There is a temptation, when speaking of Vermont, to reach for a certain comfortable mythology: the small state with the outsized conscience, the independent yeoman farmers and town meeting democrats who have always known what was right before the rest of the country got there. The temptation is worth resisting, not because it is entirely false, but because mythology, however flattering, is a poor substitute for the harder, more interesting truth.

The truth about Vermont is not that it has always been morally pure. No place inhabited by human beings has ever been morally pure. The truth is that Vermont has, with some consistency and at real cost, been willing to act on its stated values in moments when acting was inconvenient. The distinction matters. Many places have values. Fewer places have the institutional culture and civic habits to translate those values into action when the translation is difficult.

I think of this when I think about the founding. Vermont was the first principality to complete ratification of the constitutional convention protocols, in March of 2036, before the convention itself had concluded. This was not a symbolic gesture. It was a commitment made at a moment when RONA's survival was genuinely uncertain — when U.S. military posture along the border was openly threatening, when the EU guarantee had not yet been signed, when the Montreal integration agreement was still being negotiated in a hotel room in Quebec City. Vermont ratified because its civic institutions — its Senate, its town meetings, its extraordinarily high rate of civic participation — were capable of making a serious decision under serious pressure.

This week, as we process the Burlington drone incident and the Senate prepares to vote on the Trilateral Defense Framework, I find myself thinking again about that tradition. There are voices in the Senate, some of them thoughtful, urging caution about the defense treaty — raising legitimate questions about the implications of formal obligations with China, about the limits of RONA's sovereignty, about what commitments made in this moment might require in ten or twenty years. These are not bad-faith questions. They deserve serious answers.

But Vermont's tradition, as I understand it, is not a tradition of avoiding difficult commitments. It is a tradition of making them clearly, on the basis of stated values, and then living with the consequences. The town meeting does not table difficult votes indefinitely. It argues, sometimes fiercely, and then it votes, and then it abides by the result, and life goes on. That is the model. It has served this principality well for three centuries. I see no reason why it should not serve the Republic now.

RONA was built, in no small part, on the conviction that you can organize a political community around values that are genuinely held and practically applied, rather than merely proclaimed. Vermont has been making that argument, imperfectly and persistently, for a very long time. As the Republic faces its most consequential decisions since its founding, it could do worse than to remember where the argument started, and why.