Kossacks of a certain age will recognize that slogan from the Watergate era, when within a year of his crushing landslide over George McGovern Richard Nixon found himself forced to resign in order to avoid impeachment, conviction, and removal from office.
Massachusetts, of course, was the only state in the union to vote for McGovern in the 1972 presidential election, and at least since then it has earned a reputation as the most liberal state of all. Proud of the fact their electoral votes did not contribute to the crook's investiture, Bay Staters started wearing bumping stickers proclaiming their innocence.
Now, I'm not from Mass, and didn't even move here until 2001. But I'd always shared this image of Massachusetts as a uniquely progressive place -- at least until I moved here.
More on the flip...
See, I lived in Madison, WI through the 1980s, when the political spectrum ran from crunchy granola to sectarian trotskyite and the only function of the right-wing Moonies in CARP was to provide us a convenient excuse to organize rallies expressing our righteous indignation at their mere existence. Shopping at the Willy St. Coop for organic local produce and cheese, kvetching about their decision to sell meat, hanging at the Cardinal Bar and the 602 Club to dance reggae and talk politics until they kicked us out, I lived in a safe left-liberal bubble -- twenty square miles surrounded by reality, as a Republican governor once famously defined the state capital.
So, I always had this image of Massachusetts as Madison expanded onto a state-wide scale.
I wasn't prepared for the kind of corrupt one-party politics the Democrats have used to run the state legislature, nor for the fact that 6 of the last ten governors since 1965 have been Republicans. Massachusetts's uneasy political mix of old blue-blood Brahmins with rough-and-tumble Irish and Italian machines can be confusing at the extreme. And, of course, sublimated somewhere in my consciousness was the memory of the South Boston busing-provoked race riots.
Rush Limbaugh might rant and rave about "Massachusetts liberals," but in my experience that phrase didn't exactly describe the state I live in.
But...
Maybe it does.
A couple of months I started taking classes at the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth -- a secondary campus of what most folks in Massachusetts already consider a second-tier public university system. UMD is an architectural hell, its dilapidated 1970s-era concrete fortresses connected by skywalks and surrounded by a ring-road (.pdf). The town of Dartmouth is a suburb of New Bedford, a "Brownfields Showcase Community" (no shit) which competes with places like Springfield and Lawrence as the most depressed city in the Commonwealth. Students don't choose to go to Dartmouth; they wind up there if their grades, boards, or bank accounts are too low to get them into someplace better.
I'm taking classes there because the Massachusetts Department of Education requires mini-grad programs for prospective teachers, and Dartmouth is the only school within seventy-five miles of my house that offers the required program at a time I can attend and at a price I can afford. One of the classes I must take is Introduction to Adolescent Psychology, a 200 level undergraduate class. (A lot of folks reading this might know I hold a Ph.D. in history.)
It's a big class, maybe thirty or forty students, we are all returning students, and a lot of us have adolescent or post-adolescent children of our own. In addition, many of us are full-time high school and middle school teachers, and all the rest want to become licensed teachers sometime soon. The professor, recognizing the amount of experience in the classroom, often assigns us a chapter of text, poses an open-ended question, and lets us talk. I'm not learning a lot of adolescent psychology, but I'm learning a hell of a lot about political attitudes in the state of Massachusetts.
For example, my classmates uniformly blame borrowers for the sub-prime mortgage meltdown. Ex-contractors turned teachers get up in front of the class and officiously proclaim that people simply shouldn't buy houses they can't afford, and throughout the room heads nod in knowing agreement. My classmates also agree that the mothers of teenage mothers are irresponsible, and that the children of teenage mothers are condemned to a future life as gangbangers, teenage parenthood, jail, or some combination of the above. The wealthy, my classmates concur, earned their riches, and the poor are probably lazy, dysfunctional, or otherwise responsible for their fate.
This, I say to myself, is a cross-section of "liberal Massachusetts"?
Last night, however, my classmates woke me up. The subject of our discussion was teen sexuality, one of the most charged issues in the culture wars, and specifically the professor asked us to consider the role of public schools in offering sexual education, distributing condoms, and promoting sexual abstinence. We were given a packet of articles about the 1996 Title V, which defined abstinence-only education and made adherence to the guidelines a requirement for schools seeking federal funding. One article discussed the 2004 decision by the Holyoke, MA school committee to make condoms available to middle schoolers (not to be confused with the recent similar decision by the Portland, ME public schools).
How did my socially conservative classmates react? Not a single student spoke up in favor of abstinence-only education. No one objected to condom distribution in the schools. The professor, playing devil's advocate, asked if parents should have prior knowledge of such distribution. No, my classmates answered, that would defeat the purpose.
I was shocked. Here we are on the cutting edge of the culture wars, and the consensus view was absolutely on the progressive side.
Yeah, the guy down at the supermarket may be collecting signatures to abolish the state income tax, and folks may be just as racist as you'll find them anywhere else in the nation, but something about Massachusetts is different. It may not be Madison on a statewide scale, but it very well might be the most liberal state in the union.
Not for nothing are we celebrating Niki Tsongas's election to Congress...