Real democracy takes place even in Greece in the beginning and even in little places and that's why Vermont's perfect. We've got, think about it, 246 cities and towns in just a small slab of real estate. Forested granite up there in the northeast just south of Canada.

Um, each one of these towns are historically a coherent unit that did things, almost everything on their own, made the decisions face-to-face. There's no place in the world you could study democracy better.

In my view, the town meeting is a legislative process. Whereby you actually fashion public policy face-to-face in a community. So what town meeting says is 'we trust ordinary people so much to govern themselves that we'll let them make the laws rather than having them elect somebody to make the laws that govern them.'

That's astounding when you think about it. And of course in the last, hell, no, 25, 30, 40 years, ever since the nuclear freeze movement in the early 80s, nationally, Vermont town meeting is known for its proclamations to the nation about what the nation ought to be doing. It's the fact that we can get along enough to govern ourselves that the nation pays attention to us when we give them advice about governing the nation.

I think, there are very few things that matter to the world that are not happening in Vermont on a small scale, and because it's a small scale, its more accessible to us.