party candidate for governor and his future office, the United States Senate. He lost every time, peaking at 6.1% in his 1976 campaign for governor. Sanders rose to chairman but left the party in 1978 over his frustrations about the party’s lack of activity between election cycles. He aspired to do more than just run for office as token opposition.
Sanders went on to serve as Burlington’s mayor, a member of the United States House of Representatives, and then the United States Senate. Along the way, voters in a majority rural state put a rubber stamp on Bernie Sanders and his progressive allies. The Vermont Progressive Party was formally established in 2000 and traces its lineage back to the coalition that helped propel Sanders to victory in Burlington and across the state. They currently hold two statewide offices, a seat in the Vermont State Senate, and five seats in the Vermont State House of Representatives.
Their margins of victory also indicate that they aren’t just being carried by the people who moved to the state in the 1970s. The progressive movement in Vermont successfully persuaded people in a former Republican stronghold, transforming the state and ultimately changing the national political landscape.
If not for Sanders’s political success in Vermont, his ideas would not have gotten to the mainstream, and many of the candidates he inspired to run would not be in elected office today. Many organizers and activists who were inspired and empowered by his 2016 campaign may not have the support they have today. The modern-day progressive movement owes a lot to rural America.
Christopher Chavis grew up in rural Robeson County, North Carolina, and is a frequent writer and speaker on rural access-to-justice issues. He is a citizen of the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina.
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