What is a Massachusetts Liberal?

Yes, the most extreme, properly defined as "Wicked liberal."

Safelink provides phones to people with fixed incomes; people who are raising kids on little money and/or people with disabilities. You get 68-80 minutes per month (depending on various factors), which is not enough to spend time socializing on the phone. The service allows people in shelters or transient living situations, or people who can't keep phone service, to have a number where they can be reached for appointments and things. It's a lot cheaper than the long-term effects of not being able to get a job, your doctor not being able to get in touch with you, your kid's school not being able to contact you. I do think it's a basic human right in this society to have a working phone number, plus I prefer that my tax dollars be used to provide a simple bit of dignity to our less fortunate brothers and sisters rather than being wasted on less reasonable and humane expenses. You know, like having your kid turned over to DCF because the school couldn't reach you on your turned-off phone or being on transitional assistance for years because the prospective employers who call the number on your resume and reach a homeless shelter immediately hung up. The costs of not having a phone are a lot more than having a few minutes per month on a free handset.

(BTW, this isn't some newfangled Massachusetts liberal program; it comes out of the FCC's lifeline program, created in the 1970s.)

It seems there are two answers to this question: what typical Massachusetts liberals are really like; and what the right-wing screamers mean when they try to insult people with this epithet.

The screamers imagine all liberals are pretty much the same, and in Massachusetts they must be worse because there are more of them. Liberalism is rock solid in Massachusetts, so a Massachusetts liberal must be kind of an uber-liberal. But the screamers have it backwards: Massachusetts liberals are still dour and distrustful Yankees, and are actually more conservative than liberals elsewhere.

If there is such a thing as a "Massachusetts liberal" (besides being that kind of liberal who is cocky and secure because s/he is in the majority all the time), they must be somehow different from west-coast liberals or upper-midwest liberals (the two other strongholds in the country).

I've lived in the midwest before, and one of the things that always impressed me about liberals there is the commonality of civic virtue and support for community organizations. Sure, you've got your poster-stapling minority hanging around college campuses. But what really makes liberalism strong in the upper midwest is cultural traditions of community dating back centuries. While the kids are out being freegans, their parents are supporting the town museum where you can take courses for a dollar and the symphony orchestra that plays free for the kids. It's just part of being a good citizen, like shoveling your sidewalk and mowing your lawn. Liberalism in Wisconsin is about paying your dues.

California liberals might be the most extreme variety. After all, their right-wingers are some of the most extreme as well. It's kind of a bipolar state. California liberals are used to being in the minority or constantly fighting rather than ruling over a long period. The legislature, where it's always majority D, has little actual power to make law because of all the referendums. So it's easy to support absurd or pointless stands just for the optics. California liberals support so many things that they end up conflicting. And they do wacky things like run around at Burning Man without their clothes on. California liberals are utopian, with all the pitfalls of that: they make shaky little enclaves where they can live in a dream world and ignore the rest of the state.

Massachusetts liberals are more like the original liberals - the Founding Fathers. Massachusetts liberals aren't evangelistic about it, just steady. They understand that liberalism is the central political tradition of this country and the reason this country exists, and strive to preserve our traditions, no matter how the rest of the country might shift. But that doesn't mean they have to like everybody or put up with California-type shenanigans. Animal rights activists and eco-terrorists can stay out there. Massachusetts liberals don't go for that. They don't get divorced every three years like they do out there, either. Massachusetts liberals stay married more than anybody in the country. Massachusetts liberals lead, as Eeka says, quite conservative lives, going to church (perhaps the traditional UU) and eating their vegetables (preferably good New England produce). They don't go for casinos or bars open all night or that sort of disreputable stuff. Massachusetts liberals are good, stable parents. If this country's political center of gravity hadn't shifted because of the far-out weight of the movement Conservatives after Reagan (a California thing, it should be noted), then Massachusetts liberals would be the conservatives. But Massachusetts liberals are traditionally too wary to go for that sort of flim-flam show.

Our high taxes are what go to the red states via the fed. In terms of state burden, MA lands near the middle and has for years.

I'll put this as simply as I can - we don't have high taxes.

There. It's not a complicated proposition.

As a pejorative, the term "Massachusetts Liberal" seems to have come into widespread circulation during the 1988 Democratic Primary, as Al Gore and Dick Gephardt attempted to demonstrate their electoral viability by denigrating Mike Dukakis. The idea was to link Dukakis to Teddy Kennedy and Tip O'Neill, thus establishing a typical Massachusetts type. During the overheated rhetoric of the campaign, the term "Massachusetts Liberal" became a virtual shorthand for three ideas:

• Soft on crime: Dukakis' commutations, paroles, and weekend passes became a potent issue, as did his opposition to capital punishment

• High taxes: In his first term, Dukakis broke a pledge by raising the sales tax. Anger over high property taxes led to Prop 2 1/2 and his primary defeat in 1978

• Cold-blooded wonkishness: Dukakis was accused favoring wonkish solutions without understanding the emotional core of issues. The 'tank-helmet incident' and the death penalty question were particularly damaging in this respect

Read through the comments thread above, and you'll find repeated echoes of all three of these points. Commenters suggest that Massachusetts has unusually high taxes, that we coddle the disadvantaged, and that liberals are tone-deaf on how their favored policies impact others.

That's the thing about stereotypes - they take a while to produce, and tend to linger long after they have any correspondence with reality. In truth, our tax burden today is middling - neither particularly high nor low, compared to that of other states. We do have more liberal social welfare policies than the national average, but then again, we're also a vastly wealthier state than the national average. We have the third highest per-capita-GDP, but we rank only tenth lowest in percentage of poor residents, and 22nd in welfare recipients. In other words, we're a state with an unusual concentration of wealth toward the upper levels, coexisting alongside a more typical degree of poverty. It's not surprising that this has tended to produce a set of policies that favor some forms of downward redistribution - or that these policies play very differently in states that are less wealthy or have larger poor populations. As for liberals being tone-deaf, that's always been slightly off kilter. The truth is that this 'liberal' trait is one with a long history in the state, dating back to the Progressive Republicans of the turn of the century. It's better explained as a preference for expertise and professionalism. And it's a real tension that plays out within our state-level politics, between pols with a gut-level connection to voters, and those with carefully planned policy programs. Ironically, in recent years, it's been our Republicans who have better fit the mold - the Bill Welds and Mitt Romneys have won office on the strength of their policies, despite their conspicuous inability to connect with ordinary people or to understand the street-level impact of those policies.