The Sanders compact has crumbled. Win McNamee/Getty Images

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.”
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