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You have to begin with the New England personality, which is a little cold and takes selfreliance to amusing extremes at times but is very practical on the whole, and pragmatic and dutiful about the life of the community. You accept that all the people around you are flawed and it's no use arguing about it. In country that is snowbound for five months of the year, everyone ultimately has to help each other get the simple things done and being impossible to be reasoned with is considered a dereliction. New England itself is temperate and quite beautiful, an intersection zone of weather patterns and geologies and ecosystems (ocean, swamp, hills, mountains, lakes) that makes it a patchwork of little disparate niches of human and animal and plant life- images of unity and diversity, permanence and passage all at the same time and all the time. So New Englanders have historically had to have some sense of tolerance about unusual neighbors and an inclination to regard them as mildly insane at the same time. This has proven to be a quite practical stance toward each other and the rest of the world- wary but not insecure, well informed but not entirely interested, proactive but not aggressive, winning by outplanning rather than outbruting, not going in search of or out of the way of a fight.
Massachusetts history has a lot more examples of proactive resistance to oppressive stupidity than you mention. There's the hanging of Mary Dyer and some other Quakers, which began the downfall of the Puritans- something which the Christian Right has not forgiven nor forgotten. There's John Hancock- the richest businessman of the Colonies- giving almost all his wealth to winning the Revolutionary War and payment of the debts the Continental Congress ran up. There's the Unitarian(-Universalist) Church founding. There's Ralph Waldo Emerson and the whole Selfreliance business (at the time Boston was a city with a lot of Quakers and in his letters Emerson says he took the Quaker idea termed Godreliance and simply renamed to Selfreliance, and Boston Quakers were the people he modelled his ideal of Americans on). There's jury nullification of the Fugitive Slave Act, for which Boston was notorious, and the state's abolitionists. There's the fight South Carolina picked with Massachusetts, via the Preston Brooks caning of Charles Sumner, which led Massachusetts to get the largest mass of federal troops placed in Charleston prior to Secession and made that city the place where the Civil War was precipitated. There's public education, first mandated in the state mostly to keep children from being forced to work in the mills in 1848. There's the rise of the Boston Irish, the first non-Anglosaxon political elite outside of New York City in the former Colonies. And so on.
There's also a somewhat strange but deep attitude toward public service that got engrained in the upper tiers of Boston society around the time of the Revolution. Sam Adams was maybe one of the first representatives of the lot. It was the idea that people like themselves had much more social freedom, disposable wealth, and personal ability than, say, the European aristocracy to bring progress and hamstring regression in the world. There was also constant contact with upper tiers of British society by the Boston Brahmin families, as they became known, and a sense of competition: as Americans they had more opportunity for enterprise and no chance to rise in feudal rank, and so they ended up fighting the status war by creating charitable or progressive enterprises and revelling in the changes these accomplished that other patrician families and aristocrats (in London, New York, Philadelphia) couldn't match. Some of these enterprises are overt (the Boston Museum of Fine Arts), some covert (parts of the local universities, foundations you'll never hear the names of, bits of things like PBS). John Kerry is part of that social system and certainly knows it- it has a lot of selfindulgence, of course, and is mildly conservative and skeptical...but it also has a powerful covert pride in bringing progress to the world and slowly destroying the oppressive forces, even (especially) if it's all done indirectly and never credited to them. The remaining Brahmins are certainly not the origin of all progress, of course, and have been losing their relative power. But it's a local tradition and the generally undiscovered and untold reason for the otherwise inexplicable accumulation of institutions and people and technical developments in Boston (and maybe Providence, our sidekick) that prove to initiate much of the great changes in American society- e.g. the Pill- and did things like make it possible for the country to prevail technologically in the Cold War.
As for the present political era, Nixon probably never forgave the Kennedys for his loss in 1960- they were better at being aristocrats, they were better players in the corruption-driven politics of their time, and if it hadn't been for their assassinations Nixon would not have made it into the Oval Office and he knew it. This leads to 1972's election and McGovern and the 1974 Watergate bumper sticker "Don't blame me, I'm from Massachusetts". Pointing back at the Kennedy record in the '60s and '70s, we then got Ronald Reagan in a 1980 debate being asked "Have you ever been to a Communist country?" and his reply of "Only to Massachusetts". After that we get BizarroWorld being preached by the Republican Party and Massachusetts being made the scapegoat. Part of real Beltway Republican hatred of Massachusetts has to do with the power the state had in Congress until 1994- a Kennedy as senator and proactive for the working class and working poor, a Brahmin (Kerry) investigating their corrupt buddies and major abuses, and a House delegation that was a Democratic power clique in the way it accumulated seniority and worked together across House Committees to maximize outcomes (pork and power) for the state and themselves as a group and for the Party. Tip O'Neill as Speaker stalled or killed a good bit of the Reagan Administration agenda- and George Mitchell (of Maine, but you know that Maine used to be a part of Massachusetts) was his helper in the Senate, and so things like blocking Bob Bork were achieved despite a lot of Southern Democrats constantly going turncoat.
So: what do people in Massachusetts care about what Texas Republican operatives allege about them and their state? Massachusetts Democrats and Independents tend not to care- they'll tell you that there's plenty wrong and illiberal to the state, that the state government is unideological and far more engrossed in arguments about nepotism and pork barrel spending particulars and payback manouvers in multidecade-old Boston politician feuds than anyone would ever dare imagine. But they'll probably also tell you that everywhere else they've been in the country they've found the very top tier of politicians to be a cut (or two, or three) lower in ability/quality.
Massachusetts Republicans will declare their state to be hell and then start offering a series of excuses for why they prefer, nonetheless, to live there- despite all the moaning they're still getting wealthier and their kids are nabbing good educations and desirable jobs, the beaches on Nantucket and the Vineyard are still pristine, you can still get a beach house out of sight of people, the snow gets cleared efficiently, no one cares about their sex lives or that they never attend church unless someone dies, the divorce courts work, the Democrats keep the state government running without calamity and pretty responsibly, and the state taxes aren't bad for the quality of life delivered at all. It's a pretty nice Hell, really, with enough conservation land and well paved country roads and plenty of money still left to be made in real estate, low rates of crime outside the slums, and St. Kitts to visit in the winters. The golf courses and clubs are not that great, granted, but that can be lived with. And so they stay and whine and scheme for big federal tax breaks.
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