Joe Miller for president

Before Eliot Spitzer went all Rachel Maddow on him last week, Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) was saying that he saw the future of America rising with the governors, not the president or Congress.

But apoplexy set in with the host before Perry could advance his thesis. He did manage to get out the radically old idea that the states should be allowed to manage their own Social Security. Unquestionably he is right. But what is more important in this election cycle than whether old-school conservatives or new-school win the congressional debate on earmarks is whether the 600-plus newly elected conservatives in the states will find a working model for Perry’s thesis. Like all theses, to become reality this one needs a place to begin and an avatar. The place should be Alaska and the avatar should be Joe Miller of Alaska. Miller should bring these ideas forward, possibly as a third party: a Federalist Party candidate for president in 2012. The scorn poured upon Sarah Palin by the MSM had a reverse effect; it raised her to national prominence. The strange and unlikely Murkowski contention has done the same for Miller.

There are a lot of things that have happened these past two years that Americans find interesting but don’t quite understand, as we have been conditioned since kindergarten by other explanations that are reinforced daily. Like how the 17th Amendment, passed in 1913, makes any difference in our lives. It takes some explication and some explanation. Judge Andrew Napolitano well explains how it took power from the states and gave it to central government, why it is unconstitutional, and why it made presidents like Clinton, W. Bush and Obama grand imperial celestial potentates. What is the end result of this gargantuan, globalist delusion (The Washington Post’s Steven Pearlstein’s excellent phrase, “dysfunctional co-dependency”) in the practical and material governance of states and individuals and in human freedom and development? We become a vulnerable and dependent prey species. A penguin horde in a sea of hungry predators.

Judge Napolitano’s Fox Business show “Freedom Watch” explains to millions today what only a few of us were talking about in small, fussy libertarian journals just two years ago. It may be seen as a barometer of American temperament that his show goes after the election from a Saturday morning special to five nights a week primetime. This new movement has gone beyond Beck’s rants and Mall rallies. Thoughtful and committed people are interested. But it takes responsible new people to lead the way to new thinking and visualization. Perry, Judge Napolitano and Palin form a context, and with Miller as action man, a quaternity: a trail leading to the future.

The Murkowski/Miller conflict is a classic struggle of Old Temple vs. New Temple; the old, with witch doctors and shamans in attendance, hoping against hope to prevent the awakening of a new generation. It happens every generation. It never works. The old — Lisa Murkowski, Nancy Pelosi — become icons of intransigence; like Ozzy Osbourne and Keith Richards, embarrassing residue of time past that won’t let go. We experienced this in the ’60s. We experience it again today.

Sarah Palin is Mama Grizzly of this new movement and Rick Perry is Papa Bear. But there is not now a potentially more effective leader and advocate for the new directions than Joe Miller, and not a better Petri dish for this new experiment in self-reliance and self-determination than Alaska.

Visit Mr. Quigley's website at http://quigleyblog.blogspot.com.