Scott Brown unites New England

Cultural concerns here in New England are different than in, say, the middle and Deep South or Texas, and Brown, like Snowe and Collins, is a shoe that fits our sense of place. The good part about Brown is that he fits in a regional sense; a New England sense. In that regard, New England is getting its mojo back.

It is good for us in New Hampshire. New Hampshire’s mountain independence felt compromised when Massachusetts people moved across our border and brought the Boston mentality with them, but with Brown it seems that the independent-mindedness of New Hampshire has found its way back to Boston. And we have found cohesion with the whole region, possibly in a way that we haven’t experienced since before the Civil War.

Through the 1950s and long before up here, it was Kennedy vs. Lodge, Catholic vs. Protestant, expanded nationally with Bush Republicans vs. Kennedy/Obama Democrats. But with Scott Brown, New England is finding a common sense of itself. We begin to identify, as Jefferson intended, with the region, not with an idea, or a dangerously destabilizing utopian nationalism, a messianic globalism or a one-size-fits-all federalism, but with a real place of earth, sky, color, sound and ocean with its own unique, vastly beautiful and complex personality.

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