While many folks run away from Massachusetts in search of lower taxes, cheap liquor, affordable housing and fewer blizzards, it wasn’t always that way. Consider Roger Williams, who came from England to Boston, in a “Plymouth” sort of way, 375 years ago next month, in search of a less stifling Anglican tradition and season tickets to the Red Sox.
Williams was an irritating young man, wandering between Anglican and Puritan sensibilities, grumbling about church-state issues in an era before the American Civil Liberties Union had even been invented; and, worst of all, complaining that the Bay Colony wasn’t being very nice to the Indians. Much in the way that Republicans are treated in Massachusetts today, Williams was advised to leave the area – perhaps returning to England, where there weren’t any Indians. But no, Roger sneaked over to what would eventually become Rhode Island, where he became sort of a Baptist until he became something of a religious nomad. He obtained a royal charter and invented Rhode Island as a place where folks of all religions could come together and do their Christmas shopping in peace.
It was an interesting experiment, good for colonies which, by the time of the American Revolution, were home to almost 700 Congregational churches, 500 Anglican churches, almost 600 Presbyterian congregations, hundreds of Lutheran and Reform congregations – and just enough Catholic churches for everyone to persecute. Rhode Island was particularly popular with Jews and Quakers, who were in need of a friendly, or at least neutral, jurisdiction to call home.
Conforming To Everything
Roger popped up over and over again in Rhode Island Gov. Lincoln Chafee’s inaugural address. In other parts of the country, the incoming governor might sing the praises of a fabulous football coach, but for a stuffy, Northeastern patrician like Chafee, the memory of Roger Williams would do just fine.
There is a certain kinship. Chafee lost the U.S. Senate seat that he and his father had held since Roger Williams was a boy. And, much like Roger escaping from Massachusetts in a snit, Chafee bolted the Republican Party and became an “independent.” Just as Williams wasn’t much of an Anglican even when he was one, Chafee was never one of those snarling, tax-cutting kind of GOP watchdogs – even when he was one. New England seems to do that to people.
Joe Lieberman, a long-time lefty, progressive Connecticut politician, U.S. Senator, and vice presidential candidate, had to wiggle free from his Democratic label to win re-election as an independent. And Connecticut’s former U.S. Rep. and U.S. Sen. Lowell Weicker Jr. had to shed his Republican affiliation to market himself as an independent in his successful election as the state’s governor in 1990.
In Massachusetts, the GOP-flavored, Tea Party-favorite Scott Brown, who wears the Kennedy Senatorial crown, is already being smacked around for not really being conservative enough; of becoming one of those sissy Northeastern Republicans. Maybe he’ll move to Rhode Island and become a Baptist.
The two women pretending to be Republican U.S. Senators from Maine would be quite comfortable switching parties and consorting with labor unions, if circumstances allowed it. Even Mitt Romney, not one to wiggle when it came to which side of the political aisle he found most to his liking, brought Massachusetts an early version of ObamaCare, even before there was much of an Obama.
This kind of murky business has been much more common at the city and suburban levels, where many the city manager of a nonpartisan political town has been known to say that there is no such thing as a Democratic or Republican pothole. The most high-profile recent example, of course, is Mayor Bloomberg in New York City, a politician who has been a Democrat and a Republican and an independent over the years – and would be happy to run on the Vegetarian Party ticket, if that’s what you want him to do.
Our traditional sense of how the world works teaches us that two, or perhaps three, political parties banging away at each other is a healthy approach to governance. But when the marketplace of ideas begins to look more like a giant discount-food warehouse, with choices that become harder and harder to make, the brand loyalty begins to shrink.
