Retiring Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin’s (D) Taylor Swift comment tells the whole story. To condemn the Republican senatorial candidate, as Harkin attacked Joni Ernst, by comparing her to a dynamic young pop singer is to condemn the entire generation rising. It was a regular late Sixties, early Seventies reaction: They are just young, therefore frivolous and unprofessional, all of them, the whole lot. Not like us. No worries.
{mosads}But the nervous snicker betrayed the fear that was beginning to be felt when they were first noticed on the horizon. They were getting closer, and coming after the establishment. They even used that phrase back then — “the establishment” — as they do today. And they clearly had no respect for it; intended to take it down, all of it. Intended to take us down too.
Today, a new generation arrives in Congress.
The Tea Party was prelude, a rustic, Jacksonian uprising in the hills and hollers of Appalachia and the rural heartland, as if out of nowhere. Back in 2009, Gerald Celente, author of Trends 2000: How to Prepare for and Profit from the Changes of the 21st Century, wrote that the tax revolts, tax rallies, tea parties and healthcare reform protests had already begun a “Second American Revolution”:
“Though in its early stages, the ‘Second American Revolution’ is under way. Yet what we forecast will become the most profound political trend of the century — the trend that will change the world — is still invisible to the same experts, authorities and pundits who didn’t see the financial crisis coming until the bottom fell out of the economy.”
Back then, there was former Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) speaking the unspeakable — gold, Austrian economics, constitutional governance, states’ rights — and barnstorming firebrand Glenn Beck. Today there are Republican Senate candidates Joni Ernst and Ben Sasse (Neb.). They and the other young ‘uns running for Congress bring strength, determination, imagination and thoughtful new thinking now to an organized and original forum.
What is happening to America can be seen in demographics. Economy and population have left the 19th- and 20th-century manufacturing and financial centers of the Northeast and advanced to the South, West, Southwest and throughout the heartland. A new America arises in the middle and with it new economic paradigms. Very likely it will in time rise against the edges in a condition of “new America” in the middle vs. “old America” on the edges, much as the first American Revolution brought a challenge of “new America” vs. “old Britain.” Young rises every time against the old, but this is not random breakage. As Meredith Whitney well documents in Fate of the States: The New Geography of American Prosperity, American prosperity has left the old centers and rises today in the middle.
Google one of those satellite maps that show night lights of the Koreas, North and South: The darker part is like a metaphor for North Korea, trapped in totalitarianism, while South Korea is bathed in light. West of the Mississippi in the Rockies is dark, as it must be, but today, the brightest night lights on the map are in North Dakota, because that’s where the money is. In a free state, power will follow money. And power will find its way to the middle now in this rising century.
America will fill in. We will replace Hamilton’s centralization of capital and power with Jacksonian populism and Jeffersonian regional awakening. We will see America defined by six words: “states’ rights, sound money, constitutional government.”
We may even move the nation’s capital to the middle of the country as Ben Sasse has suggested. Get ready.
Quigley is a prize-winning writer who has worked more than 35 years as a book and magazine editor, political commentator and reviewer. For 20 years he has been an amateur farmer, raising Tunis sheep and organic vegetables. He lives in New Hampshire with his wife and four children. Contact him at quigley1985@gmail.com.