It should be Trump’s time, if only he knew what he was doing

A little history might have helped. Impulse control can be contained and channeled into intuition by quiet afternoons on the screen porch reading long complicated books. After the speech in Reno, Nevada the other day in which the Republican nominee Donald Trump taught the crowds how to pronounce the name of their own state, “The Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant” came to mind. It was this kind of thing, Grant wrote, that really irked him. Probably as much as slavery, states’ rights and racial alienation, since it found a place in his final chapter and led to the great war, the war that would open the gate to modern war and all the horrific wars ahead.

{mosads}”Prior to the rebellion,” wrote Grant, “the great mass of people were satisfied to remain near the scenes of their birth. … So much was the country divided into small communities that localized idioms had grown up, so that you could almost tell what section a person was from by hearing him speak.”

Out there beyond the Hudson River in the hollers and hills and mountains and ravines, the country people were all starting to pronounce things differently and speak in different dialects. Grant hated that. Like Trump, they should all talk the same: They should all talk like he talked.

And Trump, like all of us in the Northeast, pronounces Nevada “Nev-AH-da.” While those who live in Nevada say “Ne-VAD-a.” Trump hates that.

“Trump made a point at the top of his speech to say it is pronounced ‘Nev-AH-da,'” The Hill reported, “but the crowd responded with a few shouts of disagreement, according to reports on the ground.”

“Nobody pronounces it the other way,” Trump said. And choice of words is important: “nobody” says something about how he truly feels about those who do.

Brings to mind the provincialism of the famous film critic Pauline Kael at The New Yorker, who said she could not believe Richard Nixon had won the election. No one she knew had voted for him. Apparently, no one Trump knows talks the way they talk in Nevada. And the strangest element of this strangest of presidential races may be that Trump has become the champion of these people of the heartland whom he wants to be exactly like him even as they pronounce the names of their own home places.

And there is the breach that divided America from the beginning and does so today in Nevada. Wait until he tries to pronounce New Orleans.

That, in a word, was the difference between Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson at the very beginning. Hamilton’s approach, like Trump’s and Kael’s, was for all to be like they are, the New Yorkers who would conjure the culture then and still do today, to be like they were and talk like they talked. To be like William Lloyd Garrison, their champion, when the tide of contention turned to war in 1831, who declared very explicitly on the masthead of his newspaper: “Our country is the world — our countrymen are mankind.” And as Grant had demanded, they would all speak the same language and dialect.

That was the difference in 1776 and that was the difference still until Texas Rep. Ron Paul (R) reared his head to look again to the beginnings and to Jefferson. Renegade agrarian Frank Owsley well explained the difference in an essay on the division perfectly titled “The Irrepressible Conflict”:

In the beginning of Washington’s administration two men defined the fundamental principles of the political philosophy of the two societies, Alexander Hamilton for the North and Jefferson for the South. The one was extreme centralization, the other was extreme decentralization; the one was nationalistic and the other provincial; the first was called Federalism, the other State Rights, but in truth the first should have been called Unitarianism and the second Federalism.

Trump sees a world ahead to be just as his own is. He, like Hamilton, Kael, Garrison, Don Draper, Bono, and Bill and Hillary Clinton, want all and expect all to talk, walk and be like he is. It is irksome when others express a more primal earthy insistence of identity and self-reliance by pronouncing Nevada as they do in Nevada. “Nobody” — Trump’s phrase — does that.

The Nevadans in the audience who shouted their disagreement are the true Jeffersonians. They are the saviors of mankind. Their time is ahead.

And it could have been Trump’s time had he known what he was doing. A “new age of Jefferson” has been rising here in the last decade. A rising age of states’ rights, sound money, and constitutional government in which the regions and mature states saw themselves as able to speak up, speak for themselves: Speak their minds and speak it in their own language.

It may have it all started up here in woods of New Hampshire in February 2009, when a singular state legislator declared that his state need not follow the dictations and contours of ObamaCare, taking council from Thomas Jefferson’s Kentucky Resolutions, and more than 30 states followed suit. Never underestimate the power of a handful of rural rednecks, duty-bound, born-again to the Constitution and hellbent on a free vision of starting the world again from scratch.

All it lacked was a leader who would respect them as Jefferson might have. And it could well have been Donald Trump.

Now it will have to wait.

Quigley is a prize-winning writer who has worked more than 35 years as a book and magazine editor, political commentator and reviewer. He lives in New Hampshire with his wife and four children. Contact him at quigley1985@gmail.com.

The views expressed by contributors are their own and not the views of The Hill.