[ The Bay State’s deep-blue reputation obscures a cynical
political establishment that’s more interested in accruing power
than in advancing progressive policies.] [[link removed]]

THE DEEP ROT OF THE MASSACHUSETTS DEMOCRATIC PARTY  
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Daniel Boguslaw
February 18, 2021
The New Republic
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_ The Bay State’s deep-blue reputation obscures a cynical political
establishment that’s more interested in accruing power than in
advancing progressive policies. _

Congressman Richie Neal, Jessica Hill/AP/Shutterstock

 

Massachusetts’s road to failure runs straight through the digital
waiting room of the Democratic State Committee’s video calls. During
long, slur
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and expletive-filled gatherings, a vanguard of wizened Harvard alumni
and outer-ring suburbanites screech over one another in a dread
contest for Zoom-mic supremacy, hurling insults at the young,
progressive, and racially diverse members bold enough to question the
most basic tenets of their long-held rule. In a particularly
unpleasant meeting last month, state committee apparatchiks moved to
end the inquiry into the state party’s role
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in destroying Alex Morse, the young gay mayor from Holyoke who went up
against the powerful chair of the House Ways and Means Committee,
Ritchie Neal, only to have his reputation and career pummeled by a
homophobic smear campaign
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ginned up by young politicos in search of an internship.

The disturbing behavior of the state Democratic Party’s varied
membership may come as a surprise to political spectators whose
bird’s eye view of Massachusetts leaves the mistaken impression that
it’s studded with progressive firebrands like Senators Ed Markey and
Elizabeth Warren and Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley. But at the
Democratic State Committee’s end-of-January meeting, Markey made a
special appearance to laud committee Chair Gus Bickford for his
stewardship of the party and of the state. This was a shocking cameo:
It was none other than Bickford who fanned the flames of the Morse
smear campaign, who has had a hand in enabling Republican Governor
Charlie Baker’s two-term tenure, and who cultivated a roster of
conservative DSC members so horrified by Morse’s unprecedented
threat to the sleepy status quo, and their power within it, that they
leapt to protect his saboteurs.

Prior to the Morse scandal, the DSC was more content to simply ignore
progressives than actively sabotage them. The organization’s
membership is much closer in skill and temperament to an army of Rudy
Giulianis than it is to a cabal of conniving Boss Tweeds. Markey’s
laudatory remarks merely demonstrated the extent to which the
state’s most committed progressives are compelled to do business
with the cracked and anachronistic moderates who line the statehouse,
governor’s mansion, and the top floor of _The Boston Globe._ Taken
together, this is no party machine: It is a hopelessly atomized
collection of actors, scrambling to maintain their political careers
at the cost of a cohesive political vision.

As a result of this mayhem, Massachusetts ranks thirty-first in
affordable housing and forty-seventh for income inequality in the
nation. As of 2017, the average net worth of a Black family in Greater
Boston was $8
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and in cities to the north and south, between one in four and one in
six residents live in poverty. The towns of Lynn, Lawrence, New
Bedford, and Fall River rarely make the news, but when they do, it’s
usually because their residents are struggling to make ends meet.
Springfield, once a major manufacturing hub of firearms, textiles, and
paper, now boasts the highest rate of asthma in the country, and in
Boston’s Chinatown, the air quality is the worst in the state. (An
instance of environmental racism rendered even more staggering by a
recent report showing
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nearly 20 percent of deaths worldwide are attributed to air
pollution.)

Failures on the part of Democrats to address the fallout from a
half-century of deindustrialization and its outsize effects on Black,
immigrant, and working-class citizens have only been exacerbated by
Baker’s unflinching willingness to sacrifice human lives for the
sake of Boston’s business-owner class during the Covid-19 pandemic,
opening up restaurants and pushing for fewer restrictions even as the
state’s food insecurity rises faster
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than any other’s. In carefully worded statements, state
Representative Mike Connolly
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and other similarly cautious legislators
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have detailed the ways in which Baker’s belief in private enterprise
as a universal panacea had positioned Massachusetts next to last for
overall vaccine distribution:

If Massachusetts was its own country, we would have the worst per
capita COVID death rate in the world—and unfortunately, that fact
remains true as of this writing (with 212 deaths per 100,000
residents, according to recent figures tabulated by Johns Hopkins
University). To put these numbers in context, the overall death rate
in the United States is about 135 per 100,000.… According to figures
posted
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Thursday evening by The New York Times
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Massachusetts has so far only been able to administer about 53% of the
vaccines that we have received from the federal government. This
places us 48th in the nation in terms of overall vaccine distribution.
Only the states of Alabama and Mississippi have been less efficient
than us.

Data suggests substantial improvements
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been made in the intervening time.* But the blame for
Massachusetts’s cascading failures doesn’t fall on the individual
sensibilities of Baker or Massachusetts’s progressive senators.
After all, neither Markey nor Warren have been able to propel
themselves out of the stupefying quagmire of the state’s politics on
their own. Markey’s 2020 revival was almost entirely dependent on
the bonds he forged in recent years with the Sunrise Movement. Warren
would still likely be a Harvard professor had Harry Reid not tapped
her to play an oversight role in Washington as millions of Americans
coalesced in outrage over the 2008 financial crash. Neither has
successfully built a coalition capable of challenging their state’s
inert political institutions.

Jonathan Cohn, an organizer with Progressive Mass and dedicated
chronicler [[link removed]] of
the state party, tells _The New Republic_ that in order to understand
why it’s so difficult for progressives to build power in the Bay
State, one must first come to grips with Massachusetts’s underlying
political ideology. “People think Massachusetts isn’t a terrain of
conflict or struggle because they conceptualize conflict only through
nationalized fights of Democrats versus Republicans, and we don’t
have those kinds of fights because we have a nonexistent Republican
Party and plenty of Democrats in our legislative supermajority whose
voting records align with moderate Republicans,” he says.

This lack of polarization creates a political feedback loop in which
progressives seeking to challenge and confront the stale hegemony of
moderate rule find themselves without any real state-based mass
movement to back their efforts. The resulting dismal success rate has
sapped the motivations of progressive political aspirants. It’s no
wonder that the most vital project to which Massachusetts’s youngest
progressives pledged themselves was the cynical smearing of Morse’s
character. Out-of-state reinforcements are in short supply as well.
“You don’t have big donors or outside progressive groups
mobilizing electorally here, because everyone’s under the impression
that we’re all just living happily in this liberal utopia,” Cohn
says.

“Then you also have Charlie Baker, who nobody is willing to attack
outright,” he says. “Whether for his vetoes, or for his regressive
stance on basic social welfare policies, everybody in the state is
terrified of his approval rating, and so it keeps growing even as he
continues to attack progressive policies and voices.”

In 2020, Baker held the highest approval rating of any governor in the
country
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following in the footsteps of other Republican governors like Mitt
Romney who leveraged Boston’s corporate lobbies and the absence of a
competent Democratic Party to maintain his lock on power. In the
Senate primary last year, neither Markey nor Kennedy was willing to
say that they would support a Democratic challenger to Baker; major
progressive groups like Planned Parenthood and the Environmental
League of Massachusetts have similarly refused to endorse a Democratic
challenger out of fear of reprisal. After losing his 2010 election
with a Tea Party–style campaign, Baker rebranded with a persona more
closely aligned with the charter school bourgeoisie. Swapping
political wardrobes secured his favor with Boston’s fiscally
conservative Brahmin class in 2014; they reaffirmed their fealty in
2018.

“If you are a wealthy, educated, socially liberal person, you align
with the Democratic Party in most places, but Baker is a great asset
for your fiscal conservatism,” Cohn says. “This is the kind of
person that really defines the voice of _The Boston Globe_ editorial
board: They represent the mindset of white, upper-middle-class,
inner-ring suburbia—socially liberal but into the idea that a
friendly Republican governor is a check on a runaway Democratic
legislative branch.”

As Lily Geismer argues in _Don’t Blame Us: Suburban Liberals and the
Transformation of the Democratic Party,_ there is a strong argument to
be made that Boston and its suburbs provided the ideal spatial and
economic conditions to serve as the scaffolding for the national
party’s most conservative leanings. In the highly segregated suburbs
connected by the postwar construction of Route 128, academics and
high-tech defense industry workers were fused into an
upper-middle-class bloc by a military-industrial complex rapidly
expanding outward from MIT’s labs and legitimized by the kind of
liberal, if jingoistic, social scene swirling around Harvard Square
cocktail parties.

These professionals endorsed socially liberal policies like busing and
fair housing but only insofar as they didn’t integrate Blacks into
their own suburbs. Once proposals for various kinds of integration
started to creep out of Boston proper and into the 128 corridor, they
were met with intense hostility. (It’s worth remembering that
Massachusetts may have been the first state to abolish slavery
outright, but it was also the first colony to legalize it.) The
suburban liberals supported pro-business tax cuts as long they aligned
with high-tech white-collar job creation, leaving the
deindustrializing central and coastal towns to wither. The only state
to go for McGovern in 1972 and Reagan in both 1980 and ’84,
Massachusetts finally found a presidential candidate in its own
likeness with Michael Dukakis, who, in an ironic turn, climbed into a
tank and lost to Bush handily in a 1988 landslide.

Today, the suburban political outlook forged in Brookline, Newton,
Concord, and Lexington is also the mentality that tolerates a
statehouse controlled by a Democratic supermajority in theory but by
the troika of governor, statehouse speaker, and state senate president
in reality. The centralization of power in the weekly meeting between
the three Boston bosses is enabled by rules and procedures that make
the Massachusetts state legislature one of the least transparent in
the country. (In 2015, the Center for Public Integrity gave
Massachusetts
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an F for access to public information, a D for legislative
accountability, and a D- for executive accountability.) This provides
cover for Clinton-era “progressives” and Blue Dog hard-liners
alike to pander to their respective bases without any real
accountability for highly secretive votes.

Calla Walsh, an organizer with the progressive advocacy organization
Act On Mass [[link removed]], has been organizing to expand
transparency in the Massachusetts statehouse. She tells _The New
Republic_ that if progressives want to see change in the state, first
they have to pull back the shades shielding Beacon Hill from public
scrutiny. “Right now, committee votes are for the most part secret.
That means that bills will sit in committee for years or get sent to
study, where they die,” Walsh says. “That’s why we’re lobbying
to have a 72-hour period before any bill is voted on where they are
made available to the public, lowering the threshold needed for a
recorded roll call vote, and making committee votes public.”

At the end of last year, the statehouse waited for the final days of
the session to vote on a slate of high-profile bills. The late arrival
of a police reform bill, weighing in at over 100 pages, gave members
cover to vote against it under the pretense of not having time to read
it in full. Now, hot on the heels of his veto of the Roe Act—which
would have immediately expanded access to reproductive health care in
the state—Baker has vetoed a sweeping climate bill for the second
time, returning it to the legislature with a suite of kneecapping
amendments. In a gesture mirroring his Janus-faced stance on the
climate emergency, Baker signed the rejection on recycled paper
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Even when members of the legislature try to break the consensus forged
by Baker and Democratic leadership, the speaker’s cudgel is used to
punish dissent and rein in progressives who step out of line.

Multiple state representatives have spoken publicly
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about former speaker Robert DeLeo (who resigned last year) stripping
members of their committee chairs
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for challenging his conservative agenda in the statehouse. While DeLeo
managed to break the streak of the three preceding House speakers who
left office under indictment, his chosen successor, Ronald Mariano,
lined up the votes for his own speakership years before DeLeo’s
resignation, winning the election handily along party lines almost
immediately after DeLeo’s departure in a not-so subtle hat tip to
the seat’s storied legacy of corruption.

In 2016, Massachusetts’s statehouse primaries were ranked last in
the country
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for competitiveness. There’s little to no incentive for incumbents
to challenge the speaker and fight for progressive policies. If they
do, they are stripped of their committee chairs and the healthy
stipend that comes with the job. The failure to advance progressive
ideas comes with no consequences, as there are few viable progressive
challengers moving through the pipeline of the atrophied state party.
While a handful of representatives and state senators affiliated with
progressive groups have pushed for drug legalization, subsidized
housing, police reform, racial justice legislation, climate action,
and eviction relief, they represent a sparse minority in a crowded
field of Democrats who are content to ax bills in secret committee
votes or send them to the purgatory of legislative study.

The lack of a vital progressive wing in Massachusetts’s state
politics has had national implications. In addition to Ritchie Neal
maintaining his chairmanship of the House Ways and Means
Committee—where he has continued to wage war
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against Medicare for All, an end to surprise billing, and tax filing
reform—other House districts have either become safe havens for
tepid moderates or have been seized by young conservatives, taking
advantage of the absence of a progressive bench.

Congressman Stephen Lynch, known for his anti-abortion and pro-charter
school stance, has represented the Southie-anchored 8th Congressional
District for two decades. Before arriving in Washington, Lynch was
arrested for drunkenly attacking a group of Iranian students
protesting U.S. intervention abroad, and went on to provide pro-bono
legal counsel to a gang of white teenagers accused of violence and
harassment of an interracial couple. Later, in 1996, Lynch would
introduce a “gay panic” amendment
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to lower the penalties for homophobic hate crimes. The most notable
piece of legislation forwarded by Congressman Bill Keating, a New Dem
caucus member and 10-year incumbent representing Cape Cod, is H.R.
1814, extending the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate
exemption to Christian Scientists.

In the 4th District, a young Jake Auchincloss—with the help of his
mother’s expansive donor network, forged through her role as head of
the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and her cozy relationship to _The
Boston Globe_
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Congressman Joe Kennedy’s former seat. Prior to his electoral
victory, Auchincloss worked for Baker; he is viewed by progressives in
the state as little better than a Republican in Democrat’s clothing.
Recent additions to the state delegation, such as Seth Moulton and
Lori Trahan, offer policies similar to their moderate Democratic
colleagues in competitive Southern and Midwestern districts, albeit
polished with a progressive sheen to reflect Massachusetts’s
bleeding heart facade.

As Ezra Klein observed in relation to California last week
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“progressive” states are often fraught with contradictions between
the superficial image promulgated by the national media and the
economic and social realities on the ground. The lack of attention
afforded to these contradictions allows for the further erosion of
progressive institutions in the very states that claim to be their
champions. With Republican state legislatures in states like Arizona
and Texas weaponizing Trump’s legacy to pass increasingly
right-wing—and increasingly craven—policies, Massachusetts has
failed to offer a rejoinder. No one seems to notice that despite being
plastered with “RESIST” yard signs, the state is devoid of
inspiration when it comes to developing a policy response to the rise
of the far right.

During his second term as a state representative, Ed Markey fought for
legislation to end part-time district court judgeships in
Massachusetts and, by extension, the cycle of corruption whereby
judges curried favor with the politicians who appointed them through
the private practices they were allowed to maintain. In an episode
that could easily have played out today given the perpetuation of
concentrated power in the hands of the House speaker, Markey was
stripped of his seat on the Judiciary Committee, his desk literally
thrown out into the hall
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“The bosses may tell me where to sit, but nobody tells me where to
stand.”

To transform Massachusetts into the progressive beacon it’s often
mistaken for, Markey and his fellow progressives will have to break
from the tradition of supporting incumbents at all costs, especially
when they categorically oppose
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the most basic tenets of the progressive agenda. Like-minded liberals
must support the same challenge to the status quo that Markey mounted
in 1976, spending equal time fighting for left-wing legislation in
Washington and energizing grassroots movements back home. During his
2020 campaign, Markey flipped the Kennedy script, declaring in his
most celebrated ad, “With all due respect, it’s time to start
asking what your country can do for you.” The joke landed, and
Markey won a mandate with a 10-point victory. What Massachusetts is
doing for its residents, however, remains unclear.

* _This piece has been updated to reflect new Covid-19 data._

Daniel Boguslaw [[link removed]]
@DRBoguslaw [[link removed]]

Daniel Boguslaw is a writer and researcher living in New York City.

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