How Massachusetts Became a No-Party State

In order to understand Massachusetts politics, one must come to terms with the State’s myths. Left and Right, Democrat and Republican, within and without Massachusetts, the misconceptions exist: Massachusetts as a liberal State; and Massachusetts as a one-party State.


Both are false.

Measured by the political attitudes of its citizens, Massachusetts is a center-right State. It is, however the center-right State with the highest percentage of liberals.

At the same time the organizational structure of statewide politics became so degraded as to be nonexistent. Despite the number of elected officials with parenthetical “D”s after their names, the Commonwealth is actually a no-party State.

Here’s how it happened.

Until the early Seventies, Massachusetts was competitive at the statewide level between the two Parties, with liberal Democrats contending with progressive Republicans.

A point of nomenclature: “Progressive” is not the same as “liberal”, political jargon notwithstanding. Liberal in the American sense of the term denotes a system based upon government insuring equal opportunity to insure upward social and economic mobility. “Progressive” in the same sense assumed public administration by an educated elite, based upon rational principles of management. The corruption of these terms (among others; neither the market fundamentalism nor the right-wing populism predominant in today’s Republican Party could be considered to be “conservative”) is one of the reasons for the ongoing collapse of the Commonwealth.

The political history of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, in particular the Yankee versus Irish political wars of the nineteenth through mid-twentieth centuries added ethnic components to the class conflicts between the two Parties; nevertheless both were firmly anchored in the civic cultures of their respective adherents.

Then came the Sixties.

In hindsight, most of the damage was done, not by the New Left or the Counterculture, but by the New Politics wing of the Democratic Party. Combining the elitism of the Progressives with the class bigotry of traditional conservatives, and a tendency to condescending racism. New Democrats sought to dispense with grassroots politics altogether, preferring to concentrate on media campaigns, targeting educated suburban voters. Urban labor-liberals, though more numerous on the ground (and in the Legislature) soon lost control of the Massachusetts Democratic Party. Many, while remaining Democrats, became swing voters, casting their ballots for Republicans in national elections. Hence the strength of George Wallace in 1976; and Reagan winning Massachusetts in 1980 and 1984.

On the Republican side, old-style progressives fell victim to a “New Right” alliance of social conservatives, market fundamentalists, and libertarians; doing as much damage to the social culture of Massachusetts as their portside cousins.

Long story short: there were rebellions within both parties, middle-class good-government types (hereinafter “goo-goos) took over the Democrats; larval Reaganites took over the Republicans. A corruption of progressives in the original sense, goo-goos are too class bigoted to form lasting alliances with culturally working class voters. The Republicans (allied with the Libertarian Party) were victimized by their own success. A twenty-year process of successful grassroots organizing collapsed under the weight of narcissism at the top.

In the period from 1974 to 1978, both parties had collapsed as principled political mechanisms. The following three decades saw the collapse of grassroots politics. The result was a loose feudal system, centered upon state representative districts and strong mayors in cities like Boston and Worcester. Rather than the governor, power in such a system naturally accrues to legislative leadership, usually the Speaker of the House.

Hence, the operating premises of Massachusetts state politics, both ideological and structural are false. What exists is loosely corporatized feudalism in a collapsing polity, overwhelmed by its costs, and whose elites are too decadent to care.