District 12

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 3/17/12

The gods hide in low places, they used to say, meaning the simple truths are everywhere apparent and can be told in the simplest tales. One such tale is The Phantom of the Opera, best watched with children or grandchildren. Joel Schumacher's 2004 version featuring Emmy Rossum and Gerard Butler is the best. This story has been told a dozen times and will be told again. Possibly nothing tells of the death of Europe like this tale. Worth seeing again because since the fabled fire in the opera house Europe has not recovered. Likely now it never will. It is replaced by varied economic zones which all strive to be the same and which now, with Germany dominant, are required by law and regulation to be the same. And to be more like Germany. Today, instead of Europe we have stylish, modernist, economic zones which are heading instead to a nowhere land like that of District 12, the home of Katniss and Prim in the tale of committed love and liberation, The Hunger Games. But that which was once Europe no longer really exists.

The question today is does China still exist? Or is it, like the Pamen of The Hunger Games, just a sequence of economic districts on which the world’s entire economic life and livelihood depends?

As China edges up today to a new leadership fight, the Washington Post is correct to ask whether a purge is going on and the expulsion of neo-Maoist Bo Xilai portends a new leadership fight. At the victory speech of Hu Jintao on the 60th anniversary of the People’s Republic, on which occasion Hu dressed in Mao suit, it should have been asked whether there is really any “China” left to advance.

Taoists, who brought the dragon spirit to China up to six thousand years ago are today being pulled off the streets and thrown in prison with the quiet compliance of the western press and American state department. Elderly Chinese women of the traditional devotions even find their way into my life to seek help to get their families out of jail.

Suzanne Collins, like Neil Gaiman and Hayao Miyazaki, brings psychological depth and mastery to her task which a rising young generation has long been familiar with. The rest of the world will catch on Friday when The Hunger Games opens nationally. Intrade posts a 90% chance that it will gross over $100 million on opening weekend.

Is there any dragon left in China, any tiger remaining in the Jewel Heart of Buddhism? But maybe Collins’ blockbuster is meant to send a reminder to us and not to those realms gone to history already, as Katniss’s District 12 is said to be Appalachia, the last place on earth still with the faith to fight for its life.

Mitt Romney/Rick Perry 2012

by Benie Quigley

For The Hill on 3/14/12

Another nice mess you’ve got us in now, Ollie! Santorum has taken the Deep South! Mitt Romney might now have to form a deal in order to avoid a brokered convention, a leading Gingrich surrogate told The Hill.

What kind of a deal? Newt Gingrich as Vice President? As he said earlier, he is willing to serve his country in that capacity. But would Gingrich on the ticket increase Romney’s electability? Only in that 51st state, the dark side of the moon. Gingrich brings too much baggage. He got to this position he is in now by a strange twist of fate. It was all really a book promotion that got out of hand. But they were saying this not long ago about Ron Paul who no longer has the leverage. Romney would have to deal with him. Ron Paul as VP or maybe his son, Rand, as surrogate. So maybe Gingrich can bite the bullet as well and put principle before ego and present as a deal to Romney his closest surrogate on the issues, Texas Governor Rick Perry.

It would incorporate much of the new thinking that has come into this campaign. Perry literally wrote the book on state sovereignty and the devolution of power to the states. Romney said repeatedly he would follow this initiative as president. And Steve Forbes says Perry’s tax ideas are the best. As a manager, he is a match for Romney, for anyone.

Romney likes Perry and admires his work as governor and has said so in the early part of the campaign before Perry entered. And a Romney/Perry ticket – a Massachusetts/Texas ticket - would fit the tradition of harmony and equilibrium between the regions.

America is recklessly accelerating toward economic disaster. And Rick Perry, Texas governor for the past decade, is uniquely qualified to offer a firsthand perspective on why the United States – the most successful civilization in human history – is being threatened with economic collapse. Gingrich says so in the introduction to Perry’s book, Fed Up! Our Fight to Save America from Washington.

Gingrich and Perry and Huntsman, oh my! (And Sarah Palin.)

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 3/13/12

To understand Sarah Palin it might work best to view the movie U.S. v. John Lennon. The Nixon administration was unaccountably preoccupied with John Lennon. One of the commentators said that they had no interest in others like Mick Jagger and saw him as a flighty, marginal figure, But Nixon, his men and the FBI were dogged and driven in their obsession with Lennon. Likely the same with Sarah Palin. The latest, the HBO offering “Game Change” suggests as well that they can’t stop thinking about her. Possibly because she and her husband Todd, late of the Alaska Independence Party, are, like Lennon, potentially revolutionary figures.

It is a nice rumor, possibly started here, that Newt Gingrich is in talks with Rick Perry to bring him in as his Vice President. I wouldn’t be surprised. As I recall, Gingrich said long ago that candidates might announce the VPs and staff ahead of time so people would know what they are getting. He also suggested that Jon Huntsman, Jr. would come in some function due to his expertise in China if I have that right. And he said he would bring in John Bolton in some capacity. And Sarah Palin. Visualize that.

Which does tell us a lot. Who would Rick Santorum bring in? Times columnist Stanley Fish has been running several useful columns this week defending Rick Santorum’s position on religion. Santorum claimed that JFK was wrong to separate church and state in his mind. Santorum has a unified perspective. In my opinion it clears things up by taking the “left” and “right” aspects of partisan warfare out of the debate. It does then make the case for regionalism; people in one place want to think one way, let them. Another place different, let them. That is the Jeffersonian perspective and in our times, that is revolutionary thinking. JFK wanted to include the Irish in with the mainstream. He could otherwise have made a case for Catholic regional autonomy in a Catholic-majority region and so could Santorum.

On Lou Dobbs last night, The Hill’s Dick Morris made the plea for Republicans to vote for Romney. If the primary continues until August, he said, there will not be enough time to defend against President Obama in the general election. And if Gingrich or Santorum win the primary the big winner will be Barack Obama.

I've felt from the beginning that certain forces in the most conventional conservative establishment have been looking to Obama victory in 2012 anyway, so that they, the conventional political religionists, may win in 2016. George Will recently suggested as much. But maybe everyone here including Santorum and Gingrich are looking to bypass 2012 and rise in 2016.

If Gingrich wins the primary and loses the election, he would be going into 2016 as leader. (Visualize that.) This might be considered a revolutionary position and a revolutionary strategy, because Gingrich, Rick Perry and Ron Paul should be considered revolutionaries (and Sarah Palin the La Passionara of this rising movement). Like all successful revolutionaries, Vladimir Lenin had no interest in who would win WW I, as the war itself was a checkers game and Lenin saw the chess game underlying. No matter who won, the war itself advanced the revolutionary position. And so the extended primary, which weakens the Republican Party, strengthens the “revolutionary” position. And so would a second Obama term advance the positions which have come to contention in this primary.

In other words, by 2016 America may be in a state of revolution.

“Free the American West”: But western lands could trigger revolt

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 3/12/12

The Hill’s John Feehery asks the important question: Is this election about revolution or restoration? Since April, 2009 when Texas Governor Rick Perry chanted “ . . . states’ rights, states’ rights, states’ rights!!!” at the Alamo, it’s been on people’s minds. Perry, Gingrich, Santorum, Bachmann, Paul have tendencies.

Revolt needs philosophers like Ron Paul, distinguished supporters like Perry, passionate advocates like Sarah Palin, warrior ascetics like Alaska’s Joe Miller and even mad hatters like Glenn Beck. But most a revolt needs casus belli; a singular cause that bonds to purpose. Otherwise, there is no rebellion. There is an issue today that qualifies: Land.

“Whose land is it,” Connor Boyack, Director, Utah Tenth Amendment Center, asks in The Daily Caller? “Has the federal government become so arrogant as to claim ownership of the land over which it has jurisdiction? Put differently, does the United States of America exist to protect and defend the property of each individual living within its borders, or to own and control that property itself? This is not a theoretical question reserved for intellectual banter. It is a real question pondered often, especially by those in western regions where the majority of land is owned and regulated by the federal government. Although the federal government owns less than 10% of almost every eastern state, it owns large swaths of the West: 65% of the land in Utah, 83% of Nevada, 63% of Idaho, 45% of Arizona, 44% of California and similar percentages of the surrounding western states.”

We never consider it back east, but demographics bring it. Slightly more than one hundred years back the western regions were virtually empty, struggling for a purchase under a Comanche moon. Today, those who prioneered there might want to make their own determinations.

Last week Robert H. Nelson, senior fellow with the Independent Institute in Oakland, CA, wrote in the LA Times (“Free the American West,” March 7, 2012) that U.S. public land policy is a vestige of the past, established in 1910 when America’s population was just 92.2 million and a western state such as Nevada had only 81,000 residents.

“The United States can no longer afford to keep tens of millions of acres of ‘public’ land locked up and out of service,” he writes. “Some of these lands have great commercial value; others are environmental treasures. We need policies capable of distinguishing between the two.”

Few Easterners realize the immense magnitude of the public lands, he says. The federal government's holdings include about 58 million acres in Nevada, 45 million acres in California, 34 million acres in Utah, 33 million acres in Idaho and more than a fourth of all the land in Arizona, Colorado, Montana, New Mexico, Oregon and Wyoming. Add to that Alaska, where 75 million surface acres are federal public lands.

“It is time to end outdated federal land policies that are draining our country's wealth, tying up valuable resources in red tape and bureaucracy, and harming the environment. The transition to a new system would take time, but it might reasonably be completed over a 10-year period, the same time frame Washington is using for deficit-reduction planning.”

Utah legislators are demanding the feds cede control of 30 million acres and Boyack says other westerns states are closely following with model legislation they can likewise implement.

But suppose the feds won’t let go? Does anyone really think they will?

Romney wins: Conservatism’s Lost Generation is over

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 3/6/12

Last words of celebrity; gods they would be called in old Greece, are important. In his last conference Steve Jobs, dedicating his landmark building in California said, “The spaceship has landed.” As often with Jobs it is thought provoking and suggests something else. Andrew Breitbart had some significant last words as well, screaming them at a bunch of young people who were demonstrating against the rich: “You are freaks and animals!” he shouted at them, distorted in scorn and laughter. I was reminded of General Colin Powell who wrote in his autobiography about returning from a second tour in Vietnam and visiting the Pentagon, shocked to see thousands, hundreds of thousands, of young people railing against America. His response was compassion and understanding and he vowed to live his life to make these young ones love America as he did.

What a contrast. In the recent passing of Breitbart, Anne Coulter said it was like “the death of John Lennon.” Other conservatives compared Breitbart to Abbie Hoffman. For anyone who lived through those times the comparisons are absurd, but you get the idea. Conservatism has been experiencing an age of dissent; an anti-age or “counter culture” like the political aspects of the Sixties. They do indeed have their Bhagwans and Jim Joneses – Rush Limbaugh and Cheney come to mind and maybe Coulter could be considered the Susan Sontag of this motley group. America has been drinking the Kool-Aid now for more than a full decade.

This Lost Generation of Conservatism, to coin a phrase, saw its high water mark with George W. Bush. I felt that Bush and particularly Cheney intentionally brought in Colin Powell to embarrass him and to disgrace him; dissent does not honor honorable men and needs to de-legitimize it. Which they did, by sending America’s most honored soldier to lie before the UN.

But Powell doesn’t belong to them. He belongs to us and if Obama is reelected he should bring him in as staff. And so should Mitt Romney. It would have even greater significance. It would show to America that conservatism’s Lost Generation is over. Our most distinguished, like Eisenhower’s son John and granddaughter Susan might even come back to the party.

Conservatism today gets a new start. John Thune, Nikki Haley, Bob McDonnell and Rob Portman in particular, form an elite group of Republicans who were with Romney before Tuesday. They advanced Romney at the critical moments when he needed them. They should be remembered for this.

Also, those who held back from the center of the party should be remembered as they bear the burden for dragging this race out and risking the health and survival of the Republican Party and hoped to engineer a brokered convention. They should be left behind with the Lost Generation.

Say good bye as well to Newt Gingrich, Herman Cain, Michelle Bachmann, Rick Perry and Rick Santorum, never to be heard from again. Romney now must bring order and stability to America in a 12-year-ride (Romney/Portman 2012, no?). By then (2024) the young, dedicated and enthusiastic followers being schooled today by Ron Paul and Judge Andrew Napolitano will be just beginning professional life and they will bring this new force forward.

Then all hell breaks loose.

Romney will rise on Super Tuesday

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 3/5/12

The reelection of Scott Brown in Massachusetts would be a landmark event. It would indicate that Massachusetts had passed its post- liberal period and is coming back to national relevance. A Suffolk University poll gives Brown a lead of nine over Elizabeth Warren, the best proxy candidate in an Obama referendum. This is bad news for President Obama. Intrade has Obama ahead at 60 % which might be a better indicator than fickle national polls which have him under 50. But that liberal Massachusetts continues with Brown a second time is a good indicator that we, the most entrenched of liberals, have reached a sea change and the Romney tide will rise on Super Tuesday.

Romney will rebuild conservatism from scratch and he is not a bad one to do it. He knows how to make things and fix things which are broke. It is what he does. And he sees utility in the everyday just as Picasso found utility in found objects. He will surprise everyone by inaugurating state sovereignty and regional responsibilities in new places and will apply much of Ron Paul’s thinking. Watching him in Massachusetts and at the Olympics I am sure of this. He is the rare politician who can see the value in new ideas when they apply and will not hesitate to use what works.

A New York Times column yesterday and my column here claimed the GOP was dying, which it is. But Romney will bring it back to life. He will make it a new party. It is what he does and has always done. “The last gasp of the GOP?” the Times asked and they insinuated that it was. But I recall asking the exact same question in a graduate class during the Jimmy Carter administration. It should be said by now that Obama is no Jimmy Carter. First off, he gets his man and the assassination of Osama bin Laden was a stunning piece of work by all involved, especially Obama.

The failure of Carter to get reelected was not policy related. It was temperament related and in that way Carter does compares with Obama. Personally, Carter was interesting and personable and so is Obama. They brought us a break at the end of stressful historic times. But after we have had our rest we return to management indicators on the resume; Nixon after Kennedy, Reagan after Carter, Romney after Obama. Rest period is over and Romney’s era starts today. One, in my opinion, in which America will prosper and the American West will rise in influence.

End the Republican Party; start the Ron Paul party

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 3/4/12

Conrad Black, the conservative editor of the NY Sun, says the first words Fidel Castro has ever uttered that he has agreed with are those recently published on his blog in which he opined that the current republican race is one of the most inane and stupid events in modern world history. George Will says they should just let it go until 2016. And the editors of the Washington Post say Republicans can no longer avoid their Limbaugh problem. Good news for President Obama who remains at 60% at Intrade. Indeed, they may begin to ask if there will even be a 2016 for Republicans. The constant rant from Limbaugh and his mindless others on the radio waves suggests the tailwind of a lost cause, like the bitter wind that persisted followed the Civil War with Nathan Bedford Forest and the Ku Klux Klan, and the Brown Shirts after WW I.

The beginning of wisdom, said William F. Buckley, Jr., quoted by George Will in the weekend Post, is “fear of the Lord.” Maybe, but not my experience. That, I think, is the problem with the current batch of Republicans formed by Buckley and Will: They see the wrath before they see the glory. They enter life by way of the shadow. Now, I question whether their shadow play can survive. But the Pauls seem different.

Consider that we see actual conservatism with the rise of Ron Paul like we have never seen it here before since Kennedy, since before Roosevelt, since ever.

The beginning of a new conservative period rises today and Ron Paul and son Rand have by now institutionalized the new thinking and it will not go away as it is the rising political culture of the young, and it makes sense. Forget about 2012 and 2016 and start a new party. Call it something else; the Conservative Party or the Federalist Party. It will help explain what these words mean again or maybe for the first time.

If Obama wins he will bide his time. The mainstream establishment featuring Jeb Bush, his ready sidekick New Jersey Governor Chris Christie and the Weekly Standard crew immediately stage their 2016 comeback but are ignored. History passed them by in 2012. A new conservative youth culture arises featuring Ron Paul, Constitutional government, state sovereignty and regional rights and responsibility. Rand Paul/Judge Napolitano 2016 awakens a new America era and runs the century.

Olympia J. Snowe departs the Congress of Easter Peeps

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 3/2/12

The Post's top lead today tells us that everyone in the small town of Washington, Oklahoma, lives the conservative life. The same could likely be said about the rest of Oklahoma. Those who feel differently, like Elizabeth Warren, might move to Massachusetts. Having lived in every New England state except Connecticut which is really part of New York, I'm glad Warren is here. She's a good fit. She belongs here and I'd vote for her if I lived in Massachusetts. But why should the rest of Oklahoma be forced to be dominated by us New Engalnders? That is the question Olympia J. Snowe should be asking when she returns to Maine. And this one: Why should we in New England be dominated when Texas and Oklahoma run against our moral being? Like in the invasion of Iraq?

Snowe has spoken for years, she says, “about the dysfunction and political polarization” of the Senate. The Senate, she says, “Is not living up to what the Founding Fathers envisioned.” The great challenge, she says, is to “find common ground” and only then will we achieve results for the “common good.”

But in the invasion of Iraq and in many others situations, there is no common ground and there should be no compromise. Snowe supported the invasion and so did most of New England’s senators and representatives although calls were said to be coming into Senator John Kerry's office in Massachusetts ten-to-one against. Instead New England compromised.

Jefferson offered a better solution: In the Kentucky Resolutions of 1797 he said when the states were driven to unconstitutional or illegal actions by the federals they need not and should not participate. The Kentucky Resolutions and the Tenth Amendment were raised recently when the feds forced its will again on the states with Obamacare. This time conservative states like Oklahoma and Texas objected citing Jefferson and 29 states followed. The New England states should have done the same with the Iraq vote.

There is a dark and subliminal human need perhaps for bloody vengeance in our condition (Atlanta, Hiroshima, Baghdad) but it leaves a bitter taste. Those who singularly and heroically oppose, like Wisconsin’s Russ Feingold, are sent back to the hinterland. The compromisers and appeasers remain but are held in little regard and Snowe leaves a Congress today which has an astonishing approval rating of 13 percent.

The Congress of Easter Peeps which she leaves behind also injured our most valued ancestor, Israel, by creating the impression that Israel insidiously ordered the George W. Bush invasion of Iraq from a secret cabal in the U.S. It will take Israel another decade to recover and it can well do so perhaps only by repudiating its relationship with the United States entirely.

President Newt Gingrich: The conservative insurgency– draft for The Hill on 2/28/12

Hill commentator Dick Morris on a recent Lou Dobbs show was asked about the primary outcome: Mitt Romney wins Michigan and then goes on to sweep Super Tuesday and wins the nomination. He beats Obama and is elected President in 2012.

Makes sense. But Laura Ingraham, who brings intuition to her take, said Tuesday morning on Imus, if Romney wins Michigan, look for a Gingrich insurgence on Super Tuesday. In a word, Gingrich will finally have commandeered the insurgent’s role, taking it finally from Santorum (and Perry, Cain, Bachmann and Paul). And since Sarah Palin was named VP by John McCain in 2008, conservative culture has been in a grass roots insurgency; it is an authentic insurgency in search of its Trickster and that could well be Newt Gingrich.

Intuitive, in my estimation as this race has been influenced by two factors; one, the rise of a garden variety of new ideas and all candidates besides Romney can be seen as proponents of some kind of new thinking; some of it strange (Santorum) some of it lucid (Paul). This calls an end to the conservative tradition if there ever even has been one to end. Two, the “establishment,” a phrase I first used primarily to call on the Bush family apparatus featuring Chris Christie and Jeb Bush, including the Weekly Standard group, featuring Fred Barnes as representative (who first pitched Christie/Jeb Bush 2012), is not really a tradition so much a mainstream power/influence group and they have shown great reluctance to get behind the obvious manager here, Mitt Romney. I can think of no other reason why they opposed him other than the fact that he is a clear thinker and smarter than they are will not be lackey to their initiatives and agendas as George W. Bush was. This has left the field open to the insurgents.

This could be a fatal mistake for the Republicans because without mainstream support behind Romney and with the wicked, perverse and subversive wish for a brokered convention in which Christie and Jeb Bush would emerge, it sends the weight instead to whomever can consolidate the varied publics behind the “new people”: Perry, Cain, Bachmann, Santorum, Gingrich, Ron Paul and throw in Sarah Palin. Who would be the single combat warrior to oppose? Newt Gingrich. And bring back Rick Perry as VP.

In a more spooky vein, it is interesting that Gingrich brought up the Lincoln/Douglas debate as with Gingrich it has always come to my mind in my Southern experience the Simon Legree type or archetype; those from elsewhere who come to the South and love it too much. And Obama brings Lincoln to mind considering that Obama fulfills the third goal of the Lincoln era: The first goal to prevent Southern secession, the second to free the slaves, the third to bring egalitarianism between white and black. Obama v. Gingrich in debate does indeed suggest Lincoln v. Douglas; the ghosts of Lincoln and Douglas.

When history finally completes its purposes, it tends to move on. Is it possibly to see Gingrich winning a debate with Obama? Entirely. And thus the presidency? The country has been in a fever these past two years. Absolutely.

Scotland, England, USA: One world

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 2/27/12

I knew the Sixties was over when the hippies started staying home to watch Upstairs, Downstairs. In our time we are staying home again to watch Downton Abbey. It seems a lesser tale than that narrated by William F. Buckley, Jr. of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited in 1981. Another recent offering, The Tudors, today goes to our beginning: Which strong force will dominate? That of the Catholic wife, Catherine, and her daughter Mary? Or reformer Anne and her daughter, the Protestant monarch who institutionalized the modern world, Elizabeth I? These shows are longings which arise when we face uncertainty. And when we do we return to England.

When the gods fail us we warn of collapse and look for return passage. So often these past 100 years that which seems to be collapsing has been Europe. But England’s journey is its own. As Fareed Zakaria reports in The Post American World: “Niall Ferguson has argued that the British Empire is responsible for the worldwide spread of the English language, banking, the common law, Protestantism, team sports, the limited state, representative government and the idea of liberty.”

The English-speaking places and not “the West” form their own natural states and cultures whether it be called a civilization or not. It seems really a great, motley, mutated tribe which can find its collective beginnings in myth and antiquity in the reign of Earth Mother prehistory (See Robert Graves, The White Goddess).

World War II proved to us that we would at last rescue in the nick of time the English speakers, Australia and England. The portal opened and the walls between us fell then and the Beatles could thereafter pour down the plane at JFK without interference as no others outside our borders could. With Churchill and John Lennon we united with our psychic ancestor with whom we had divided at the Revolution.

John Browne, Senior Economic Consultant to Euro Pacific Capital Inc, a former advisor to Margaret Thatcher and of the old school, recently made a good recollection on Cavuto. Should England just leave the Euro zone and team up with America, asked Cavuto? It has long been moving in that direction, said Browne. In the Johnson administration he said it was suggested that the British Isles join America as four states.

Something culturally akin to that might be looked at now as Scotland desires to separate. A problem with this desire for separation and that sought by Vermont and Texas as well is, where you gonna go? Autonomy is the real issue and it is a healthy desire. But we are in our realm together and apart by degree and that is as it should be. A looser arrangement of states and regions in an Anglosphere might be considered in all of the places where we share the same language and cousins and folk tales, ritual holidays and bedtime stories for our children.

England is our old mother; an old dream of Mrs. Brown. Adele, Chef Ramsey, McCartney, Dr. Who, Frodo, Harry, Professor McGonagall, Downton Abbey and even William and Catherine, who visit occasionally and feel at home here, seem to bring us incrementally closer. Anglosphere is our natural path, the Tao of the English-speaking people, and we will get there over time whether we chose to go there or not. We are already there.

Falling Apart

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 2/26/12

Russia without Putin, England without Elizabeth, America without Kennedy and Bush. We are people of personalities and archetypes and when they go, the age goes. As it did with Jefferson, with Victoria, with Roosevelt. Wisconsin is right to plan for its own future with schemes of coining its own cash as Ron Paul suggests. Vermont and Texas and Scotland ready to go alone as well. Kansas seems about to roll and Alaska never quite fit. Arnold Schwarzenegger had some good ideas for California and saw it as a great, rising city state. Sadly, no one else did. Maybe there really is no California. Maybe it is all just an idea. Then they all go home to New York and New England. Because that is the big problem in America and the world: Mistaking ideas for places. Places – Texas, Quebec, Russia, Scotland – remain. Ideas – U.S.S.R., Britannia and the U.S.A. they are saying now – are made of air. And that Rick Santorum wants to be president is sure sign of the end times.

His is a classic of recently arrived ethnic people like the Santorums and Quigleys; here but not quite here yet. It is the classic American ethnic tale told in “The Sopranos” and the masterly “Miller’s Crossing”: “Up is down. Black is white.” We crossed the water with JFK. Now they go back across the river. I have four kids. Had I listened to Santorum I’d have 28, one for each year of marriage. That practical people listen to him represents a shattering of conservatism and potentially a shattering of America. They really don’t.

But when Elizabeth and Phillip go as invariably they will, and Kennedy and Bush and the current batch of pop stars, I see an auspicious Age of Catherine rising just ahead. An age in which the Anglosphere has found its natural edges for the first time which it may not breach. It is here already and it is an auspicious beginning for England, America, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. And the suggestion that Canada team up with Russia at the North Pole, suggested by scholar Michael Byers in the most creative of foreign policy journals, “Global Brief,” is also interesting: The world allied for the first time in line with the North Star which may have been God's purpose from the first. It would be a cold, new Jerusalem. Everything changes. It is the law of all things.

And there seems to be a natural bond in the cold places through hockey; places even as far away from Boston as Vancouver. Natural relationships seem to run across and above the 44th parallel. It is cold up here and you have to live by the head to survive each winter. Things come more easily below and there you are free to live in the heart. A better life no doubt, but not ours.

And football is the defining mandala which since post-war has shifted the axis of America to places like Wisconsin and Texas and Indianapolis. America is finding its true center in the middle. It is a step forward in time from the baseball era; the Civil War era when it was all about New York and Boston. No more. Pretty much ended when they shut down Toots Shur’s.

England falls, Israel rises. No heaven, no country, no religion too. Only football keeps us together. And warfare. Our world today is a donut. In the middle we play football. Around the edges they play soccer. But that will change as well as everything changes.

If Romney loses Michigan . . .

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 2/24/12

A marketing pattern has occurred in Presidential races now, following Reagan then Romney: If you want to be President you should run twice, the first time for practice. It seems to be going well for Romney who knows how to do things. But all hangs on the Michigan primary, in which Santorum and Romney are in a virtual tie.

If Romney loses Michigan it will indicate that the Republican party has lost its taste for management and governance and has gone over to ideology, marginal religious factions and regional eccentricities. That means, it has come to the end of things and a new party needs to develop. This may not be a bad thing. Jon Huntsman has said as much but he brings no new thinking to the table. Ron Paul does and he carries with him substance. The Pauls bring substance and good ideas but the eccentrics in this race (Gingrich, Santorum, Bachmann, red necks like Herman Cain, others in the wings) represent birth pains and a repudiation of America’s globalist path since Wilson.

A Romney victory with bring needed stability. In my opinion we have not had a stable presidency in 20 years and have afflicted the world with political neurosis. Romney is a stable politician; a family man and a personal man. He is not married to ideology as the others are. He is not a maverick. He is not “born again” anything. He has always been the same and can trace stability and strength in his family for generations. His choice for VP will not come from art or sociology. His work history shows that he will chose the individual most suited to the job. The safety and progress of America demands it now. My guess is he will choose Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell.

But if Romney loses Michigan America will fall in a malaise. And in 2016 we will see a motley batch of contenders giving it their second try; the one that really matters to them. Some of them have been depending on an Obama victory in 2012 which raises questions of character. Rick Perry has already implied that he intends to run in 2016. Certainly Gingrich will run and Michelle Bachmann and Santorum and probably Cain. And of course Jeb Bush and sidekick New Jersey governor Chris Christie, which might be considered the pre-Enlightenment team as their vision of governance precedes that of Elizabeth I. But Mitt Romney will not be running.

The only other post-Enlightenment, post-Jefferson, post-Second World War, post-Elvis candidate with a practical vision of America will be Tennessee Senator Rand Paul. His vision and that of his father’s is right and sensible. It is a coherent vision which responsibly challenges the orthodoxy, and opens to the future as did Martin Luther’s challenge to Roman governance. It may well be suited to America in the future, perhaps the near future. It will develop in time to maturity. Perhaps a hundred years, and it will invariably require a revolution. That is what the eccentricity in this race means: It is prelude to a revolution.

A non-Western representative for World Bank chief

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 2/20/12

When Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew brought his country from Third World to be the most prosperous country in the First World, he first had to deal with the West: “I had to come to terms with American power without a British buffer,” he has written. “The British enforced their will with a certain civility. The Americans were different, as I could see from the way they dealt with South Vietnamese leaders . . .”

Lee was likely referring to the assassination of Ngo Dinh Diem, president of South Vietnam, in 1963, but as the World Bank chief position opens up again today, it might be asked if, in Lee’s words describing that period, America still had “bulging muscles and a habit of flexing them.”

Possibly more than any other global body World Bank has become pretext for what is called NGO imperialism. And like the Academy Awards “life work” awards, it has come to glorify an individual once the diva has become irrelevant. Hillary Clinton, who during her run for the presidency, said she had no use for “elitist economists,” is contender today and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and former Treasury chief Larry Summers have been suggested.

Traditionally, the Bank president has always been a U.S. citizen nominated by the United States. But The Manila Bulletin reports that China, the world's second-largest economy, wants the next World Bank president to be selected on merit, “going against a tradition that dictates the bank's head is an American.”

The Economic Times agrees that a non-American should take the helm: “The world might have changed dramatically since 1945 when the Bank was established, along with its Bretton Woods twin, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) . . . China is now the second-largest economy and emerging economies account for close to 55% of world GDP measured in terms of purchasing power parity. But, for the Bank and the Fund, it is as though nothing has changed. The result is the unwritten pact between the US and Europe, that has seen Americans at the helm of the Bank and Europeans at the Fund, continues to hold sway.”
The emerging economies, they write, especially the Brics, must come together on this and agree on a candidate from amongst them.
If World Bank and the IMF are not to go to the way of the court of Louis Quatorze, and the arbitrariness of appointments like those of the universally despised Paul Wolfowitz to World Bank and the prancing French aristocrat Dominique Strauss-Kahn to IMF suggest they are heading in that direction, they should try to rise to relevance.
Harvard’s Niall Ferguson reported recently on Bloomberg that had it not been for China, we today would now be in a Great Depression. It seems a relevant observation, but denial of Asian economy and power rising and having already arrived seems still the dominant theme in these appointments.

Legendary investor Jim Rogers, who lives in Singapore, complains that there has never been a Nobel Prize for economics given to an Asian working economist, in a period when the rise of China and the other Eastern economies is the economic story of the century.
Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew may be seen as this age’s sage and master. And Hu Jintao’s China brought stabilization in a time of global turmoil. The appointment of a non-Western chief would bring Americans psychological acceptance of the rising century and bring status and relevance once again to the World Bank.

The century hangs on Michigan: Ron Paul/Judge Napolitano 2012?

by Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 2/21/12

"I love the Lakes," said Mitt Romney. I do as well and I've never heard someone else who had returned back east say so. I considered the Midwest with the same patronizing condescension that is imprinted on us New Englanders, but after a few years in Ann Arbor I fell in love with the Great Lakes. Camping under the stars at Rabbit Blanket above Lake Superior with the family I felt we'd come to the center of the world as Native Americans see the Lakes and it's life spirit, Manitou. Then when we came back east it seemed almost wrong to do so but duty called. And Romney was governor then of Massachusetts. I came to admire him for these things which no one else seemed to notice. He would seek the simple things and find there substance and strengths. Next week, if Romney wins Michigan, he will sweep the series.

And he will be chosen against Obama because of this: New England and the Northeast goes through periods of meandering and psychological weariness: The Franklin Pierce presidency, cursed from the first, allowing Frederick Douglas to bully them just as Gingrich does today. They chose then Lincoln for strength. Then again the Lost Generation between the wars, they chose FDR for strength and ability. Then the Sixties and Seventies, creative in their awakenings like meanderings, but turning at last to strengthen again with Reagan. We are in such a period now. People don't choose then “left” or “right” in times like this, they then choose necessity of organizational ability and management. They choose survival. And we will choose Romney.

Romney will bring a legacy and 12 years of strengths and a new order and a new vision of America from east to west if he wins Michigan.

But if he loses Michigan it all drifts apart. If Santorum beats Romney on his home turf and in Arizona as well the Super Tuesday votes could go in three directions; Romney, Santorum and Gingrich, with Ron Paul taking his niche. It brings a brokered convention and anything can happen. Commentators fear it and pitch the old school; Jeb Bush and his front man, NJ Governor Chris Christie. Always the same. But Sarah Palin will surely enter as well because of this formula: If Jeb Bush, then Sarah Palin. And she could well consolidate that new strong force rising – Tea Party, Constitutional conservatives, “common sense conservatives,” state sovereigntists and Tenth Amendment advocates, and there is a good chance of it. Conservatism has bristled with creativity these past three years. Ron Paul has suggested Judge Andrew Napolitano for his vice president.

Ron Paul it appears could consolidate with Romney. They like each other and have personal substantive issues in common – family and the private man first - so Romney could skate through.

Romney/Paul brings the new century and so would Romney/Nikki Haley. Palin/Rick Perry brings a new century as well. Christie/Bush brings the last century again. And the century hangs on Michigan and the Great Lakes.

A China representative for World Bank chief

By Bernie Quigley
For The Hill on 2/20/12

The World Bank chief position is opening up again. Possibly more than any other global body World Bank has become pretext for what is called NGO imperialism. And like the Academy Awards “life work” awards or the Nobel Prize at the end of a life’s work, it has come to glorify an individual and her realm once the diva has become irrelevant. Hillary Clinton, who during her run for the presidency, said she had no use for “elitist economists,” is contender today and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and former Treasury chief Larry Summers have been suggested. Traditionally, the Bank president has always been a U.S. citizen nominated by the United States. But The Manila Bulletin reports that China, the world's second-largest economy, wants the next World Bank president to be selected on merit, “going against a tradition that dictates the bank's head is an American.”

This next World Bank chief should come from China or Singapore.

The Economic Times agrees that a non-American should take the helm: “The world might have changed dramatically since 1945 when the Bank was established, along with its Bretton Woods twin, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) . . . China is now the second-largest economy and emerging economies account for close to 55% of world GDP measured in terms of purchasing power parity. But, for the Bank and the Fund, it is as though nothing has changed. The result is the unwritten pact between the US and Europe, that has seen Americans at the helm of the Bank and Europeans at the Fund, continues to hold sway.”

The emerging economies, they write, especially the Brics, must come together on this and agree on a candidate from amongst them.

This calling up of agents of passing realms, Clinton, Geithner, Summers and Wolfowitz, tends to drag down the entire industry. If World Bank and its dark twin, the International Monetary Fund, are not to go to the way of the court of Louis Quatorze, they should try to rise to relevance. Harvard’s Niall Ferguson reported recently on Bloomberg that had it not been for China, we today would now be in a Great Depression. It seems a relevant observation, but denial of Asian economy and power rising and having already arrived seems still the dominant theme in these appointments.

Legendary investor Jim Rogers, who not long ago moved his family from New York City to Singapore, complains that there has never been a Nobel Prize for economics given to an Asian working economist, in a period when the rise of China and the other Eastern economies is the economic story of the century.

Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew may be seen as this age’s sage and master. And Hu Jintao’s China brought stabilization in a time of global turmoil. A proxy for Yew’s Singapore of Hu’s China should be sent. Such a position would bring Americans psychological acceptance of the rising century and bring status and relevance once again to the World Bank.

Is there life after "All my children"?

After 41 years, America's archetypal folk tale, the soap opera "All my children" will be cancelled. In the Taoist outlook, this soap opera might be considered the “smooth but common stone” which is the essence of a culture. It is always despised by scholars and critics but held on to by the real people. Can America survive without it? Not sure. Not only that Myanmar prophecy thing which says the world comes to an end this year, but the Elliot Wave as well. I couldn't help to notice that two years back Japanese banks started turning in their dollars. Because the Elliot Wave currency theory, which claims that dominant currencies run in an arc, suggests dollar dominance will receed in 2012. Because the Elliot Wave says the dominant currency has a 41-year life cycle just like "All my Children."

Watching the breathless interviews on Bloomberg TV would go far to create the impression that it is all about money, and so far none of the men in bow ties have acknowledged my theory that economy and culture run together or two aspects of the same thing and the correct model of understanding would be Buddhist prayer flags, which rise in a cycle to fertility then wealth in a golden age and back again to death or the in-between. But economist Harry Dent comes close. It is all about demographics he says and he has been saying so for 20 years.

And right now the demographics don't look so good. I am 65 years old, the front line of the war babies. I've bought six houses and maybe a dozen cars and trucks since All my children began. This year my spending goes to a broken foot because when you are 65 and fall down walking your dog, you break things. I'm lucky. Some of my generational friends are dead already. They will not be spending either.

Economic collapse is a symptom of cultural collapse. It can be graphed in demographics, and a collapse like this compared to for instance Katrinia, always marks itself generationally. The second and third posh-war generations watched All my children. The fourth don't get it. They don't even watch television.

Economists need a word for wu chi. Creative destruction , a psychological term, has worked its way into the lexicon and well explains how why Toots Shor’s famous bar would go out of business when generations shifted in interest in Joe DiMaggio to Joe namouth. Everyone changed and economy rose with the new generation. But wu chi is the end of all things, a time waiting again for the beginning. It is lucky and pozo holding the rope and it is now, at the end of the third post-war generation.

Wu chi brings no Joe Namoth or Bob Dylan to bring on the next generation. People are not sure who they are or where they belong. They are not even sure what sex they Are. That is wu chi. Paris between the wars was such a place. Two great books, twins light and dark, came out in 1925 and 1926, hemingway's the sun also rises and fitzgerald's the great gatzpy. They marked the end of everything in America that had been built with false money and false words. A third book, mein kamph, belongs in that group because it promised a war to bring the end of everything and surely it did. So by 1929 when the economy collapsed, it should have been expected. It took a long time to get going again; 1953 with Elvis, and took a head of steam in 1971 with the rise of the dollar and all'y children.
The middle rose then to its epex. Now it yields.

Adele: The world begins again - draft

Before I came to this the work I did consisted of looking at the world as pictures without words: The Beatles rushing down the stairs together at JFK, Neil Armstrong on the moon, Salvador Dali's 1943 painting of an American messiah climbing out of an egg and another same year in a football helmet, Emanuel Gootlieb Leutze’s painting of Wasington crossing the Delaware, Holbein’s full portrait of Henry VIII which signified the beginning of our age. They form patterns and tell the inner story of our passage. One such photo occurred this week at the Grammy Awards. A sensational iconic photophraph taken by Matt Sayles of AP of Lady Gaga standing alone in the audience, looking mournfully to the left. It has that same quality of James McNeill Whistler’s “Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1” of a woman remembering something lost. Lady Gaga has dressed herself in mourning and like Whistler’s mother she appears to be mourning for an age passed. Mourning for herself.

Generational historians Strauss and Howe (Spengler for dummies) write how history can shift in a few hours and this event was one such evening. I'm usually the last to know about these things because I live in the woods and wait until my kids tell of the world's turnings, but as the Sayles picture dramatically suggested an age receding, there on the front page of the WSJ was an image of the world beginning again: A video clip of Adele singing “Someone like you.” I was fairly new the song as my young daughter had been playing it gently on piano all year, but had never heard it by Adele.

Bob Dylan once said that every changed when he first heard Odetta perform on one of those early Sixties folk music programs. I'm old enough to have had that experience as well. But back then it was also humanly possible to be the only one or two white listeners to Ester Phillips in the quiet black clubs of Chicago night. They were gentle American secrets where you could smoke through the night in bliss with only a handful of others. There were as I recall no awards then which is why the creatively is pure and organic. With awards, thereafter the Mad Men would come looking for the next Ester or Odetta or Nina Simone and the next Bob Dylan or Leonard Cohen. It began in caves in the night in Chicago at 4 am with only four people left. It ends at a football stadium in the middle of the afternoon with 100 million people watching. Until you had marketed copies 60 years through the generations until it got to Madonna and Janet Jackson and at the very end a copy or a copy of a copy. And that which was once a song is now only a shout; until you get to lady gaga and that is what she was mournfully looking back through window upon window.

But when I heard Adele it was as if I was there again at the creation in Chicago where the world first began. There again at the beginning with Little Ester.

Sarah Palin, Andrew Jackson and the "nostalgico" political elements

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 2/15/12

Fred Hiatt, editorial page editor of The Washington Post, has an instructive essay this week on the different camps that divide progressives: “You could call it nostalgia liberals versus accountability liberals,” he writes. “The priorities of nostalgia liberalism are community, social cohesion and preservation of New Deal and Great Society programs. Accountability liberals put more stock in market forces and individual empowerment. Their debate is sure to sharpen over the next four years.” Joe Biden vs. Elizabeth Warren maybe.

It is an instructive essay in viewing the critical breach we have entered as all turnings of life-changing proportion are conflict and contention between the “nostalgicos” – the phrase from Spain in the 1930s when she experienced a life-ending crisis - and the new generations; in a word, it is a generational struggle between defenders of the old temple and the builders of the new. These changes reach to the mythic core of the human condition; they are issues of death and rebirth like those described by anthropologists such as Sir James George Fraser. We have entered such a breach. Both parties are now experiencing this division and so is the country.

I did a radio interview out west last night on this as commentators had read an essay I wrote here about a division among conservatives between the “traditionalists” – the radio commentator called them conservatism’s “gentry establishment” (nostalgicos) - represented today by NJ Gov. Chris Christie and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, and the new spirit of independent-mindedness rising in the heartland manifest especially by Sarah Palin and Texas Gov. Rick Perry.

This I’ve been calling Jacksonian as it brings precisely to America the spirit force which rose in the west with Andrew Jackson. This was apparent from the first with Gov. Palin and the attacks she received from the geist; mainstream conservatives and liberal punditry and especially those essential keepers of the cultures in the night; Tina Fey, David Letterman and so many others. Jackson, like Sarah Palin and Rick Perry, ran their contests against “the establishment” meaning Washington, New York, the “nerd prom” (Palin) and with phrases like, “I don’t care what they think in New York and Washington,” (Perry). Jackson’s race, like Perry’s and Palin’s, pitched frontier vs. Boston and Richmond.

“His passions are terrible,” said Jefferson. “I feel much alarmed at the prospect of seeing General Jackson President. He is one of the most unfit men I know of for such a place . . . He is a dangerous man.”

In this long, strange, primary season conservatism is experiencing a creative breakup. Conservatives are torn between nostalgia and new awakening. It will serve them well in the future as they are getting there first and this metamorphosis will rise through the new century. I wouldn’t be surprised to see them lose the 2012 election as Obama is a smooth and likeable character and fulfils a long-fought historic destiny for America. And mainstream American feels as comfortable and natural with him today (59.7% at Intrade) as it suddenly does with Adele.

But Palin, like Jackson, represents a new beginning and so does Rick Perry, who suggested this week that he expects to run again in 2016.

Maybe he will run against Jacksonian Democrat Elizabeth Warren. This Okie grandmother who knows how to bake a special Valentine-day cake and can probably do anything country people can do, suddenly brings us nostalgia-prone New Englanders out of our torpor in giant steps.

Why are Tibet’s nuns dying? Who is the Karmapa?

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 2/14/12

The International Campaign for Tibet reports: “News has reached ICT from Kirti monks in exile in India of the self-immolation today (Feb 11) of an 18-year old Tibetan nun, at around 6 pm in Ngaba. This is the third Tibetan nun to set fire to herself since the wave of self-immolations began inside Tibet in February 2009, and the second from her nunnery, Mamae. The nun has been named as Tenzin Choedron, a nun at the Mamaeconvent in Ngaba.”

It brings heartfelt response from Gyalwang Karmapa, Ogyen Frinley Dorje, known to Tibetan Buddhists who honor the Dalai Lama as the 17th Karmapa. Karmapa is a sublime young man who is said by some to fill the shoes of the Dalai Lama when he passes on. The Dalai Lama is 76 years old. His comments from the International Campaign for Tibet:

“Having been given the name Karmapa, I belong to a 900 year old reincarnation lineage that has historically avoided any political engagement, a tradition I have no intention of changing. And yet as a Tibetan, I have great sympathy and affection for the Tibetan people and I have great misgivings about remaining silent while they are in pain . . .

“Reports have just emerged that three more Tibetans set themselves ablaze within a single day in eastern Tibet. This comes shortly after four Tibetans immolated themselves and others died in demonstrations in Tibet during the month of January. As tensions escalate, instead of showing concern and trying to understand the causes of the situation, the Chinese authorities respond with increasing force and oppression . . . I pray that these sacrifices have not been in vain, but will yield a change in policy that will bring our Tibetan brothers and sisters relief . . .

“I call on the authorities in Beijing to see past the veneer of wellbeing that local officials present. Acknowledging the real human distress of Tibetans in Tibet and taking full responsibility for what is happening there would lay a wise basis for building mutual trust between Tibetans and the Chinese government. Rather than treating this as an issue of political opposition, it would be far more effective for Chinese authorities to treat this as a matter of basic human welfare.”

A brokered convention: Jeb Bush vs. Sarah Palin

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 2/13/12

Santorum’s contraception boom – “We’re all Catholics now,” said Mike Huckabee – won’t hold up. Because we’re not. This race could well go to a brokered convention. If Jeb Bush is proposed, so Sarah Palin should be proposed minutes later. She is now and always has been the singular Jacksonian voice in the original Tea Party phenomenon; the only one who can bring it to the mainstream. Her absence from the primary race has left a vacuum and no substitute has been found. Every other possible or potential leadership hopeful has risen and receded in this long Republican primary season.

But as The Hill’s Josh Lederman reports from the CPAC conference, the former Alaska governor received far-and-away the most spirited and enthusiastic reception at this convention of about 10,000 conservative activists. She drew the audience to its feet more than a dozen times during her keynote address on Saturday.

“The cheers for Palin were so loud that they drowned out her remarks again and again,” he writes. “Conference organizers had to set up three overflow rooms to accommodate the throngs of supporters eager to hear her words.”

The Bush secret agenda has been a subliminal theme for months with NJ Governor Chris Christie as the favored proxy and pitch man. At CPAC it broke through to the surface: Al Cardenas, head of the American Conservative Union, says that Republican turmoil might lead to a brokered convention in which Jeb Bush would emerge as a “possible alternative” party nominee. It made Drudge this weekend.

Conservatism is at the shore of a new awakening but is afraid to cross the river. It goes back to Texas Governor Rick Perry’s Texas primary race. From Quigley’s “Pundit’s Blog” January 21, 2010: “The Austin Statesman reports that former President George H.W. Bush will endorse U.S. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison in the Republican primary for governor in her race against Rick Perry. Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, Margaret Spellings and Karen Hughes [W.’s agent] also support Hutchison . . . But Sarah Palin supports Rick Perry and will appear with him at a rally on Super Bowl Sunday. Does one Sarah Palin equal a Bush, a Rove, a Spellings and a Hughes? In Texas, I believe it does.”

Perry won in a landslide. But why would the Bush establishment pull out all the stops to support Hutchison, who was sure to lose? Because they saw a new conservative movement building with Perry and Palin and were determined early on to stamp it out. They still are.

Bush/Christie or Christie/ Bush as “establishment” representation is bound to bring muffled chuckles (“Hey Abbott!!!”) and Obama would win in a landslide. But Bush/Christie vs. Sarah Palin/Rick Perry positions coming head to head at the Republican Convention would pit the storied worlds of Dexter and Paulie Walnuts; the most notoriously corrupt, burned out, busted up, used up, dangerous, underwater and broke eastern states, against the new, independent, states-oriented, freedom-seeking Constitutional conservatives like Palin of the western states, Texas and Alaska. Now that would be interesting.

A brokered convention: Jeb Bush vs. Sarah Palin rough draft

by Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 2/11/12

Donald Trump asks how can Rick Santorum be running for President? It is like someone who just flunked out of high school and now wants to apply to The Wharton School of Business. Because something today is missing in the center of conservatism that is driving people to the edges is why. And because Santorum is handsome, young and in 2011 still thinks like a 70-year old man in the 1950s. This is now the "back to the future party" which is making it a magnet to the strange and the miscreant. A related problem: At least half of Republicans today can think of nothing but Jeb Bush. The center hopes to destroy all new growth and default to monarchist dynasty. Why now they are born to lose, why the bitterness and bile and viral nihilism at CPAC 2012, and why Obama rises this week to 64 % at Intrade. The Republicans want a young and handsome politician who reminds them of themselves when they were 12. And Jeb Bush, dutiful son, presents the pristine paradigm.

The Bush secret agenda has been a subliminal theme at the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post. At CPAC it breaks through to the surface: Al Cardenas, head of the American Conservative Union, says that Republican turmoil might lead to a brokered convention in which Jeb Bush would emerge as a “possible alternative” party nominee. It made Drudge this weekend.

Conservatism is at the shore of a new awakening but is afraid to cross the river. It goes back to Texas Governor Rick Perry’s Texas primary race. From Quigley’s “Pundit’s Blog” January 21, 2010: “The Austin Statesman reports that former President George H.W. Bush will endorse U.S. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison in the Republican primary for governor in her race against Rick Perry. Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, Margaret Spellings and Karen Hughes [W.’s agent] also support Hutchison . . . But Sarah Palin supports Rick Perry and will appear with him at a rally on Super Bowl Sunday. Does one Sarah Palin equal a Bush, a Rove, a Spellings and a Hughes? In Texas, I believe it does.”

Perry won in a landslide. But why would the Bush establishment pull out all the stops to support Hutchison, who was sure to lose? Because they saw a new conservative movement building with Perry and Palin and were determined early on to stamp it out. They still are.

Santorum’s contraception boom – “We’re all Catholics now,” said Mike Huckabee – won’t hold up. Because we’re not. This race could well go to a brokered convention. If so, after Jeb Bush is proposed, so Sarah Palin should be proposed. She is now and always has been the singular Jacksonian voice in this movement; the only one who can bring it to the mainstream. Her absence from the primary race has left a vacuum and no substitute has been found. Every possible challenge now to the alternative or “anti-Eastern establishment” position of liberty, Tea Party and Constitutionalism has risen and receded.

Bush/Christie or Christie/ Bush as “new establishment” representation is bound to bring muffled chuckles (“Hey Abbott!!!”) and Obama will win in a landslide. But Bush/Christie v Palin/Rick Perry positions coming head to head at the Republican Convention would pit the storied realms of Dexter and Paulie Walnuts; the most notoriously corrupt, burned out, busted up, used up, dangerous, underwater and broke eastern states, against the new, independent, free-seeking western states, Texas and Alaska. Now that would be interesting.

Jeb Bush/Chris Christie 2012

JFK: The barbarian king

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 2/10/12

What have I become? – Nine Inch Nails

In hindsight it might be seen that the most treacherous moment, well described in David and Julie Eisenhower’s “Going Home to Glory,” was when Eisenhower tentatively handed over the keys to John F. Kennedy. 50 years later the Kennedy legacy continues to descend. But what I found most revealing in Mimi Alford’s memoir of our most auspicious beginning at war’s end was in The Washington Post’s Reliable Source column. The part about the partying at Bing Crosby’s house in Palm Springs, where JFK urged her to try amyl nitrate (“I was his guinea pig”). It brought to mind the food testers in barbarian regimes hundreds, thousands of years back.

But these events to which Alford speaks, which should now include Dave Powers, whose job it says was “to find her an abortion doctor when she briefly feared she might be pregnant,” and my own Boston family should by now be considered the twisted aberrations of an ethnic political cult. The wanton sexuality inspired a generation and legitimized similar behavior in the Clinton period. In America, what’s good for the white glove Boston gentry is good for trailer park. And 20 years hence when more Clinton stories come out, that will be considered a cult as well.

These new accounts by Alford reveal nothing new. They tell us what we as people united only by war and football have come to accept and to some degree, they tell us what and who specifically have poisoned us. For we have become used to the neurotic, the obscene and the squalid and have come now to accept it and to universally be part of it.

We in Boston then were probably most concerned with the war between Catholics and Protestants that we’d engaged in these first hundred years since we got here and which still echo today in Kennedy v. Bush. But it is worth going back to the beginning and the great Canadian production “The Tudors” will bring a short cut. Contention first rose between the Catholic wife, Catherine of Aragon, and the next one, the Protestant reformer Anne Boleyn, and this would shake the world these 500 years.

Eisenhower’s America was well beyond it; he was from the plains, Kansas and Texas, and turning it back to Catholic and Protestant families of Massachusetts as compatible as Angry Birds seemed curiously a step back in time. Now with JFK it becomes clear that we had not transcended the Tudors contentions and the struggle of Henry and his good friend Charles, Duke of Suffolk, to rise above barbarism.

The need, and the need in all of history that is good, is to manage the barbarism. That is what all the current vampire stories are about. The sexual escapades of Henry VIII actually draw sympathy in this, in the first days of the English-speaking people just leaving the forest. Those of JFK and Clinton do not because there was no struggle.

But what is striking in the first episode of “The Tudors” is when Henry takes a mistress right under the eyes of his wife Catherine. Before they plunge into the bed he asks her face to face: “Do you consent?”

In our time, do we even ask?

Dark dreams of Chris Christie

The Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin takes up the cri de coeur of New Jersey governor Chris Christie who, despite his conspicuous displays for Romney which materialized virtually the day after the Bush-family coup to displace Romney with Christie fell apart, is really running for President himself in 2016. It is dispiriting that none of the GOP presidential candidates can hold a room like Christie, she says: “But perhaps the winner will go to him at the end of a long, bloody campaign and say, ‘I need you. The party needs you. The country needs you.’ And if he accepts, then whatever the outcome of the presidential race Republicans would have something to cheer and an extraordinary politician to watch.”

The second establishment dream, Christie/Bush 2016, not far from the first (Romney/Christie 2012), has it that Obama wins in 2012 and the Republicans can get back again on automatic pilot with Christie/Jeb Bush in 2016. Kind of extraordinary when you think about it: Patronizing the Massachusetts Mormon so distasteful to the main line establishment to line up the proxy in 2012 to run and win in 2016. Better maybe they lose in 2012. For sure then it is Christie/Jeb Bush in 2016.

But the first dream is not yet shattered: Christie in a brokered convention.

Is there no more imagination than this in American conservatism?

I can think of no real purpose for Newt Gingrich and think he is half crazy. But so was John Brown. Possibly only Gingrich can rally the masses on the margins against the inevitable gentry establishment.

Jefferson vs. Obama: The rise of a revolutionary generation at CPAC 2012

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 2/8/12

The most important thing that has happened in the last two years is that the states have discovered that they don’t have to do what the federal government tells them to do, I said to a small group of New Hampshire mountaineers one year ago this month. It is one thing to say this in school basements before a few handfuls of New Hampshire’s hill people where “live free or die” can be seen tattooed on the forearms. It is expected of us. But when the same sentiments are presented at the button-downed CPAC 2012 convention in Washington, DC as they will be tomorrow, something different is happen here. Liberal commentator Pat Goddell has suggested that the Tea Party these past two years has brought us to a “pre-revolutionary “state. For the last two years libertarian Ron Paul has been the overwhelming favorite of conservative’s rising generation at CPAC. This year CPAC 2012 features a film produced and directed by Jason Rick exploring the history of state nullification, its constitutional legitimacy, and how states can use nullification to push back against the encroachment of federal power.

“Nullification: The Rightful Remedy promises to be the most comprehensive documentary on the subject of the Tenth Amendment and nullification, the long-forgotten tool that Jefferson considered our best defense against the Federal Government’s unconstitutional usurpation of power,” Rink said. The full-length documentary is presented by the Foundation for a Free Society and the Tenth Amendment Center will debut at 5:30 p.m. in the Citizens United CPAC Theater.

Nullification and separatism are not just for New Hampshire hillbillies and Texans anymore. The left wing “Counterpunch” reported that at a recent symposium at the Yale Political Union 45% of the participants voted to dissolve the United States. But original thinking that will bring new ideas to action takes longer and requires a revolutionary generation. The folksy Tea party has fallen away in influence, blocked out perhaps by its own roar. But it is safe to say now that the young coming to CPAC these past few years will identify with these issues and constitute the life force that could formulate a new republic: A new age of Jefferson.

Rand Paul, Rick Perry and Sarah Palin are all confirmed speakers at CPAC 2012. They have all spoken to the issues of states rights, sovereignty, and the Tenth Amendment. But the Republican primary season most strongly suggests that real change is at hand. Separate wins by Santorum, Paul, Gingrich and Romney in different places imply that different regions today legitimately want different things. It is fair to say that this represents a maturation of the American regions. They have developed different natures as natural states evolved here in time and one size no longer fits all. That is as it should be in time as Jefferson suggested.

Mitt Romney, Bob McDonnell, Nikki Haley: A new conservative order

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 2/4/12

“One size does not fit all" was the catch phrase I used in my early complaints and Romney first used the phrase publicly. He was clearly suggesting a change in format and a historic change of outlook. Truth is, it was only after the Tea Party event at the Alamo that state and regional autonomy became a real and advancing possibility. So when Governor Romney suggested early on that his Massachusetts health care plan go national he was merely advancing it from the “initiative state” of Massachusetts to the vast generic, continent-wide model of governance, the only way ideas had come to practice in the U.S. since 1865. But after the nation-wide, grass roots Tea Party uprisings of April, 2009, a more practical and efficient system tailored to regions and states became a real possibility. Nixon had tried earlier to regionalize but the model he used was ineffective as it did not follow the natural cultural contours of America and the timing was all wrong. But Romney could see now that the times had at last changed enough to mobilize a more creative and efficient management model. Provided that leadership had the prodigious management skills that he has.

Watching Romney in Massachusetts and at the great Winter Olympics event that he ran in 2002 you could see that he knows how to fix things and he does this by ignoring prejudices, ideology and the set ways in which things were always done before: Instead, by focusing zen-like on the thing itself that needs to be fixed and ignoring everything else.

The initial offerings of the Tea Party have been lost in conservatism’s recent long day’s journey into the night. (Was the Gingrich scam all along geared to make Newt Rick Perry’s VP?) But Romney stands apart. Of the original Tea Party others, so do governors Nikki Haley of South Carolina and Bob McDonnell of Virginia who came to position in the original Tea Party wave.

Romney has always been more a westerner than a New Englander but he has certainly certified himself as a New Englander as Governor of Massachusetts. If he brought in Haley or McDonnell for VP we would have our traditional north/south break. But we would also have an east/west break with Haley and McDonnell representing the east and Romney who comes from western generations in a 100-year-journey representing the west, a binary more suited to the times and the centuries ahead in a future which looks across the Pacific as well as the Atlantic.

Our American journey to date is prehistory; prelude to a great awakening. We have been a north/south country for 200-some years and still lag there psychologically, but demographics have since WW II made us essentially east/west. And could well remain an east/west country now for a thousand years.

The Tao of Wesley K. Clark

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 1/3/12

Read this morning with interest an interview with Harvard’s Steven Pinker in “Global Briefs” titled, “On the State and Future of Violence” in which questions were asked like “How violent is the today’s world?” Not much, the answer. For which we are all grateful. And as much as I have appreciated Pinker’s outlook for what it does, his interview brought to mind Francis Fukuyama famous essay with the fairly astonishing title: “The End of History and the Last Man” in 1992. Which, if I recall correctly, was extended by Charles Krauthammer to an essay titled “The end of Time.” The end of time, if you care to check it.

And these two essays seemed representative of the end of something. Fukuyama’s vision the end of the world of his generation when its vision of “time” consisted exclusively of contention between the U.S.S.R. and the U.S.A. Nothing more.

Likewise Pinker’s essay seemed to mark the end of a generation. A generation awakened by a masterful world shaman who quickly receding with this phrase: “Imagine there’s no heaven . . . no country . . . no religion too.” It brought the experience of what the Taoists call wu chi: The world between the end of the last world and the beginning of the next world. A world of relative peace got by stasis. This was Bill Clinton’s world and this was his generation’s fulfillment.

And now we are at the end of that as well. Obama was never really part of it. He only patronized it and accommodated it as best he could. But if the Democrats are to bring the century forward with Obama they will leave the Clinton generation behind. And if the Republicans are to bring the generations forward Mitt Romney will do it with the Reagan/Bush generation. So whichever case, the world begins again in 2012.

In contrast with visionaries like Pinker and Fukuyama, Wesley K. Clark seems a practical cat. In his essay in The Hill this morning he writes: “And after a decade or more focusing on ground combat in the Middle East and Southwest Asia, that requires shifting at the margins our resourcing and attention to air and sea and the Asia-Pacific. This is precisely the strategy recently articulated by the Department of Defense and endorsed by our nation’s uniformed military leaders.”

Clark’s essay brings us the world as it is and as it will be now. A world in time again. And this is where the generations will start again. As I understand it, Clark is an advisor to President Obama. The President would do well to bring him in, potentially replacing Joe Biden as Vice President. Obama has paid his debt to the generations and should let them go now and start again. No better place to start a second time than with General Clark.

Mark Zuckerberg’s Nerd Manifesto

by Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 2/2/12

Mark Zuckerberg presses himself into the public eye. It was his insistence and demanding countenance that first brought to my mind those ancient socialist realist statues of Lenin pressing forward against the wind, oversized, waving a bronzed document, almost a hundred years ago in the century’s first great wave – worldwide wave – of “new man” generational politics. It came then from the realization that they simply had the numbers. Capital had already fled Russia. Russian gentry were now waiters in Paris and all was left were peasants; comrades then, millions upon millions of them. And the document: The three-page, single-spaced letter that Zuckerberg had prepared; a letter to potential investors for a $5 billion initial public offering of Facebook. It was a manifesto:

We live at a moment when the majority of people in the world have access to the internet or mobile phones — the raw tools necessary to start sharing what they’re thinking, feeling and doing with whomever they want. Facebook aspires to build the services that give people the power to share and help them once again transform many of our core institutions and industries. . . There is a huge need and a huge opportunity to get everyone in the world connected, to give everyone a voice and to help transform society for the future.

But the key was in the urgency of his voice before the microphones: They had the numbers. Not so many as Borodin would have in Russia and China when he put them together, but they were getting there. And the legitimacy of the vision came from that: There are more of us. And we will change you: We will change government, we will change what you buy, we will change your life and who you are. But Trotsky was a better writer. Here, from his defense of the October Revolution:

It is true that humanity has more than once brought forth giants of thought and action, who tower over their contemporaries like summits in a chain of mountains. The human race has a right to be proud of its Aristotle, Shakespeare, Darwin, Beethoven, Goethe, Marx, Edison, and Lenin. But why are they so rare? Above all, because almost without exception, they came out of the upper and middle classes. Apart from rare exceptions, the sparks of genius in the suppressed depths of the people are choked before they can burst into flame.

The agitprop was breathtaking:

Anthropology, biology, physiology and psychology have accumulated mountains of material to raise up before mankind in their full scope the tasks of perfecting and developing body and spirit. Psycho-analysis, with the inspired hand of Sigmund Freud, has lifted the cover of the well which is poetically called the “soul”. And what has been revealed? Our conscious thought is only a small part of the work of the dark psychic forces. Learned divers descend to the bottom of the ocean and there take photographs of mysterious fishes. Human thought, descending to the bottom of its own psychic sources must shed light on the most mysterious driving forces of the soul and subject them to reason and to will.

Say what you like but fearless they were to a flaw and would shake the world in 10 days. Facebook, basically a Yellow Pages for kids, will take longer.

Trotsky’s famous phrase was repeated often; Everyman a Plato, Lincoln, a Marx. But maybe we have reached the end of the cycle as we find the Everyman today a Newt, a Maynard G. Krebs, a Donald, a Lady Gaga.

Time ahead to begin again from scratch.

Erskine Bowles for North Carolina governor

by Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 1/30/12

President Obama’s invitation to Bush family members to the White House makes him seem an Everyman; all things to all people, and Caroline Kennedy’s open letter to vote for Obama a second time because her name is Kennedy, both mark the turning of the times, and suggest that Obama, like the Kennedys and the Bushes, is no longer a rising part of the times. We have left the age of two family politics, honoring Northeastern gentry who bask in Kennebunkport or Hyannis, and have entered instead into a full-bore Jacksonian heartland awakening. Tea Party has taken the mantle these past two years. But Jacksonian populism, channeled today by Gingrich, Sarah Palin, Ron and Rand Paul, all started in Virginia with Mudcat Saunders.

This new Jacksonian wave brings a most auspicious beginning. It awakens a new generation of politics; the first new wave in the new century. It could bring Elizabeth Warren, Tom Brady loyalist and Massachusetts’ own Okie grandmother, to the White House in the future, and Erskine Bowles to the governor’s chair in North Carolina in 2012. Public Policy Polling says that Democrats “will have a better chance at winning the North Carolina Governor's race now than they did yesterday no matter whom their candidate is this fall. But one potential candidate really rises to the top: Erskine Bowles.” Bowles, with assist from Dave “Mudcat” Saunders and Steve Jarding, authors of “Foxes in the Henhouse: How the Republicans Stole the South and the Heartland and What the Democrats Must Do to Run ‘em Out” could now find a path.

Jarding and Saunders helped Mark Warner win the governorship in Virginia, sponsoring NASCAR stock cars and bringing in The Stanley Brothers. This was not the anti-South, self-hating liberalism which has sapped the spirit of Virginia. Warner’s liberalism demanded fiscal responsibility and economic health and progress. It was liberal politics which sought the center, not that which rushed to the edges; one that families, hillbillies and hunters could feel comfortable with. Warrior-scholar Jim Webb, supported by General Wesley Clark, followed, to remind Virginians that before Ronald Reagan, they were Democrats. The same spirit shortly rose in North Carolina with Senator Kay Hagan. They go to church, watch the Super Bowl, serve in the armed forces and honor those who do.

Bowles would be a prodigy of Warner’s creative model of governance in this rising era. Simpson-Bowles was a heroic effort and Bowles and Simpson were heroes just for one day. Warner was a strong supporter. Bowles could well run now in opposition to a weakling Congress, a failed “super committee” and an ineffective Presidency.

Bowles and his folksy sidekick, Alan Simpson, former senator from Wyoming, brought an old school voice of country authenticity to a time of discontent and confusion, not unlike the voices of Sam Ervin and Howard Baker during Watergate proceedings. It gave sudden clarity to the issues and gave the possibility of a safe recovery and an auspicious future, if only we had the courage and common sense of these two. He could build bipartisan support on this in North Carolina.

The Raleigh News and Observer reports that Bowles and Simpson want to keep the pressure on Congress as they tour the country giving speeches about their deficit plan.

"I think the future of this country is very, very bright if we face up to our problems," Bowles said at one event.

"If not," Simpson interjected, "we'll be a great country, but we won't be No. 1."

Note to Gingrich: “The Seventies called . . . “

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 1/27/12

“The spaceship has landed,” – Steve Jobs, 2011

Note to Gingrich: To paraphrase from the movie “Joe Dirt”: The Seventies called, they want their space program back. Gingrich is the disco paragon; a conservative reaction to the Sixties in double-poly leisure suit, white patent leather belt and shoes and all the baggage trailing from the very end of a century of total war. Like David Bowie’s Major Tom, Newt is stuck in Seventies space/time. His comment RE the moon base egging us on to get there before the Chinese, might be looked at in view of the singular American conservative genius barely mentioned in the Republican debates, Dwight D. Eisenhower, who saw the moon project as a stunt. It wasn't then, but it is now. China flies blindly to the moon with no purpose but competition with America, but it is a competition we do not share in.

We as Anglo-Americans are unable to see and feel the competition with China that we felt with Russia. Asia is foreign and difficult to penetrate. Lao Tzu has no equivalence in Angloamerica. A legitimate swami like the Maharishi Mahesh Yoga is soon scorned back to India by MSM and Gingrich’s Seventies space/time mentality. Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy on the other hand somehow fit, and often guide us to our deepest places and belong to us. With China it is merely economic, with Russia it is existential. With Russia we share our primordial European prehistory and cultural prehistory which swings back a thousand years and beyond. To their credit, the creators of the Project for a New American Century, Kagan and company, understood this.

The are good reasons to go to space but a moon colony is not one. The Kennedy space program had its beginning in the German rocket program in WW II and in post war imagination still fired on military systems and in the economic competition between American Keynesians and Russian Marxists. For more than a hundred years Anglo-American imagination preceded us in space with Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon, mavens of the pop culture in the rising populism of mass democracy. The pop culture space imagination ended in the mid 1990s with the rise of a new earth-based myth cycle seen in “Lost” “Survivor” and “Avatar.” The rest of us have returned to earth, but Gingrich, like David Bowie's Major Tom, remains lost in space.

Gingrich thinks the imagination of luminaries such as Steven Spielberg, George Lucas and J.J. Abrams trickles down from some government official offering direction. In fact, and this can be found in endless interviews with space scientists and engineers later in life, it goes the other way around.

If Gingrich wants to see the future he might open to page 22 of The Atlantic this month. There is a picture of a long procession of bearded patriarchs in a row leaving a snowy Russian Orthodox Church which doubled in the space age as a gulag. There may be relevant symbolism to that. Say whatever else you might about the Russians but they have moved on from the age in which Gingrich is stuck. They have returned to the earth and like Raskolnikov, found their way again to God. And they may have gotten their ahead of us.

Free New England: Repudiate The National Defense Authorization Act

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 2/26/12

New England was a Jeffersonian region of independent-minded yeoman farmers and free-thinking, independents before the Civil War. We lost that earthy colloquialism to the abstraction of federalism after teaming up for the conquest of the west and the South in 1857 and 1865, and again to globalism after the conquest of Europe and Asia in 1946. But today New England begins to find its yeoman soul again. We have always been Jeffersonian. We just forgot. When it starts to catch on any step outside the prescribed Constitutional reservation by the feds will be considered overreach, domination, totalitarianism. And it is starting to catch on. The National Defense Authorization Act is a giant step in the direction of the benign American police state.

Provisions in the National Defense Authorization Act may allow for the indefinite detention of U.S. citizens, but the feds could find they get no cooperation from some state and local officials.

Virginia Delegate Bob Marshall (R-Manassas) introduced HB1660 which would, “Prevent any agency, political subdivision, employee, or member of the military of Virginia from assisting an agency or the armed forces of the United States in the investigation, prosecution, or detainment of a United States citizen in violation of the Constitution of Virginia.”

On Wednesday, a House subcommittee passed the bill 6-3, moving it closer to a full House vote.

And the Tenth Amendment Center reports that as many as ten states will consider legislation or resolutions in response to the detention provisions in section 1021 and 1022 of the NDAA.

We read today that liberal iconoclast Oliver Stone begins to look to Ron Paul. My kids, reared on Kurt Cobain and Flogging Molly, tend to as well and the Pauls have become big hits on college campus. A new generation is rising to the idea of states rights as a defense against the hovering domination of the federal government.

Lawmakers in Rhode Island and Washington will likely introduce resolutions authored by the Rhode Island Liberty Coalition within the next week, writes Mike Maharrey of the Tenth Amendment Center. Additionally, local governments, including Fremont County, Colo. and El Paso County, Colo., have passed resolution condemning the detention provisions.

"Federal politicians never seem to repeal federal law. It's going to take ‘We the People’ in our states to stand up and say, ‘No!’ to this unconstitutional monster," Tenth Amendment Center executive director Michael Boldin said.

The Rhode Island Liberty Coalition, “a grass-roots organization dedicated to the preservation of Civil Liberties, Economic Liberties, and the inherent autonomy of the individual” is especially interesting. I’d like to see it expand to The New England Liberty Coalition.

“We drafted nullification legislation that can double as a draft state-wide Act as well as a local ordinance --in any state, county or municipality in the Country -- that denounces Section 1021 of the NDAA and prevents local officials from cooperating with military investigations and detainments of United States Citizens and legal resident aliens,” their website states. “The Act goes one step further and attempts to outlaw military investigations and detentions of citizens and resident legal aliens within those states, counties or municipalities. Did we mention this legislation can be used as a template in jurisdictions ALL ACROSS THE COUNTRY?”