Massachusetts and America

By Bernie Quigley

- for The Hill on 1/19/10

Repetition of the 1930s in the year 2009 is an experiment doomed to failure. Likewise repeating the Sixties. But here in the Boston region where Bob Dylan, Jack Kerouac, Jack Kennedy and Maharishi Mahesh Yogi first took root, the Sixties have never really ended. It is very much like Faulkner’s South, where the past was never really dead, it wasn’t even past.

One way or another, the past ends today in Massachusetts.

If Scott Brown wins the race for the U.S. Senate seat from Massachusetts, Massachusetts and New England will join the trends that are taking hold in the rest of America. If Martha Coakley wins, Massachusetts and New England will be marginalized.

And Coakley’s presence in the Senate will further inflame the anti-tax movement which started here in Concord, New Hampshire, less than a year ago when Dan Itse, a state representative from Fremont, resurrected the 1798 Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison and made the audacious claim that the states had the sovereign right to oppose federal legislation which went beyond its prescribed Constitutional fences.

The future rises now in the heartland. If Coakley wins Massachusetts will become a pariah state in a free republic.