["Its important to meet people where they are," says David
Zuckerman, who ran on both the Democratic Party and Vermont
Progressive Party tickets]
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LIEUTENANT GOVERNOR, FARMER AND UNAPOLOGETIC PROGRESSIVE  
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Steve Early, Suzanne Gordon
October 23, 2023
Barn Raiser
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_ "Its important to meet people where they are," says David
Zuckerman, who ran on both the Democratic Party and Vermont
Progressive Party tickets _

Vermont Lieutenant Governor David Zuckerman on his farm in his truck
holding two of the books that accompany him on his Banned Book Tour,
Beloved by Toni Morrison and the a children's book And Tango Makes
Three, the story of a baby penguin with two father, Terry J. Allen,
Opposable

 

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt) has inspired thousands of progressives to
seek elected office, but few have been as successful as Vermont farmer
David Zuckerman, now serving his third term as Lieutenant Governor.

Born in 1971, Zuckerman was raised in Brookline, Massachusetts, where
his mother served on the school board—an experience that gave him a
interest in activism and issues, but left him wary of party politics
and the power dynamics. initially left him with a distaste for
politics. He attended the University of Vermont in Burlington, to
major in chemistry with the hope of following in the footsteps of his
father, a doctor who died when Zuckerman was 13.

For decades, Zuckerman has been a leading member of the Vermont
Progressive Party. He first ran for the Vermont House of
Representatives in 1994 when he was a 23-year-old college student, but
lost by 59 votes. Two years later, Zuckerman tried again and won,
becoming the fourth Progressive Party member in the Vermont House of
Representatives, where he served until 2011. In 2012, after running in
and winning both the Progressive Party and Democratic Party primaries
he was elected to the Vermont Senate and, in 2016, again running on
both party’s tickets, he was elected lieutenant governor.

In 2022, Zuckerman was the only third-party candidate in the country
to win statewide office. In his three races for Lieutenant Governor,
the same electorate that picked Zuckerman chose Republican Phil Scott,
Vermont’s current governor. In 2020, Zuckerman lost his bid to
unseat Scott—only his second defeat in 14 campaigns for Vermont
public office.

Like his U.S. Senate mentor, Zuckerman has won over rural voters by
engaging with their economic concerns, from property taxes to
affordable housing to more equitable healthcare access. His experience
farming with his spouse Rachel, raising vegetables, chickens, pigs and
hemp on Full Moon Farm, a 150-acre spread near Hinesburg in Chittenden
County, informed his years of work on the agriculture committees of
the Vermont House and Senate.

In addition to being an early champion of progressive issues—from
marriage equality and GMO labeling to cannabis reform—Zuckerman is a
staunch advocate of workers through his support for Vermont unions,
minimum wage increases, public employee pensions and better working
conditions.

In the wake of this summer’s disastrous flooding in Vermont,
Zuckerman connected such local manifestations of extreme weather to
climate change and the urgent need for fossil fuel divestment and
investment in renewable energy sources. Recently, he has received some
national attention with his state-wide Banned Books Tour, which seeks
to organize public opposition to Moms for Liberty and other
authoritarian groups that try to limit what people can read, see and
hear.

_BARN RAISER_: How did you get your start in politics?

ZUCKERMAN: I first got inspired to run for electoral office in the
spring of 1992 when I was 20. I saw a first-term U.S. congressman
speak by the name of Bernie Sanders. He was someone who could connect
the dots between the activism outside of politics with the political
activity within elected office.

When I ran for the Vermont House of Representatives, I ran solely with
the Progressive Coalition label. The Progressive Coalition soon became
the Vermont Progressive Party (VPP) and more people started running
for statewide office as VPP candidates. In the early 2000s, VPP
statewide candidates got more than 5% of the vote, thus qualifying the
VPP as a major party under state law.

That made my races for state senate and lieutenant governor different
from my run for the Vermont house. To run for the senate seat in
Chittenden County, I did what Progressives were asked by Democrats to
do—which is run in the Democratic Party primary to avoid a “vote
splitting scenario” benefitting any Republican on the November
ballot. Today, many Vermont Democrats don’t remember that and get
mad at me for doing so. “You’re not a real Democrat,” they say,
“but you’re running in our primaries.” Look, I win the plurality
of Democratic primary voters. And I do it to avoid a three-way race in
the general election. So, Democrats, what do you want us to do? Run in
the primary or not?

Many efforts were made by the establishment to defeat me. But in 2012
I managed to win a state senate seat. So I’ve been doing it that way
ever since, running and serving as a Progressive/Democrat, both in the
senate and now as lieutenant governor..

_BARN RAISER_: How did you become a farmer?

ZUCKERMAN: I grew up in the summers on a very remote hillside next to
Shenandoah National Park in Virginia, on property my mom had purchased
during her first marriage in the 1960s. As a suburbanite from outside
of Boston, I had this very different rural upbringing for two months
of every year. As an environmental studies major at the University of
Vermont, it became apparent that one of the biggest, most detrimental
impacts to our environment in the United States was our agricultural
system and the widespread use of chemical fertilizers, herbicides and
pesticides. As a younger person infatuated with environmental issues,
I saw the importance of valuing our natural world—both from its
intrinsic value, as well as from a selfish perspective. I thought, as
a farmer, I could have a profession where I could both enjoy what I do
and live my values. Farming is a lot of work—and I probably didn’t
understand that at the time—but I am a bit of an Energizer Bunny
type person.

_BARN RAISER_: Vermont historically was both a Republican state and
heavily agricultural, and I think traditionally a high percentage of
the people in the state legislature were farmers. When you were chair
of the Agricultural Committee did you find yourself to be of a
minority of what had once been a majority, but also with a bridge to
colleagues who were also farmers, but perhaps not progressive?

David Zuckerman feeds the chickens on Full Moon Farm in Chittenden
County, Vermont. (_Terry J. Allen, Opposable
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ZUCKERMAN: When I got to the statehouse in the mid-1990s, there were
only 5 to 10 farmers or farmer-related folks, mostly Republican. At
that time, a lot of the Republican state legislators were
libertarian-esque. They wanted small government, but they were also
part of a “live and let live” culture and, therefore, on issues
like civil liberties, they were pretty reasonable to work with.

I found common ground with a lot of farmers over our shared work
ethic: the fact that you do what has to get done when it’s got to
get done. And in farm communities across the country—and I would say
this is true with contemporary Republicans, as well as the older
version of New England Republicanism—you help out your neighbor when
they need help because you know you’re going to need help someday,
too.

The statehouse is a bit like high school. You’ve got one group here
and another group there, and subgroups within each of these. So, in
the cafeteria, Republicans tended to sit in one area and Democrats sit
in another. As one of the handful of Progressives, I sort of floated
around, even though I sat with Democrats more often because we have
more in common.

One time, I was sitting in the Republican area and chatting with a
bunch of them about maple sugaring season, how it was going and what
was the forecast. We were just shooting the breeze about farming and
life, you know, which is an important human side of politics that’s
never really talked about anymore. And I heard that some of the more
partisan Democrats—at the time I was a straight Progressive—were
asking, “What is David strategizing with those Republicans about?”

This world of paranoia exists in politics on all sides. All I was
doing was talking to other farmers who also had to get up at four in
the morning to milk their cows or do field work before they drove up
to the state house, just like I was doing.

_BARN RAISER_: You talk about the mutual aid that people in rural
areas give each other. How can we help people understand why people
other than their neighbors might also need such help?

ZUCKERMAN: I’ve been thinking about that a fair amount. During the
pandemic, we had a lot of mutual aid happening in our rural counties
and towns. Some of that explains Trump’s success with the slogan,
“Make America Great Again” because people, on a communal level,
used to help each other out a lot. But today the financial pressures
of end-stage capitalism and what’s happened over the last 50 years
make that much, much harder. Minimum wage jobs and rural agricultural
jobs are no longer the low end of middle class. They’re poverty.
Trump taps into a nostalgia about being able to work hard and pull
yourself up by the bootstraps, a reality that used to be attainable
for some. The anger that resonates in these so-called red areas where
Trump puts on a show is real anger. Think about it: If you’ve been
raised on the idea that if you work hard, you’ll get a stable life,
then when that’s not the case anymore, you’re not going to look at
yourself in the mirror and say, “Dave, you’re doing poorly because
you didn’t work hard enough, even though you’re working 60 hours a
week.”

Instead, it’s someone else’s fault and you’ve got to figure out
who that someone else is. And that’s when racial stereotypes enter
the picture. The scapegoat becomes black women with too many kids who
get labeled ”welfare queens.” It’s the Mexicans and the
Guatemalans who Trump says are those terrible rapists and drug
dealers. Or it’s “big government” that got in the way of your
success. Right? And the truth is, it is someone else’s fault.
However, the finger of blame is not being pointed in the right
direction.

_BARN RAISER_: It’s the “rich men north of Richmond.”

ZUCKERMAN: Very much so. It’s the job of Trump and the current
Republican world, but also historically the Democratic Party as well,
to make sure we keep as capitalistic a system as possible—a
corporate capitalism that has concentrated wealth into the hands of
very few people while many decent, hard-working people of every
identity are left behind.

David Zuckerman in one of his hoop houses, where he grows vegetables
that he sells at the Burlington Farmers Market and the Full Moon
Farm’s CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) program. (_Terry J.
Allen, Opposable [[link removed]]_)

_BARN RAISER_: How do progressives in rural states respond to the
policy challenges driven by climate change, which some continue to
deny even exists?

ZUCKERMAN: The federal government is in the midst of rewriting the
farm bill, which authorizes a very big annual budget allocation,
especially for farm subsidies. There are folks that greatly despise
the federal government, and yet get phenomenal subsidies to keep
themselves afloat.

We’re in a challenging moment because the Right has done a
phenomenal job of getting people to hate a government of which they
are beneficiaries. We need to point that out and de-stigmatize
government support as something that goes against the grain of
American individualism. Natural disasters create, unfortunately, the
opportunity to have that conversation. It has been incredible to see
folks coming out to muck out businesses and homes after the floods
this year in Vermont.

But there has been more focus on the economic recovery of Montpelier,
the state capital, than in rural communities where the average income
is less. The financial assistance was not there, and the media was not
there, and that fits in with the feeling of being forgotten, and makes
people angry. Even in little Vermont, people contact me from the
Northeast Kingdom, from all over Vermont and say, “No politicians
ever come here. We are the forgotten part of Vermont.” They don’t
feel like people in power acknowledge them.

ZUCKERMAN: I’ve been a different kind of politician. Bernie
broadened the scope of what politicians can say and do. Now you’ve
got people like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and others at the national
level who are not only involved with inside Beltway politics but
community organizing at the local level.

What government can do is say, “We’re all in it together.”
That’s what a successful liberal economy should do well. Everybody
will help lift all boats and help restore areas damaged by things like
bad economic policies or climate crises.

_BARN RAISER_: Your Banned Book Tour is not the kind of thing that
statewide officials in other states spend their spare time doing.
You’ve definitely become a boogeyman of Moms for Liberty. What’s
that been like?

David Zuckerman asks, “How does book banning play into the evolution
of our democracy right now and movement towards authoritarianism?”
(_Terry J. Allen, Opposable [[link removed]]_)

ZUCKERMAN: The job of lieutenant governor doesn’t have a defined
policy role. In my particular case, I’m a Progressive lieutenant
governor with a Republican governor, but one who is not a
fire-breathing partisan. Yet for some reason in 2016, Governor Scott
decided we would not work together. I thought it was a shame. After
Trump won, I thought we had a real opportunity as a Republican and a
Progressive/Democrat to say, “Hey, everybody, democracy can work
with different perspectives and people finding common ground.” But
that wish of mine was not fulfilled.

I was thinking, this winter and into the spring, “Okay, what is my
new thing?” Statewide political figures like Gov. Glenn Youngkin of
Virginia and Gov. Ron DeSantis and others were pushing this narrative
around books that was really scary. And no statewide politician was
pushing back. And so I thought, “Why not create the opportunity for
the narrative to be more balanced?”

Most of the banned book events have had 35 or 40 people, which in
Vermont on a weekday evening at 4:00 or 5:00 is a remarkable turnout.
And it’s been amazing to discuss the whole issue of free speech and
critical thinking. How does book banning play into the evolution of
our democracy right now and movement towards authoritarianism?

Right now, people are overwhelmed. They’re overwhelmed with
democracy collapsing. They’re overwhelmed with hate. They’re
overwhelmed with the climate. They’re overwhelmed with their
economic strife. And we’re seeing this in mental health numbers.

So these readings and thinking about whether books are going to be
banned at your local school or your local library is a bite-sized
battle that people feel they can fight and win. We’re, in effect,
holding trainings on how to have conversations with people who don’t
agree with you.

The good news is about half the Republicans are not into book banning.
They’re big on free speech and can understand that a broader
principle is at stake than any particular issue that you don’t want
to hear about.

_BARN RAISER_: In Vermont that’s been a preemptive effort, right?

ZUCKERMAN: Some people who have run for school boards and some
selectboards [Vermont’s municipal governing bodies] have campaigned
either directly or covertly on the issue of controversial books. But
they have all lost, so far, knock on wood. It’s a bit more of,
“Hey, if this is coming, let’s make sure people are well prepared
with the arguments to be made.” Including, “You don’t have to
read a book and you don’t have to have that book in your household.
But that doesn’t mean you can tell other people they can’t have
access to that book.”

_BARN RAISER_: It seems to us that some people who want to ban books
or are otherwise falling for the MAGA message, have lost a sense of
control. They’ve lost control of their economic lives, their sense
of community, their connection to local manufacturing that once
offered better paying jobs.

How do we convince more progressives to rethink their heavy emphasis
on “white privilege,” when so many poor and working class people
at the bottom of the heap in many rural states don’t feel very
privileged? How do we wake up the woke about the downside of such
messaging?

ZUCKERMAN: With respect to identity politics, I think we should lead
with economics first. I have brought this up with progressive
colleagues, suggesting that we not _lead_ with identity-based politics
and they respond, “You pushing back fits exactly into the right-wing
narrative. We shouldn’t stop talking about this. Neglecting these
generational traumas is divisive politics.” They’re not
acknowledging that, in this moment of time,_ leading_ with identity 
furthers divisions. Sadly, it shouldn’t, but it does.

But coming from a cis-gendered, white, middle-aged politician, that
doesn’t really come across very well no matter how I raise it, even
though it’s based on the experience of having campaigned statewide
in Vermont, meeting a wide range of folks where they are, not just in
its progressive enclaves. Also, while there is white privilege, it’s
at different levels for different folks. The fact that my mom could
help me with $12,000 for a down payment for a duplex in Burlington in
1994 and co-sign the loan—that’s an example of the additional
economic privilege I’ve had. But many working class white people are
insulted by terms like “white privilege” because they too feel
like the system is not working for them. And they are right, it’s
not.

If you want to connect with people and bring them somewhere where they
aren’t at the moment—no matter where they are on the spectrum of
politics—it’s important to meet them where they are, find some
commonality to reduce skepticism and barriers, and then move into
sharing information that might grow things.

I’m going to connect this to an agricultural analogy. You don’t
bear the fruit in the first conversation you have with someone who has
a very different perspective on things. You begin by planting seeds.

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Steve Early [[link removed]]

Steve Early has been writing about politics or labor in Vermont since
he was an undergraduate at Middlebury College more than fifty years
ago. He is a former international union representative for the
Communications Workers of America and was involved in organizing,
bargaining, and political action by CWA members and other workers
throughout New England. He co-founded “Labor for Bernie” and was
active in both Sanders for President campaigns. Since moving to the
Bay Area, he authored four books, including _Refinery Town: Big Oil,
Big Money, and the Remaking of an American City _(Beacon Press) about
his new hometown, Richmond, California. He can be reached
at [email protected].

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