http://www.massinc.org/index.php?id=531
QUOTE
The more things change, the more we stay the same
By Alan Wolfe
Spring 2006
Massachusetts is different from the rest of America, and is becoming more different with every passing year. But it’s not that Massachusetts is more liberal than the rest of the nation, it’s that the Bay State is more conservative.
By more conservative, I am not, of course, referring to politics. Even our Republican governor calls Massachusetts “the bluest state in America” when speaking before Republican audiences around the country, presenting himself as a political outcast in his home state rather than its elected leader. We are certainly blue enough: Since 1996, when Republicans Peter Blute and Peter Torkildsen lost their seats, we’ve had an all-Democratic congressional delegation, the largest in the country. We not only reliably vote Democratic in presidential elections, we supply more than our share of Democratic presidential nominees, including the two, Michael Dukakis and John Kerry, who have come to symbolize all the foibles of liberalism. Living in Massachusetts is synonymous with lying outside the political mainstream.
Because it is so politically liberal, conservatives generally hate Massachusetts. Follow the Bay State’s lead, they tell the rest of the country, and the result will be gay rights run rampant, a nation soft on crime, and a pacifist foreign policy on every issue save Ireland. If the nation is going to hell in a handbasket, as many conservatives believe, Massachusetts is at the head of the march.
But as former Massachusetts resident Daniel Patrick Moynihan once observed, “the central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society.” And when it comes to cultural matters, Massachusetts stands well to the right of the rest of the country. If Moynihan is correct, conservatives ought to fall in line with us instead of running away. For we rank at the top in trends that, if the rest of the United States followed, would improve the quality of life for all Americans.
Talk to any conservative, and the single most important social institution, you will be promptly informed, is the family. Without strong and stable families, children will be lost to crime and delinquency, adults will find themselves in the grip of hedonistic sexuality, and no one will be willing to invest in future generations. These are truths people in this Commonwealth well understand; we rank first—literally first—in the infrequency of divorce. (There were 2.4 divorces in Massachusetts per 1,000 people in 2001, compared with 6.6 in Bill Clinton’s Arkansas and 6.1 in Dick and Lynne Cheney’s Wyoming.) Couples in Massachusetts also take their time before marrying. The median age at first marriage in Massachusetts is 27.4 years for women and 29.1 for men, the highest in the country for both sexes. If you want to find people who believe that their marriage vows should be taken seriously, this is the state on which you ought to cast your eyes.
Once you do, you might also discover that people in Massachusetts are less likely to engage in irresponsible sex than those in the rest of the country. For some time, conservatives have been worried about the effects of sexual promiscuity, as taboos against premarital sex have broken down; when people become sexually active in their teenage years, or, even worse, when women become pregnant while unmarried, their failure to control their sexuality harms themselves, their children, and society in general. People here are good at either abstaining from sex or practicing birth control. We also rank first in the infrequency of birth to teenage mothers. Our record on out-of-wedlock births is almost as good; here we are third, after Utah and Colorado. Surely, then, conservatives should find much to admire about our state.
To be sure, we are by no means consistent in our familial traditionalism; we rank 37th in the percentage of households with single parents, the same ranking we have for households composed of married couples and their own children. (We also have disproportionately large numbers of residents who do not marry at all.) Still, we more than hold up our share of responsibility for conserving the “Ozzie and Harriet” style of family life that has been disappearing in the United States.
Thus the statistical evidence suggests that, in the Bay State, marriage is serious business. No wonder, then, that while other liberal-minded states namby-pambied on the issue of homosexuality—talking in euphemisms such as gay rights or civil unions—we came right out and made hitching gay people up the law of the land, or at least the Commonwealth. Conservatives around the country, of course, denounced Goodridge v. Board of Health, the Supreme Judicial Court decision that legalized gay marriage here, as a radical step toward moral decay. But in doing so, they failed to recognize the yearning for marital rights as the conservative impulse that it was. Just a decade or two ago, gay political activists, like leftist activists in general, were denouncing marriage in any form as a stifling, bourgeois, and oppressive institution bound to interfere with personal and sexual freedom. We in Massachusetts knew better, and in 2003 our highest court declared that the thing to do about marriage was to have more of it.
“Marriage is a vital social institution,” Chief Justice Marshall opined in Goodridge. “The exclusive commitment of two individuals to each other nurtures love and mutual support; it brings stability to our society. For those who choose to marry, and for their children, marriage provides an abundance of legal, financial, and social benefits. In turn it imposes weighty legal, financial, and social obligations.” You cannot find language more conservative than this. If gays want to be conventional, the Massachusetts response is to encourage them. Elsewhere—in states that have high divorce rates, for example—gay people are much more likely to be shunned or stigmatized, and for that very reason, they are also likely to engage in dangerous forms of sexual behavior. We would rather have them at bridal showers than bathhouses.
Of course, acceptance of same-sex marriage is not something that happened all at once here in Massachusetts, and is not yet complete. As befits our conservative nature, the SJC ruling was greeted with some unease, and initially lawmakers scrambled to find a way to short-circuit it. But once marriage rights for gays went into effect, in May 2004, the legislative move ran out of steam. And, as befits a state as conservative as this one, once gay marriage became legal, more people began to accept it; according to surveys taken by the Center for Public Opinion Research at Merrimack College, 58 percent of Bay Staters approved of gay marriage in March 2006, compared with 33 percent in February 2004. There may yet be a statewide vote on rolling back marriage to its traditional limits, but not before 2008. By that time same-sex marriage will have been in effect for more than four years. And in culturally conservative Massachusetts, nothing makes a policy more secure than its being the status quo.
CATHOLIC TASTES
No doubt some of Massachusetts’s affinity with marital stability is due to economics; richer states tend to have more stable marriages than poorer ones. But some is also due to the preponderance of Catholicism in this state. When it comes to religion, therefore, it is worth pointing out that, on cultural matters, the Roman Catholic Church is as conservative as they come. By this I do not mean that Catholics are political conservatives; in Massachusetts, although not so much nationally, Catholics are more likely to vote Democratic than Republican. Nor am I referring to the Vatican’s teachings on birth control or abortion, both of which lie on the right side of the spectrum.
I mean instead that churches have cultural affinities as well as political affections. And here, once again, Massachusetts opts for the most conservative cultural styles among religious denominations while the rest of America goes for the most radical. Even if the Catholic Church’s doctrinal retrenchment, abdication of pastoral responsibility in handling sexually predatory priests, and controversy over whether Catholic Charities should allow adoption by gay couples is putting the state’s attachment to Catholicism to the test, Massachusetts seems almost immune to the religious fads sweeping the country.
The fastest growing religion in the United States is Pentecostalism, with the number of self-declared Pentecostals increasing by 11.5 percent nationwide between 1999 and 2005, from 10.4 million to 11.6 million, but it has a weak foothold here. Pentecostals are known for their emotional fervor, born-again enthusiasm, charismatic preaching, and, in the extreme case, dancing in the aisles and speaking in tongues. Compared with that, Catholicism’s attachment to a relatively unchanging liturgy is as staid, in cultural terms, as a religion can be. Attend Catholic Mass on any given Sunday and you are engaged in religious rituals that would be familiar to a 13th-century European. Go to a Pentecostal church in California, by contrast, and you will be surrounded by people born in one religious tradition willing to join another, one that promises to put them in touch with their inner selves. If you are Catholic, Jewish, or mainline Protestant, as so many residents of this state are, your God is a bit distant. If you seek to be born again in the rest of America, especially in the allegedly conservative South, your God is a friend who walks with you in need. The old-time religion used to be found in America’s rural backwaters. Now the inner-city parishes of Dorchester are the closest thing in America to religion as it was practiced in this country in the 19th century.
Innovative religion, the kind found in megachurches, increasingly popular throughout the country, is less likely to be found here because people in Massachusetts are as conservative in where they live as in how they live. Megachurches sprout up in newly built exurban communities located some 40 or 50 miles from the city with which they very loosely identify. But we in Massachusetts have nothing like Alpharetta, Ga., or Sugarland, Texas. And the reason is that people in this state simply do not like to move. According to the Census Bureau, 58 percent of Bay State residents in 2000 were living in the same residences as they were in 1995, the ninth highest percentage in the US. Even the sprawl in this state is caused not by the yearning for green pastures but by resistance to growth in the established suburbs. Aversion to change, not the desire for it, is driving development into the hinterlands.
The results of this conservative preference to preserve can best be seen in Boston. During the 1960s, when urban whites around the country were fleeing the cities for the suburbs, white, primarily Catholic residents of Boston largely stayed behind. They had invested heavily in impressive parish buildings. Having created urban political machines, they were reluctant to lose the political power they had in City Hall and the State House and didn’t want to disperse their votes across suburban subdivisions. Their neighborhoods, once described by the sociologist Herbert Gans as “urban villages,” were tight-knit and well policed. This attachment to place had its underside, to be sure, as Boston’s urban whites became famous at this time for resisting busing as a way of achieving school desegregation. But it’s easy to recognize their instincts as conservative in the deepest cultural sense—preservation of community, fear of outsiders, reluctance to uproot.
ROOTS DEEP IN TRADITION
Life in Massachusetts today continues to be shaped by the conservative need for roots. Where else in America are suburbs (Lexington, Concord) not artificial creations but instead historical monuments? Where else are small cities and towns (Northampton, North Adams) major cultural centers? Fleeing the past is the way America’s radically innovative temperament expresses itself elsewhere. Living with the past all around you is the way we do it here. Our real estate prices are so high not only because the supply of housing is low, but also because people in this state will pay a premium to live in places where 18th- and 19th-century Americans became famous. Elsewhere, Americans are infatuated with the new. Here, it’s the Colonials and Victorians that rise in value.
Not that long ago, Massachusetts boosters decided to market this state based on its innovative spirit. Route 128, dubbed “America’s Technology Highway” during the mid 1980s, was to be the epicenter of a new computerized America. Yet as befits a state as conservative as ours, even our innovators became stodgy, as PCs replaced minicomputers, and Silicon Valley’s Hewlett-Packard absorbed Digital Equipment Corp. America saw the future, and it was Palo Alto, not Waltham.
To be sure, Massachusetts continues to capitalize economically on its advantages in science, and there is nothing quite so opposed to conservative stand-pattism as scientific inquiry. So stem-cell research got the legislative seal of approval here last year, while “intelligent design” tried to creep into science curricula in several other states. In the mid 1990s, Boston and Cambridge responded to compelling evidence by adopting needle-exchange programs to prevent the spread of AIDS and other diseases, while President Bill Clinton went against his own science advisers in opposing such programs.
Massachusetts owes its advantage in science and technology to the presence of world-class universities. But for all that the modern research university promotes new knowledge, it is important to remember that universities are also culturally conservative institutions. Over the past 10 years, in the rest of America, globalization has shaken up industry, leading to serious job disruption, loss of health coverage, and all the resulting instabilities that undermine tried-and-true ways of life. In academia, however, professors have tenure, which is far more a legacy of feudalism than a sign of capitalism. They can count on their pensions being funded when they retire.
Outside of science departments, most universities are filled with leftists, but no one is more conservative than a faculty member, and that goes for the radicals as well; if you don’t believe me, consider changing the college curriculum or tinkering with course times and classrooms (or ask Larry Summers what it is like to propose moving a department to Allston). Massachusetts should be proud of its universities; without them, I would surely be living in another state. But when we praise our institutions of higher education, we generally fail to appreciate the extent to which they protect us against the forces of change that sweep through nearly all other institutions in the United States.
Massachusetts has also been relatively immune to faddish approaches to crime. Despite numerous attempts to reinstate the death penalty, Massachusetts resists, at least in part out of an old-fashioned stubbornness to get on board with trends sweeping the rest of the country. Interesting enough, however, our conservatism on crime threatens to become faddish itself; now other states are joining us in expressing second thoughts about capital punishment. Whether one supports or opposes the death penalty, there is something to be said for a system in which standards of punishment are consistent over time. Massachusetts meets that essentially conservative conception of justice.
I write about the conservatism of Massachusetts not to condemn it, but to praise it. For it just so happens that, like so many other people here, I lean to the left in politics but find myself appalled at the radically transformative cultural trends to which our country is so addicted. There ought to be someplace in America for people who do not know what songs dominate the Top 40, which celebrities are on the covers of which magazines, and how the latest flat-screen televisions compare. Fortunately, there is such a place. It is dreadfully old-fashioned, indelibly resistant to fads, and gladly willing to embrace its history and traditions. Its name is Massachusetts.
By Alan Wolfe
Spring 2006
Massachusetts is different from the rest of America, and is becoming more different with every passing year. But it’s not that Massachusetts is more liberal than the rest of the nation, it’s that the Bay State is more conservative.
By more conservative, I am not, of course, referring to politics. Even our Republican governor calls Massachusetts “the bluest state in America” when speaking before Republican audiences around the country, presenting himself as a political outcast in his home state rather than its elected leader. We are certainly blue enough: Since 1996, when Republicans Peter Blute and Peter Torkildsen lost their seats, we’ve had an all-Democratic congressional delegation, the largest in the country. We not only reliably vote Democratic in presidential elections, we supply more than our share of Democratic presidential nominees, including the two, Michael Dukakis and John Kerry, who have come to symbolize all the foibles of liberalism. Living in Massachusetts is synonymous with lying outside the political mainstream.
Because it is so politically liberal, conservatives generally hate Massachusetts. Follow the Bay State’s lead, they tell the rest of the country, and the result will be gay rights run rampant, a nation soft on crime, and a pacifist foreign policy on every issue save Ireland. If the nation is going to hell in a handbasket, as many conservatives believe, Massachusetts is at the head of the march.
But as former Massachusetts resident Daniel Patrick Moynihan once observed, “the central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society.” And when it comes to cultural matters, Massachusetts stands well to the right of the rest of the country. If Moynihan is correct, conservatives ought to fall in line with us instead of running away. For we rank at the top in trends that, if the rest of the United States followed, would improve the quality of life for all Americans.
Talk to any conservative, and the single most important social institution, you will be promptly informed, is the family. Without strong and stable families, children will be lost to crime and delinquency, adults will find themselves in the grip of hedonistic sexuality, and no one will be willing to invest in future generations. These are truths people in this Commonwealth well understand; we rank first—literally first—in the infrequency of divorce. (There were 2.4 divorces in Massachusetts per 1,000 people in 2001, compared with 6.6 in Bill Clinton’s Arkansas and 6.1 in Dick and Lynne Cheney’s Wyoming.) Couples in Massachusetts also take their time before marrying. The median age at first marriage in Massachusetts is 27.4 years for women and 29.1 for men, the highest in the country for both sexes. If you want to find people who believe that their marriage vows should be taken seriously, this is the state on which you ought to cast your eyes.
Once you do, you might also discover that people in Massachusetts are less likely to engage in irresponsible sex than those in the rest of the country. For some time, conservatives have been worried about the effects of sexual promiscuity, as taboos against premarital sex have broken down; when people become sexually active in their teenage years, or, even worse, when women become pregnant while unmarried, their failure to control their sexuality harms themselves, their children, and society in general. People here are good at either abstaining from sex or practicing birth control. We also rank first in the infrequency of birth to teenage mothers. Our record on out-of-wedlock births is almost as good; here we are third, after Utah and Colorado. Surely, then, conservatives should find much to admire about our state.
To be sure, we are by no means consistent in our familial traditionalism; we rank 37th in the percentage of households with single parents, the same ranking we have for households composed of married couples and their own children. (We also have disproportionately large numbers of residents who do not marry at all.) Still, we more than hold up our share of responsibility for conserving the “Ozzie and Harriet” style of family life that has been disappearing in the United States.
Thus the statistical evidence suggests that, in the Bay State, marriage is serious business. No wonder, then, that while other liberal-minded states namby-pambied on the issue of homosexuality—talking in euphemisms such as gay rights or civil unions—we came right out and made hitching gay people up the law of the land, or at least the Commonwealth. Conservatives around the country, of course, denounced Goodridge v. Board of Health, the Supreme Judicial Court decision that legalized gay marriage here, as a radical step toward moral decay. But in doing so, they failed to recognize the yearning for marital rights as the conservative impulse that it was. Just a decade or two ago, gay political activists, like leftist activists in general, were denouncing marriage in any form as a stifling, bourgeois, and oppressive institution bound to interfere with personal and sexual freedom. We in Massachusetts knew better, and in 2003 our highest court declared that the thing to do about marriage was to have more of it.
“Marriage is a vital social institution,” Chief Justice Marshall opined in Goodridge. “The exclusive commitment of two individuals to each other nurtures love and mutual support; it brings stability to our society. For those who choose to marry, and for their children, marriage provides an abundance of legal, financial, and social benefits. In turn it imposes weighty legal, financial, and social obligations.” You cannot find language more conservative than this. If gays want to be conventional, the Massachusetts response is to encourage them. Elsewhere—in states that have high divorce rates, for example—gay people are much more likely to be shunned or stigmatized, and for that very reason, they are also likely to engage in dangerous forms of sexual behavior. We would rather have them at bridal showers than bathhouses.
Of course, acceptance of same-sex marriage is not something that happened all at once here in Massachusetts, and is not yet complete. As befits our conservative nature, the SJC ruling was greeted with some unease, and initially lawmakers scrambled to find a way to short-circuit it. But once marriage rights for gays went into effect, in May 2004, the legislative move ran out of steam. And, as befits a state as conservative as this one, once gay marriage became legal, more people began to accept it; according to surveys taken by the Center for Public Opinion Research at Merrimack College, 58 percent of Bay Staters approved of gay marriage in March 2006, compared with 33 percent in February 2004. There may yet be a statewide vote on rolling back marriage to its traditional limits, but not before 2008. By that time same-sex marriage will have been in effect for more than four years. And in culturally conservative Massachusetts, nothing makes a policy more secure than its being the status quo.
CATHOLIC TASTES
No doubt some of Massachusetts’s affinity with marital stability is due to economics; richer states tend to have more stable marriages than poorer ones. But some is also due to the preponderance of Catholicism in this state. When it comes to religion, therefore, it is worth pointing out that, on cultural matters, the Roman Catholic Church is as conservative as they come. By this I do not mean that Catholics are political conservatives; in Massachusetts, although not so much nationally, Catholics are more likely to vote Democratic than Republican. Nor am I referring to the Vatican’s teachings on birth control or abortion, both of which lie on the right side of the spectrum.
I mean instead that churches have cultural affinities as well as political affections. And here, once again, Massachusetts opts for the most conservative cultural styles among religious denominations while the rest of America goes for the most radical. Even if the Catholic Church’s doctrinal retrenchment, abdication of pastoral responsibility in handling sexually predatory priests, and controversy over whether Catholic Charities should allow adoption by gay couples is putting the state’s attachment to Catholicism to the test, Massachusetts seems almost immune to the religious fads sweeping the country.
The fastest growing religion in the United States is Pentecostalism, with the number of self-declared Pentecostals increasing by 11.5 percent nationwide between 1999 and 2005, from 10.4 million to 11.6 million, but it has a weak foothold here. Pentecostals are known for their emotional fervor, born-again enthusiasm, charismatic preaching, and, in the extreme case, dancing in the aisles and speaking in tongues. Compared with that, Catholicism’s attachment to a relatively unchanging liturgy is as staid, in cultural terms, as a religion can be. Attend Catholic Mass on any given Sunday and you are engaged in religious rituals that would be familiar to a 13th-century European. Go to a Pentecostal church in California, by contrast, and you will be surrounded by people born in one religious tradition willing to join another, one that promises to put them in touch with their inner selves. If you are Catholic, Jewish, or mainline Protestant, as so many residents of this state are, your God is a bit distant. If you seek to be born again in the rest of America, especially in the allegedly conservative South, your God is a friend who walks with you in need. The old-time religion used to be found in America’s rural backwaters. Now the inner-city parishes of Dorchester are the closest thing in America to religion as it was practiced in this country in the 19th century.
Innovative religion, the kind found in megachurches, increasingly popular throughout the country, is less likely to be found here because people in Massachusetts are as conservative in where they live as in how they live. Megachurches sprout up in newly built exurban communities located some 40 or 50 miles from the city with which they very loosely identify. But we in Massachusetts have nothing like Alpharetta, Ga., or Sugarland, Texas. And the reason is that people in this state simply do not like to move. According to the Census Bureau, 58 percent of Bay State residents in 2000 were living in the same residences as they were in 1995, the ninth highest percentage in the US. Even the sprawl in this state is caused not by the yearning for green pastures but by resistance to growth in the established suburbs. Aversion to change, not the desire for it, is driving development into the hinterlands.
The results of this conservative preference to preserve can best be seen in Boston. During the 1960s, when urban whites around the country were fleeing the cities for the suburbs, white, primarily Catholic residents of Boston largely stayed behind. They had invested heavily in impressive parish buildings. Having created urban political machines, they were reluctant to lose the political power they had in City Hall and the State House and didn’t want to disperse their votes across suburban subdivisions. Their neighborhoods, once described by the sociologist Herbert Gans as “urban villages,” were tight-knit and well policed. This attachment to place had its underside, to be sure, as Boston’s urban whites became famous at this time for resisting busing as a way of achieving school desegregation. But it’s easy to recognize their instincts as conservative in the deepest cultural sense—preservation of community, fear of outsiders, reluctance to uproot.
ROOTS DEEP IN TRADITION
Life in Massachusetts today continues to be shaped by the conservative need for roots. Where else in America are suburbs (Lexington, Concord) not artificial creations but instead historical monuments? Where else are small cities and towns (Northampton, North Adams) major cultural centers? Fleeing the past is the way America’s radically innovative temperament expresses itself elsewhere. Living with the past all around you is the way we do it here. Our real estate prices are so high not only because the supply of housing is low, but also because people in this state will pay a premium to live in places where 18th- and 19th-century Americans became famous. Elsewhere, Americans are infatuated with the new. Here, it’s the Colonials and Victorians that rise in value.
Not that long ago, Massachusetts boosters decided to market this state based on its innovative spirit. Route 128, dubbed “America’s Technology Highway” during the mid 1980s, was to be the epicenter of a new computerized America. Yet as befits a state as conservative as ours, even our innovators became stodgy, as PCs replaced minicomputers, and Silicon Valley’s Hewlett-Packard absorbed Digital Equipment Corp. America saw the future, and it was Palo Alto, not Waltham.
To be sure, Massachusetts continues to capitalize economically on its advantages in science, and there is nothing quite so opposed to conservative stand-pattism as scientific inquiry. So stem-cell research got the legislative seal of approval here last year, while “intelligent design” tried to creep into science curricula in several other states. In the mid 1990s, Boston and Cambridge responded to compelling evidence by adopting needle-exchange programs to prevent the spread of AIDS and other diseases, while President Bill Clinton went against his own science advisers in opposing such programs.
Massachusetts owes its advantage in science and technology to the presence of world-class universities. But for all that the modern research university promotes new knowledge, it is important to remember that universities are also culturally conservative institutions. Over the past 10 years, in the rest of America, globalization has shaken up industry, leading to serious job disruption, loss of health coverage, and all the resulting instabilities that undermine tried-and-true ways of life. In academia, however, professors have tenure, which is far more a legacy of feudalism than a sign of capitalism. They can count on their pensions being funded when they retire.
Outside of science departments, most universities are filled with leftists, but no one is more conservative than a faculty member, and that goes for the radicals as well; if you don’t believe me, consider changing the college curriculum or tinkering with course times and classrooms (or ask Larry Summers what it is like to propose moving a department to Allston). Massachusetts should be proud of its universities; without them, I would surely be living in another state. But when we praise our institutions of higher education, we generally fail to appreciate the extent to which they protect us against the forces of change that sweep through nearly all other institutions in the United States.
Massachusetts has also been relatively immune to faddish approaches to crime. Despite numerous attempts to reinstate the death penalty, Massachusetts resists, at least in part out of an old-fashioned stubbornness to get on board with trends sweeping the rest of the country. Interesting enough, however, our conservatism on crime threatens to become faddish itself; now other states are joining us in expressing second thoughts about capital punishment. Whether one supports or opposes the death penalty, there is something to be said for a system in which standards of punishment are consistent over time. Massachusetts meets that essentially conservative conception of justice.
I write about the conservatism of Massachusetts not to condemn it, but to praise it. For it just so happens that, like so many other people here, I lean to the left in politics but find myself appalled at the radically transformative cultural trends to which our country is so addicted. There ought to be someplace in America for people who do not know what songs dominate the Top 40, which celebrities are on the covers of which magazines, and how the latest flat-screen televisions compare. Fortunately, there is such a place. It is dreadfully old-fashioned, indelibly resistant to fads, and gladly willing to embrace its history and traditions. Its name is Massachusetts.