Scott Brown, Sarah Palin, Jefferson: New age of common folk all started by New Hampshire’s ‘Free Staters’

There has awakened this past year in Massachusetts and across the continent a new vein of conservatism that might be seen as the dawning of a new age of common folk.

Scott Brown in barn coat and pickup truck at the heritage hockey rink, and Sarah Palin, married to a fisherman and from people, as she says, who worked with their hands. While the Democrats have somehow managed to become the party of the rich and superrich, conspicuously being seen and seeing these past weeks at those new courts of Louis XIV and the Dauphine de France, Davos and Copenhagen: Bill Clinton, Haiti’s Lord Jim, with his 50 gold watches; Nancy Pelosi, of untold California millions; friends of Obama and Bill, who bask at Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard with John Forbes Kerry, said to be the richest man ever to run on a national ticket.

This transition went somehow unnoticed because an entire generation of journalists and historians bask at Nantucket and on the Vineyard with them. But the stark contrast was suddenly opened in a simple twist of fate last summer by President Barack Obama himself when Boston cop Sgt. James Crowley arrested Henry Louis Gates Jr., Alphonse Fletcher University professor and the director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University, and Obama instinctively identified with the Harvard Yard guy over the Fenway Park guy.

This new rising form of conservatism begins history in the new century, and at the beginning of every such movement is a wild bunch. Rowdy workers on the docks in Boston, John Brown and his half-mad family. When historians trace back from Scott Brown to the beginning, they will get to a wild bunch in New Hampshire called the “Free Staters.”

They moved here a few years back and live on the edge of the forest, not more than a handful at first but expecting thousands to follow, intending to start the republic fresh again. And in a way they did. I came to their attention with an article at the beginning of the war on Iraq titled “A States’ Rights Defense against Dick Cheney” premised on Thomas Jefferson’s Kentucky Resolutions, making the claim that New Hampshire and Vermont need not participate in the war on Iraq without the permission of our state governors.

They had moved up here drawn to our state motto, I think — Live Free or Die. But it was no big ideological thing, more a free-spirited awakening that brought the usual scoffs from the lace-curtain MSM and conventional political religionists here in the cold where local politics sometimes seems a substitute for religion. I received an e-mail from one blithe spirit in their group who said that she was basically about “opposing gun laws, legalizing marijuana and Hillary is a bitch.”

What we had in common was the premise that Thomas Jefferson had recognized the natural state that formed of its own initiative when ideology was removed from the equation. And acknowledged that in the Constitution by declaring that the states had the natural right and the ability to defend themselves against an abusive, arrogant, immoral or delirious federal government.

From then till now, this idea has taken off. I think now it cannot be held back. It will bring us a new breed of politician and a new political generation. Possibly a new century. It is already doing so.

This thinking first began to move last February when Dan Itse, a New Hampshire state representative, read commentary related to Jefferson and the Kentucky Resolutions and proposed a 10th Amendment defense against the Obama administration’s deficit spending, spending so extensive that it would tax future generations. He cited the New Hampshire Free Staters’ advocacy of state sovereignty in one of his TV interviews. Within days, 37 other states followed his initiative. It advanced further on April 15 when the Tea Party revolts started across the country. When Texas Gov. Rick Perry (“states' rights, states’ rights, states’ rights!”) appeared at an event at the Alamo, it brought greater legitimacy to this movement. His friend Ted Nugent brought his own inimitable style. Then the race in NY-23 last fall separated the sheep from the goats. Sarah Palin undoubtedly brought this movement nationally when she led Perry, Gov. Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota and others to break ranks and support Doug Hoffman and the Conservative Party in opposition to the mainstream Republican candidate. (Newt Gingrich supported the Republican.)

Mainstream conservatives and the Tea Partiers need to merge, Palin recently told Fox’s Greta Van Susteren. "Definitely, they need to merge. I think those who are wanting the divisions and the divisiveness and the controversy — those are the ones who don't believe in the message. And they're the ones, I think, stirring it up."

The Republican primary in Texas on March 2 is a critical day. The Bush family and its agents have lined up behind Kay Bailey Hutchison. Palin supports Perry. But no matter what happens in Texas — Perry is ahead by 10 points — these two groups have already merged.

The election of Bob McDonnell as Virginia’s governor completed this transformation and fully legitimized the Jeffersonian ideals in Jefferson’s home state. This can be seen now as the new mainstream. The election of Scott Brown ensured that Massachusetts and New England would not be left out.

In his speech in response to President Obama’s State of the Union, McDonnell made several references to the singular man of the Enlightenment who awakened our world: “It was Thomas Jefferson who called for ‘A wise and frugal Government which shall leave men free to regulate their own pursuits of industry ... and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned.’ He was right.”

Jefferson could awaken us again in 2010 and 2012. And it all started up here in woods of New Hampshire with the Free Staters. Never underestimate the power of a handful of rural rednecks, duty-bound, born again to the Constitution and hell-bent on a free vision of starting the world again. ’Twas ever thus.

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