Bay State Blues

Massachusetts incubates the "viruses" that afflict the Democratic Party.

By Guy Darst
Wednesday, September 5, 2007 12:01 a.m.

"I shall enter on no encomium upon Massachusetts--she needs none," Daniel Webster famously said in the Senate in 1830, extolling his home state. "There she is. Behold her, and judge for yourselves."

Veteran Boston political reporter Jon Keller also invites us to behold his native state . . . and shudder in dismay. In "The Bluest State," he argues that, although Massachusetts does not suffer alone from its notorious affection for liberalism, it is the incubator for "Massachusetts viruses" that infect the national Democratic Party. The viruses come in many forms: "addiction to tax revenues and a raging edifice complex couched in disrespect to wage earners; phony identity politics without real results for women and minorities; reflexive anti-Americanism in foreign affairs; vain indulgence in obnoxious political correctness; self-serving featherbedding; NIMBYism; authoritarian distortion of the balance of governmental power, all simmered in a broth of hypocritical paternalism."

When Democrats fight off the viruses and run more centrist campaigns, Mr. Keller says, they can prosper, as they did in 2006. But the infection is always lurking--and could be the party's undoing next year. It should be noted that "The Bluest State" is not a book by a Republican cheerleader; Mr. Keller can be withering about the GOP. I know, because I have listened to his morning radio commentaries for years. But Republicans are largely beside the point when it comes to Massachusetts. Despite winning four out of the past five elections for governor, Republicans hold by far a smaller share of legislative seats--one out of six--than in any other state. Only next-door Rhode Island is even close.


"The Bluest State" is argument by anecdote. But what anecdotes! Edifice complex? The state spent almost $15 billion building a highway tunnel under the city of Boston only to discover hundreds of leaks. The genius "Big Dig" builders used what might as well have been library paste to anchor the ceiling of an approach tunnel; four concrete panels weighing three tons each fell last summer, killing a female motorist.

Featherbedding? Back when the tunnel project was expected to cost half as much, a third of the costs were earmarked for "mitigation" endeavors, essentially payoffs intended to pacify unhappy neighborhoods and other malcontents demanding some reward for not opposing the project.

Reflexive anti-Americanism? Last year, FBI agents scrambling to track down what appeared to be a terrorist threat against Brandeis University were denied access to computer terminals at the public library in Newton, a Boston suburb. The librarians demanded to see a warrant; the urgent investigation was delayed for nine hours while one was obtained.

Obnoxious political correctness? The school superintendent in Amherst put the kibosh on "West Side Story" as the annual high-school senior musical after a handful of complaints claiming that the work was racist in its portrayal of Puerto Ricans. (In fact, this modern-day Romeo-and-Juliet story is the most beautiful anti-racism work in American musical theater.) "Political correctness," writes Mr. Keller, "is the signature cultural statement of the ruling elites, undermining their moral authority and driving a wedge between them and the working class far more effectively than any right-wing demagogue could hope for."

NIMBYism? Housing costs are high because of iron-fisted, development-averse local control of zoning by 351 cities and towns. Massachusetts is one of the few states losing population--230,000 fled the Bay State between 2000 and 2005. It has not regained the 150,000 technical jobs that it lost in the bursting of the dot-com bubble. Job growth has been flat since 1999.


Mr. Keller has a few ideas about what Massachusetts should do to make itself more appealing. Almost all of Mr. Keller's recommendations are broad-brush matters of political style, such as his admonition to boomer liberals to "pack away political correctness in the attic alongside that box of Spirit and Iron Butterfly LPs" and commit themselves to "positive economic growth." I particularly liked his suggestion (which has practically no chance of ever being adopted) that "boomer leaders" disguise themselves and engage in "guerrilla listening" in the streets, coffee shops and subways to discover what actually matters to people. Practically the only specific policy innovation he endorses is for liberals to challenge the teachers' unions and strongly back "school choice, charter schools, or even vouchers" to help "poor kids trapped in failing urban schools." Conservatives like me would welcome boomer support for such an agenda.

Mr. Keller does a fine job of cataloging the "politically unappealing traits"--such as aloofness, arrogance, entitlement, condescension and hypocrisy--that beset the bluest of blue-state politicians, but he does not try to investigate the traits' origins. For that, he might have taken a look at the "Sociology of the Intellectual" section of Joseph Schumpeter's great 1942 work, "Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy." Schumpeter believed that capitalism was the only system that produced the seeds of its own destruction by nurturing intellectuals, a class thick on the ground in Massachusetts.