Abstract

The Liberal State

The article looks at politics and political attitudes in Massachusetts as of August 2004. I should explain, now that Senator John Kerry is the presumptive Democratic presidential candidate, that the phrase "Massachusetts liberal" does not mean what it is said to mean in the feverish fundraising letters of the political right. I should explain this particularly now, as gay people are marrying each other here in the Commonwealth, a development that likely will cause Massachusetts to be portrayed as Gehenna's vestibule over the next several months. Massachusetts politics never has been about conservatives and liberals. Massachusetts politics always has been about established power and the reform impulse, and, since the beginning of the last century, that struggle has taken place within a liberal Democratic context. Kerry carried his passion to his work in the Senate in the 1980s, when he drove many of the investigations into a secret foreign policy manifested most conspicuously in the Iran/contra scandal. The hearings that Kerry conducted were pure reformist Massachusetts liberalism. In its frustration, the President George W. Bush campaign may find itself running against a genuine Massachusetts liberal.