Reflections on 30, growing up with, and out of, politics.
by Avery Muzikar
My first awareness of politics was the Bush-Kerry election of 2004. I was ardently in favor of Kerry, but when pressed I couldn’t have told you why other than a vague certainty that Bush was both stupid and bad. This became a general sentiment around Republicans, which was probably inevitable growing up in a household with a teacher for a parent.
On the other hand, my childhood hero was our small town bus driver, who was a typical Republican of the time–deeply suspicious of any tax raises and hawkish on terrorism. Our bus ride arguments were (and remain) my gold standard for a reasonable disagreement. I’m grateful, because I know a lot of people who grew up in a bubble ever knowing anyone from the other side of the aisle.
I grew up listening to VPR, back when it was so stubbornly trying to be apolitical. Its core liberalism was broad and curious and always insisted on having another viewpoint.
One Democrat, one Republican, no matter the issue (how far we’ve come!). I firmly credit public radio with a good portion of my education about history, politics, and current affairs. I only really took sides on my own behalf when I discovered the Daily Show. Jon Stewart, as he did for so many of my generation, woke me up to the tribal nature of politics.
I finally had a team! I was an ardent Democrat, capital D. We were the Good Guys, trying to get everyone healthcare and stop climate change. We weren’t going to let the ignorant, corrupt Republicans stop us! Even then, though, Stewart was perfectly willing to mock Obama or Hillary, calling out hypocrisy and corruption on all sides.
That’s the thing about the Daily Show–as much as it made me a Democrat, it made me deeply suspicious of hypocrisy, emptiness, and evasiveness on the part of politicians. So, as it awakened my political consciousness, it also planted the seeds for the skepticism that would later define me.
When I came to Burlington at 17, I was high on the first term of Obama’s hope and change messaging. Except, as it turned out, there had only really been hope, with very little actual change. I watched Occupy take off like a raging bonfire of class-conscious righteousness, only to be bulldozed by the corporate elite that Obama had installed in leadership positions (so much for being a community organizer).
I watched the anger and indignation we had all felt at the crash of 2008 be turned into a complacent acceptance of the fact that not only were no bankers punished, they were rewarded with positions at the highest levels of government. Still, I held my nose and voted him for a second term. Good Guys.
Bernie was the first time I felt inspired since that initial rush of the 2008 election. Finally, here was someone calling out the corruption for what it was–someone who could explain why it was that despite the vast majority of the country agreeing on certain ideas, they would never actually be put into action.
I donated, I volunteered, I wore the pins. And then I watched Bernie sandbagged by the DNC, I watched him cave to corruption as he endorsed Hillary Clinton, and then watched him talk about “my friend Joe” as Biden stabbed him in the back. So much for our Revolution. So much for the Good Guys.
That was the last time I really believed the notion that national elections would bring any sweeping change. They don’t. As much as people like to talk about Trump and what a dangerous juggernaut he was and could be, the truly remarkable thing (no matter what your views on the man) is how little he actually changed. Grand ideas fail every time. Things succeed in fits and starts.
So, I turned to local politics. I liked the idea of a Progressive party in Burlington. I thought it meant something further left than the neoliberalism I had grown to hate about the Democrats. Then I started to pay attention.
In 2020 I truly realized what a warped mockery of leftism we had created here. For all their talk of conscientiousness, Burlington Progressives were (and are) shockingly out of touch. Take defunding the police–it’s supported overwhelmingly by wealthy white people, when black communities who have the most stake in it are opposed.
Living in Burlington, I learned how so many of our problems are self-inflicted, frequently by the bright shiny ideas our Progressive representatives trot out. It really just goes to show that the most highly educated people are often the best at deluding themselves. People mean well, but they vote for policies that don’t work. They haven’t learned, either. Our current mayor, for instance, described a major safety issue in this city as being stickers that the majority of Americans agree with, when people are being stabbed and shot in our streets.
Progressives are also staggeringly performative. They’ll spend hours of council time and NPA meetings on pronouns while the potholes get bigger, our pocketbooks get smaller, and the most marginalized stand to lose the most (despite the fact that they’re supposedly cared about so much).
All of their views are oddly amiable to large corporations, but nobody seems to notice or care.
They’re happy to keep parroting the latest niche views, all of which keep poor people squabbling amongst themselves (personally, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that all these expedient ideas took root after Occupy… we’ve never talked properly about class since).
For a classically liberal, European socialist kind of person, I have no place to go. In many ways, I don’t feel that I’ve actually changed. What’s changed is the world around me, how my friends have started to think, how people have begun to align themselves more broadly, and how the system, such as it is, has left many of us behind–not just economically but ideologically as well.
I find myself enjoying conversations with Republicans because it’s somehow easier to start from total disagreement and find common ground. With the left these days, any deviance or disagreement is punishable by ostracism and slander. But I’m not conservative. I may be more libertarian than I used to be but I’m certainly not a Republican.
Should I go back to the Democrats, now that the Progressives are rabid maniacs? Democrats have no principles and are complacent at best. That’s true locally just as much as nationally–I know, since I worked with them on my previous campaign for city council. I can’t think of a single time I heard them talk about real policy ideas. The only thing that binds them together is a determination to stop the Progressive agenda–not an agreement on what should be in its place.
The party is operated almost entirely on the vague idea that the status quo will somehow resolve itself if we all smile hard enough into the faces of developers and chain retailers.
This, at the heart of it, is the problem with our parties: tribalism with very little imagination aside from stopping your opponents.
In the midst of that, I worry about the future of my city, Burlington, let alone the state and the country. I’m staring down the barrel of a future where I have no hope of buying a house in the county (still less in Burlington), where public safety is eroding, and where a pattern of Democratic leadership hollowing out public infrastructure while Progressives hollow out our pocketbooks has left the average person high and dry.
Leadership at the state and local level continually fixate on wooing tourists, even paying people to move here while raising the price of staying for Vermonters. If we’re not careful, we’ll soon be a vassal state to rich yuppies from Massachusetts.
My hope is Burlington is like its ravine (if you missed it, do yourself a favor and watch the video essay in SevenDays). It’ll keep coming back, despite the best efforts of people to change its course. The same may be true of VT, which has already reinvented itself many times. If we do pull through, it won’t be because of our leaders but in spite of them.
Anyway, for the politically adrift, it’s hard to know where to turn. Maybe that’s just adulthood. Not being part of something (and being fine with that) is a marker of maturity, as far as I’m concerned. Any child can chant slogans or follow marching orders. Being an adult is to walk firmly and quietly in your own path. Others may join, but you can’t and shouldn’t make people believe things.
I just turned 30. It’s a time when everyone (on Instagram at least) agrees you should prioritize how you spend your time and energy. And, actually, accepting limitation is freeing. I won’t be everything I dreamed of being–which means I need to make some concrete choices and act on them. That’s true politically too. You grow up, and realize you can stop wasting time and energy trying to change a world that’s much too large for you.
Rather than burning yourself out in futility, you can take that passion and drive to work in your own small community where you do in fact have a great deal of power.
No more marching and protesting or putting up an endless procession of flags to show everyone what a good person you are–clean up the street, fix something, help a neighbor.
We plant our gardens, as Voltaire said, and hope to change our small pocket of the world. It turns out that for me, at least, politics (as the founders knew) should be personal rather than partisan.
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