(I wrote this yesterday, put a little time into it, and its languishing in Huffington Posts’s overburdened, pre-election queue. Rather than wait for it to show up and crosspost here, I’ll just go ahead and throw it up on GMD…

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It’s the year of the angry conservative. Of the tea party republican, no less. Voters think Obama is too liberal and are swinging to the far right. The GOP stands to overwhelm the House of Representatives and may take the Senate. Enthusiasm gap! Voter outrage! Dems running against “Obamacare!” Dogs and cats living together…!

And then there’s Vermont. Or perhaps you haven’t heard of us…

Vermont is different in a lot of currently emblematic ways. Yes there’s a tea party candidate for US House, but he is no threat to the staunchly liberal incumbent.

A true blue state you say? Then why has the Governor for most of the decade been a Republican? Why is the Lieutenant Governor a pro-life, anti-gay marriage, conservative Christian who is solidly supportive of GOP mass-market positions such as opposition to the so-called “Ground Zero Mosque?”

And why in a state that is the nation’s most rural (which, the media narrative goes, should therefore be the most conservative), does the national narrative stand to be flipped on its head? In Vermont, it’s been a long time Republican administration in executive power, and the voters stand ready to possibly promote a progressive Democrat to the position, despite the fact that he trailed in the polls around 20 points earlier in the summer.

So what gives? The media has neither the wherewithal nor the interest to actively examine this phenomenon. These mainstream narrative mills tend to be uninterested in things that might prove their analyses inadequate, and instead simply cast Vermont as so innately quirky and silly as to merit complete dismissal (and that’s if they acknowledge the state at all). Vermonters are just some kind of seperate species, apparently. They don’t count.

Vermonters tend to embrace this “unique species” branding too (because it’s kind of fun), but they’re obviously humans (and if that seems like too obvious a point to make, well… maybe).

What is the case is that Vermont political dynamics are not beholden to the same overarching guide on what’s-what that our media institutions are promoting as hard truth. And whatever those counter-convention-wisdom dynamics are, they tend to resonate when given a hearing on the national stage. This was evident when the little known former Governor of Vermont, Howard Dean, ran for President in 2004 and was roundly laughed at by the political and media establishment. None of them were laughing only a few months later, when his offering of some of that same Vermont to the nation at large resonated with enough in the Democratic Party that he very nearly walked away with the nomination (in fact, he likely would have if not for the panicked coordination of his opponents in the Washington Democratic Party establishment, notably current Obama press secretary Robert Gibbs, to craft one of the more strikingly negative advertising images in recent political memory).

Vermont’s politics can fairly be called dialectic, in the sense that they are the synthesis of many seeming contradictions, therfore defying simple explanations. Almost any issue can serve as an example, but take the politics of the environment. Vermont is considered a haven of liberal environmentalism to many outsiders (and even to many on the inside). Largely that’s due to appearences; it’s rural quality, natural vistas, recreation opportunities, even the lack of billboards along roadsides, banned as the were decades ago. Some of those vistas (along with the relatively low impact of the housing market bust in the state) reflect the success of the landmark land use regulatory regime that has been in place in one form or another for decades. Hidden behind those vistas are the repeated failures to implement natural resource protection laws and strong progressive energy policies.

The fact is that there is nothing in the air, the water or the genes that makes Vermont such a different place – the kind of place that elects both an open socialist to the Senate and a conservative Christian pro-lifer as Lieutenant Governor. In fact there is no one reason to account for the dynamics; it is neither some simple small-town-versus-big-town, nor do the political divisions and discrepencies break down along the lines of “native born” versus “outsiders,” as much as many find it politically advantageous to try and cast it as such.

But here’s the point; instead of looking for the reason why Vermont political society breaks the plotlines of the rest of the country, it makes more sense to explain why the rest of the country isn’t more like Vermont. The easy, pre-digested media narratives, institutional lines of seperation (whether those be institutions defined by distinctions of religion, region, gender, race, income, whatever…) simply haven’t come to define voters in Vermont the way they have in other states. It’s not say they aren’t important – just that they shake out differently. The answer to “why” is probably a complex soup of reasons, rather than one or two easy ones – but we should all be taking a good look at what those reasons may be, and how they can translate to the rest of the country.

It is the paradox of population that the more of us there are and the more we then communicate via mass media, the more we tend to coagulate into monolithic mentalities, depite our increased diversity as a collection of individuals.

What Vermont shows us, though, is that trends, generalities and simplistic media narratives are not necessarily destiny, even as those narratives and the simple stereotyping they feed exert powerful pressures towards their own self-fulfillment.

(Vermonters: Visit votegreengov.org and take the pledge to vote green in 2010!)