New England Politics: The Decline of the GOP + Hope for an Age of Independence

“However [political parties] may now and then answer popular ends, they are likely in the course of time and things, to become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion.”

--President George Washington (I), Farewell Address, Sept. 19, 1796

“It is not the principled partisan, however obnoxious he may seem to his opponents, who degrades our public debate, but the preening, self-styled statesman who elevates compromise to a first principle.”

-- Congressman Tom Delay (R-TX), Farewell Address, Jun. 5, 2006

The very name of this blog—Bay State Brahmin—is a reminder of the strength of the Republican Party in New England. Brahmin families who once defined the Massachusetts political elite—Cabot Lodge, Saltonstall, Gardner, Adams, Bacon—were all loyal members of the GOP, albeit a different GOP than the current iteration.

Nevertheless, despite the GOP’s recent struggles in New England, the party seems dead set against any “weakening” of its core national messaging, even if it means sure defeat in deep-blue Massachusetts.

That was the clear message sent by the Commonwealth’s GOP last week when it adopted a platform that reiterated the party’s opposition to same-sex marriage and abortion—breaking from the beliefs of the two candidates that hold the Mass. GOP’s best hopes in 2014, Gubernatorial candidate Charlie Baker and 6^th District Congressional candidate Richard Tisei.

This platform—out of step with the more libertarian “New England” Republicanism of the Brahmin—will do little to stop the GOP’s fade to obscurity in the region.

Research done by Tom Duvall, a student at the University of Michigan, charts the decline of the Republican Party in New England from the Civil War to the present. As seen here, the share of Congressional seats held by Democrats has approached 90 percent in recent years and the strength of the Democratic vote in Presidential elections has also soared.

Today, of the 33 Senators and Representatives from New England, 29 are Democrats. Two Senators, Susan Collins of Maine and Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire, are the lone Republican voices. Interestingly enough, there are also two Independent Senators—Angus King of Maine and Bernard Sanders of Vermont—the only Independent members of Congress in the entire country.

While the GOP continues to shoot itself in the foot in Massachusetts and throughout the region, the success of Independent voices like King and Sanders offers hope for a different kind of politics—not the illusory “post-partisan” era that is oft discussed, but never to be attained—but instead a politics that values inquiry over allegiance, truth over tribute, principle over party.

We see this brand of politics in the small town meetings in New Hampshire every four years and in local town meetings throughout the Commonwealth every day—where the yeoman’s work of selectmen and school committee members is done with little to no regard for party politics. All politics may be local, but we’d all be better off if more politics mimicked local politics.

Indeed, far more troubling than the rise of political parties themselves is the rise of partisan thought which demands rigid adherence to party principles rather than the truth as the standard on which candidates are judged. Officials who dare buck their own parties are tagged as RINOs and DINOs, becoming prey to intra-party challenges by ideological purists.

This trend is disheartening, not because political parties are inherently inappropriate—joining the voices of the many to work toward a common goal is a time-honored tradition in America—but instead because we no longer view parties as means to an end, but as the ends themselves.

A lot changed in the 210 years between George Washington’s Farewell Address and Tom Delay’s speech to Congress before his resignation in 2006. For one thing, the 43 Presidents who succeeded Washington have all been members of an organized political party. More troubling is the fact that politicians no longer feel shame in describing themselves as a “partisan Democrat” or a “partisan Republican.” And why should they? After all, we live in an age in which disgraced representatives like Tom Delay can cast men like Washington as little more than “preening” statesmen who “degrade” debate through their commitment to compromise.

In Have Faith in Massachusetts, President Calvin Coolidge—another famed Bay State Republican—wrote, “Politics is not an end, but a means…So much emphasis has been placed upon the false that the significance of the true has been obscured and politics has come to convey the meaning of crafty and cunning selfishness, instead of candid and sincere service.”

We’d be better off in Massachusetts, New England, and the nation as a whole, if we lived up to Coolidge’s call by electing a diverse group of leaders—if not diverse in party, diverse in mind and spirit; a group that defines “sincere service” as developing new and innovative ideas for the People, rather than how to cast their political opponents in the worst possible light.

The Past, Present, and Future of Heating New England's Homes

“Natural gas, if extracted safely, it’s the bridge fuel that can power our economy with less of the carbon pollution that causes climate change.”

--President Barack Obama, State of the Union Address (28 Jan. 2014)

In 2011, the average American household using heating oil spent $2,298, compared with $724 spent by gas users and $957 spent by electricity users. Indeed, the price of heating oil has soared since the end of the Great Recession, continuing a long-term trend that has seen the peak price in Massachusetts rise 200 percent since 2000 (see chart, below).

The significant increase in cost is particularly troubling given ongoing cuts to the Federal Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program.

Nationwide, many households have responded to these soaring costs by taking advantage of both a boom in domestic natural gas production and federal subsidies for natural gas development, driving the percentage of homes that use heating oil from about 20 percent in 1975 to roughly 7 percent in 2012.

New England, however, remains a significant outlier in the home heating market. The latest data from the U.S. Energy Administration shows that more than 7 in 10 Maine households use fuel oil as their primary energy source for home heating—a higher share than in any other state—and in Massachusetts, one in three homes is heated primarily with oil.

One of the reasons for New England’s disproportionate use of oil is the lack of natural gas infrastructure—both production and pipeline capacity. As the Energy Department stated last week, “Since 2012, limited supply from…liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminals coupled with congestion on the Tennessee and Algonquin pipelines has led to winter natural gas price spikes in New England.”

A flashpoint in this drama is the proposed $800 million natural gas retrofitting of the Salem power plant. Last week, the latest protest against the proposed plant took place, led by leaders from the Massachusetts chapter of the environmental group 350.org, which views the construction of new natural gas facilities as a significant threat to global climate.

350’s Chairman and co-founder, Bill McKibben, has described America’s reliance on natural gas as “at best a kind of fad diet, where a dangerously overweight patient loses a few pounds and then their weight stabilizes; instead, we need at this point a crash diet.”

While the environmental benefits of natural gas relative to oil are undeniable (natural gas produces about 30 percent less carbon dioxide per Btu than conventional or ultra low sulfur heating oil, according to a 2009 study by Brookhaven National Laboratory), it is also clear that simply replacing oil and coal with natural gas for home heating and electricity production will not be enough to avoid potentially catastrophic climate change (not to mention the very real concerns of communities surrounding hydraulic fracturing).

Furthermore, as the Energy Department concluded, the capital intensive investments necessary to meaningfully expand New England’s pipeline network may not be financially viable, since additional capacity may only be necessary for short periods during the year.

Nevertheless, just as we must not bestow upon our children a despoiled planet, so we must not ignore the very real suffering of so many families in New England and beyond as a result of soaring heating oil costs.

In addition to dedicating resources at the State level to make up for draconian cuts to home heating assistance (perhaps via a temporary increase the share of Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative proceeds dedicated to direct assistance), we must promote a truly progressive energy policy—one that draws on Massachusetts’ history of clean energy and the strength of our universities.

Cities and towns throughout the Commonwealth have historically relied on clean energy. For over 150 years, Lawrence has embraced hydroelectric power—from the Great Stone Dam in 1848 to the launch of a hydroelectric plant powering 7000 homes a year, in 1981. In Beverly, Salem, and Marblehead, windmills were grinding corn and bark as early as the 17^th and 18^th centuries.

In more recent years, the Bay State has continued to propel the clean energy economy. In 1979, the nation’s first modern wind turbine manufacturing company was founded in Burlington and in 2011, UMass and the Maritime Academy worked together on a trial of hydrokinetic energy—using the ancient tides of Buzzards Bay to power iPhones.

With an immense coastline, a regulatory environment supportive of renewables, and countless students committed to investing their futures in the field, Massachusetts is the perfect laboratory for the transformative energy technology of tomorrow.