Gemma Seymour is a District 8 member of Brattleboro Representative Town Meeting, as well as a member of the town Planning Commission.
BRATTLEBORO-It’s been said that “people get the government they deserve” (Joseph de Maistre, French writer, diplomat, and lawyer).
“Democracy,” it has also been said, “is two wolves and a lamb voting on what’s for dinner” (Shelby Foote, historian). You can be sure that lamb will be on the menu.
Still again, it has been said that “the strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge’” (Isaac Asimov, writer and scholar).
The founders of our state and our nation, and the framers and ratifiers of their constitutions, understood very well that to be governed by democracy alone would be to invite government by our worst impulses. This has become more clear than ever in the present moment, dominated as we have been by the divide-and-conquer ethos of neoliberalism for the past half century.
We get the government we deserve, because we get precisely the government that results from the level of care we choose to take in our duty of voting, the level of care we choose to take in our duty to ourselves and to our fellows to inform and educate ourselves, and the level of care and consideration we choose to exhibit toward each other and to Nature.
In this critical moment, when we desperately need a politics of care and consideration to prevail over a politics of division and conquest, it seems to some that surely a government in which all vote must be superior to a government in which only a select few vote, particularly on such a small scale as a Vermont town.
To that end, a petition has been made to the Brattleboro Selectboard to place a referendum on the ballot that would rescind the representative form of Town Meeting that has prevailed in Brattleboro for the past 65 years.
For all public questions, proponents would replace Representative Town Meeting with a townwide secret ballot, archaically called an “Australian ballot,” despite that procedure having been an established norm in elections in the United States for well over a century.
I oppose these measures — not only because I am an elected member of that body, but also because I study history, I study politics, and it is my considered opinion that rescinding Representative Town Meeting would be detrimental to our town. Rather than empowering the people, it would disempower and effectively disenfranchise far too many.
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In 1960, when Representative Town Meeting was instituted, the voting age was still 21, not 18, and the demographics of the town were both more conservative and more homogeneous than today.
Furthermore, most of those voting in 1960 had in their adult minds the experience of World War II, which had ended just 15 years prior, an experience which I think we can all probably agree brought the country closer together and demonstrated the value of our political norms.
A soldier who entered the war at age 18 in 1942 would have been 36 years old in 1960, in the prime of their adult understanding of the world and of politics. The youngest 21-year-old voter in 1960 would now be 87.
Very few people in our town who participate in public and civic life in 2026 have the standing to claim accurate memories of why Brattleboro voted 1,293–749 in favor of Representative Town Meeting in 1960, or why and how the town sustained challenges to it in both 1964 and 1968, long before the demographic shift began to change Vermont from a Republican Party bastion to a Democratic Party bastion.
Our population, at least in numbers, has not significantly changed, but the number of households — and their diversity — has dramatically increased.
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If merely increasing the number of votes cast would improve our government, why stop at Town Meeting? Why not abolish the Selectboard as well, the Vermont Legislature and governor, even the United States Congress and the president? Why have courts, even, if the will of the people is so obviously superior?
Are we to believe that our more conservative forebears were somehow attempting to subvert the will of the people, by calling for a representative form of Town Meeting to replace the traditional direct democracy of an open Town Meeting?
We now live in a society that has been designed to strip from us any measure of care and consideration we might wish for ourselves, our loved ones, and our communities. The manipulation algorithms of social media, designed to harvest our outrage for profits, to inflame the sentiments of the public, have replaced any pretense of responsible journalism in too many of our institutions and have become the de facto public square, filled with people endlessly ridiculing, haranguing, and harassing their perceived opponents.
To make law and policy by common consent is to reduce government to something below the average of human intelligence, knowledge, wisdom, and compassion for, mathematically speaking, a majority must prevail, and a majority is more than half.
Rather than being ruled by the better angels of our natures, as Abraham Lincoln urged, we would instead be drawn backsliding into philosopher Thomas Hobbes’ bellum omnium contra omnes — the “war of all against all.”
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All societies above a certain size and scope are better governed by representation.
Government by representatives, at least theoretically, allows each constituency to choose from among its members the most qualified, the most intelligent, the most knowledgeable, the most wise, the most thoughtful and considerate.
It binds those representatives to deliberate in one room at the same time, face-to-face, in the best interests of the people, rather than measure the worth of each and every proposal secretly by the least common denominator.
The voters of Brattleboro understood this in 1960, in 1964, and in 1968. Are we more wise than they?
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To provide insurance, we govern by written Constitution, by the rule of Law, rather than the whim of Man. Our constitutions are designed to give us assurance that, whatsoever else our representatives may enact, they are barred from abridging our fundamental rights, so that neither they nor the people at large may run roughshod over our freedoms. Our form of government is specifically designed to thwart democracy when it needs thwarting.
Government exists to be an abstraction of the trust relationships between neighbors that must be maintained for peaceable coexistence. Above a certain number of people, human consciousness does not permit implicit trust, because that is the number of those with whom we can sustain intimate bonds of neighborly fellowship. Most people cannot maintain implicit trust relationships with more than about 150 people at a time.
Governments ideally exist to allow us to get along with less strife in larger communities by making the due process of law impersonal and impartial. Government functions best when it governs closest to its constituents; but beyond the point where it is possible to implicitly trust because of our personal familiarity, government must be be sufficiently constrained by law so that we need not trust its officials, personally.
If that is not the government that results from the voting of our representatives, then who is to blame but we ourselves, for failing to choose from among ourselves those as will best secure good governance — not for the greatest number, but for all?
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Government — whether by direct democracy or by constitutional, Democratic-Republican representation — does not self-regulate. It must be continually held accountable and measured, not against the will of the majority, but against the unalienable, natural rights of the individual to Equality, Liberty, and Justice for All.
It is obligated to serve the best interests of all, not the desires of those who happen to seize the reins of power in any given era. It must not abandon even a single individual by the wayside to serve any majority, however great.
Adding more voters who decline to take interest in civic affairs and who vote with their passions is a recipe for bad government. It would remove power and deliberation from the people’s duly elected representatives and concentrate it in the hands of any three-member majority of the Selectboard, who would have inordinate power to determine which measures go to the ballot. It would fundamentally reduce the capacity for checks and balances in our town government.
For these reasons, I urge the people of Brattleboro to oppose this ballot measure, and vote to retain Representative Town Meeting. In a world that has forgotten how to evaluate qualification in favor of endlessly glorifying quantification, I would choose quality over quantity.
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