“I shall enter on no encomium upon Massachusetts—she needs none,” Daniel Webster famously said in the Senate in 1830, extolling his home state. “There she is. Behold her, and judge for yourselves.”
Veteran Boston political reporter Jon Keller also invites us to behold his native state . . . and shudder in dismay. In “The Bluest State,” he argues that, although Massachusetts does not suffer alone from its notorious affection for liberalism, it is the incubator for “Massachusetts viruses” that infect the national Democratic Party. The viruses come in many forms: “addiction to tax revenues and a raging edifice complex couched in disrespect to wage earners; phony identity politics without real results for women and minorities; reflexive anti-Americanism in foreign affairs; vain indulgence in obnoxious political correctness; self-serving featherbedding; NIMBYism; authoritarian distortion of the balance of governmental power, all simmered in a broth of hypocritical paternalism.”
