How Vermont’s governing class is destroying the State it claims to serve

by Matt Swenson

Vermont is dying by its own hand.

Not dramatically, not all at once — but steadily, quietly, in the way that 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 systematically pushed out by a governing class that has never had to live with the consequences of a single decision it has made.

That is not governance. That is occupation.

Aristotle understood something that Vermont’s progressive establishment has spent two decades trying to forget — that civilization requires its governors to have skin in the game. That people who bear no cost of a decision will make that decision badly every single time. The Founders built that instinct into the original architecture of American government. You had to have stake. You had to have something to lose. Vermont’s current political class has turned that principle inside out. They govern people whose lives they have never lived, whose problems they will never face, whose bills they will never pay. They set property taxes they don’t pay. They design energy policy for commutes they don’t make. They build a welfare infrastructure that strains every public system in the state and then congratulate themselves for their compassion while working Vermonters foot the bill and lose their voice in the process.

Call it what it is. Progressive Apartheid. Not in the crude historical sense — but in its functional architecture. A system engineered to separate the governing class from the governed. To insulate decision makers from consequences. To maintain that separation through the slow capture of every institution that was supposed to represent everyone equally. The productive class pays. The credentialed ideological class decides. Housing policy is written by people who own homes — and it protects them, through zoning restrictions that strangle new development and price working Vermonters out of communities their families built over generations. Energy policy is designed by people who can absorb its costs — and it punishes everyone who cannot. The welfare infrastructure grows because it generates political dependency, and political dependency generates votes, and votes generate power. Round and round it goes. And Vermont shrinks.

Until Vermont seriously examines a structural solution — something closer to the tax models that states like Colorado and Pennsylvania have used with flat tax frameworks, or Wyoming and Florida which have eliminated state income tax entirely — working Vermonters will continue to pay a disproportionate price for a government that serves someone else. The current tax architecture is not accidental. It is a feature of the system, not a bug. It keeps the productive class financially constrained and politically reactive while the governing class floats above the consequences.

The Green Mountain Care Board stands as perhaps the clearest illustration of progressive governance theory colliding with human reality. Established to control healthcare costs, the board has instead become a regulatory body making budget decisions for Vermont’s hospitals from a distance — decisions with consequences its members will never personally absorb. When the UVM Health Network sought relief from a $44 million deficit, the board allowed $14 million. The result was immediate — suspension of psychiatric unit expansions, $122 million in cuts to jobs and patient services, and adults and children in mental health crisis waiting days in emergency departments for beds that didn’t exist. Vermont has faced a chronic shortage of inpatient psychiatric capacity since 2011. The board’s response to that crisis has been to make it worse.

Then there are the guns. Vermont once had one of the most honest firearms cultures in the country — lawful, quiet, rooted in genuine self-reliance and constitutional clarity. The progressive legislature has spent years dismantling it through legislation that has produced exactly zero reduction in violence while successfully turning law-abiding Vermonters into criminals for behavior that harmed no one. And while they were doing it, Vermont’s crime was rising — not falling. Aggravated assaults up 42% between 2018 and 2023. A 185% increase in firearm related crime in a single year. Burlington’s homicide rate surpassing Philadelphia and Phoenix. The low crime reputation Vermont has coasted on for decades is a fiction that the data no longer supports. Crime is up. Public safety capacity is down. And the policy response has been to restrict the rights of the people who were never the problem.

The architects of that policy did not arrive organically. Gun Sense Vermont presents itself as a grassroots organization started by Vermonters. It is not. It is functionally a state chapter of Everytown for Gun Safety — an organization founded and primarily bankrolled by Michael Bloomberg, a billionaire who has personally committed an estimated $270 million to gun control causes since 2007. The same progressive movement that campaigns on taxing the wealthy and fighting billionaire influence has been taking direction and money from one of the wealthiest individuals in American history to disarm the working Vermonters they claim to represent. That contradiction deserves to be said plainly and loudly.

Meanwhile the law enforcement infrastructure that might actually address rising crime has been gutted by the same ideology. Agencies hollowed out. Capacity reduced. Morale destroyed by a political culture that treats officers as suspects and violent offenders as patients. Into that vacuum they inserted trauma-informed care — a therapeutic framework with almost no validated data behind its application to serious criminal populations, deployed not because evidence supported it but because ideology demanded it. The result is exactly what anyone honest would have predicted. Violent and extreme personalities learned the system would accommodate them. The people absorbing that lesson in real time are not the architects in Montpelier. They are the officers. The transport workers. The first responders. The ordinary Vermonters who meet the consequences of this philosophy on the street, in the workplace, in their own communities — and who have been injured doing so in numbers that the state has never been asked to account for publicly.

Someone needs to ask the question that Vermont’s progressive establishment has avoided for years and answer it honestly — how many lives have your policies ended? How many Vermonters are dead, victimized, displaced, or broken because you governed by ideology instead of evidence? How many families lost everything to an opioid crisis you met with harm reduction theory instead of enforcement? How many working people were priced out of communities their grandparents built? How many public safety professionals have been injured under frameworks that prioritized the comfort of violent offenders over the safety of the people protecting us? This is not a rhetorical exercise. It is an accounting. And it is long overdue.

Jill Krowinski is not running for reelection. Phil Baruth is leaving. Both gone in the same cycle — and the framing that this is coincidence should be rejected immediately. This is what the beginning of accountability looks like. The 2024 elections sent a signal that Vermont’s political class heard even if they won’t say so publicly. Republican gains in the legislature were not an accident of candidate quality or campaign mechanics. They were working Vermonters using the only mechanism still available to them. The state is not as captured as Montpelier believes. The people who have been quietly absorbing the cost of two decades of progressive governance are done being quiet.

The question Vermont now faces is whether its institutions can correct before the damage becomes permanent — or whether new faces simply carry the same ideology forward under different names, continuing to govern on behalf of those who need it least while the people who built this state leave for somewhere they can still afford to live and still afford to be free.

What that correction requires is not simply new leadership operating within the same rigid ideological framework that produced these failures. Political tribalism has demonstrated its limits. What Vermont needs — what governance broadly needs — is a fundamental shift in how decisions get made. Bayesian reasoning. Cognitive symbiosis — human minds working in genuine partnership with analytical systems capable of processing complexity that ideology-driven politics cannot. The data exists. The patterns are visible. What has been missing is the willingness to follow evidence rather than doctrine and govern by outcomes rather than intentions. Rigid political frameworks have not gotten us here — they have kept us here.

Vermont deserves better. So does the rest of the country watching what happens when a state disappears into its own ideology.