Before he considered running for president, I pitched Virginia’s Jim Webb (D) back in 2012 when he resigned from the Senate, claiming that he brings the antidote for the “utopianism that plagues our innocence” and has especially dogged us Northeasterners this previous century, suggesting that country life might be the cure today, much as it was when Andrew Jackson headed to Washington when the Colonials had become entrenched and enamored of their own importance. The same might be said for Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D). As a native-born New Englander still with friends and neighbors with active yearnings for County Cork, I see that the hardscrabble Okie grandmother who found her way to Harvard by sheer will and hard work has brought to us a kind of awakening.
My instinct is that these two, Webb and Warren, will somehow rise together in our world and reviewers might find it useful to read their books together. They have an interesting synchronicity; Warren’s book is called A Fighting Chance. Webb’s history of the Scots-Irish is Born Fighting. Both have fathers who were flyers. Both had a family member who arrived in the nick of time, out of nowhere, saving the family from complete devastation. Both bring tribute to the healing powers of family and heartland.
{mosads}Warren might be seen as the anti-Palin; the true rural Jacksonian who knows how to bake a cake and made one for her mother every Valentine’s Day. She even has an Aunt Bee. Really.
The importance of Warren rising to a leadership position in the Senate today cannot be overestimated, for as this season as per the Nov. 4 election brings a red wave from coast to coast, so too it has been a year of breakaway from what in these past several decades can now be identified as the “Establishment.”
How egregious to be part of the Establishment! Nobody wants that; old, fixed, stale and crusty out-of-work nostalgicos, like Norma Desmond in “Sunset Boulevard,” ready for their closeup, perennially staging a comeback. Former Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, “brothers from other mothers,” tweeting one another, frozen in time. The same unbearably light grocery-store music still going through their heads these past 50 years, frozen in amber. This is the way the world ends.
Warren is not part of the Democratic Establishment these recent years, which defaults to lifestyle and cultural approaches in politics. There is no “nerd” escapism to her. She is solid and old school: “The game is rigged!” It is possible to see in her the shadow of the old Reuther brothers firing car door handles at Detroit’s hired gun thugs with slingshots.
And with Iowa’s Joni Ernst (R) and Nebraska’s Ben Sasse (R) rising to the Senate, you could say that the back of Establishment conservative leadership has been broken as well. The old saws remain. Sens. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) and Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), Senate Majority Leader-elect Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) are still around with the old thinking. But even California liberals today yearn for new blood.
Without question, conservatives since the November election have the jump on new directions, but for Democrats, Warren brings a starting place, a new beginning. Even if it is only a crack in the liberal Establishment, it is a vigorous and worthy beginning and more are sure to follow.
Like it or not, the new is upon us. It has advanced to dominance in Republican circles, but Democrats will, given time, catch up. Warren and Webb should be pathfinders. The world is starting again, just as it started again in 1829 when Andrew Jackson entered the White House.
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.