I grew up in MA... Here is my take on it as someone who LOVES the south, as the Father in Law says the stork dropped me off @ the wrong house after seeing me eat Collard Greens in NC...:-)
* A bit of elitism
* A product of what they read NYT's etc.
* It is a talk radio wasteland, I have to hunt the dial when I go back...
* The Dems for years ran their stealth candidates as Rino's on the R and destroyed the GOP from within.
* They have become so inculcated with their bureaucracy they are used to it and maneuver within it (especially zoning rules, don't even get me started on that one) rather than fire them all and start over.
* They like "living good" and don't want to get involved in politics, if so at a superficial level only.
* I think w/ the rise of southern competition going back 40 years, they lost a lot of jobs via their unionization and never recovered from it. Tangent to this, they lost generations of people that were part of making machines, tools, firearms etc many machinist and tool and die guys. It think at one point they were more part of the arsenal of democracy than they ever knew. It is all gone. Again they never recovered from it....
I am from Georgia, but I lived for 3 years in upper New Hampshire, teaching at a boarding school. The state is utterly beautiful, as is Vermont, and is is Maine, but, I felt like a stranger in a strange land. And what I noticed about New England was (1) the sheer number of boarding schools . . . telling me that there is a helluva lot of money between Boston and New York, (2) that most of that money was not in the hands of ordinary people, whose lives seems rather bleak and stark in comparison to the rich kids I was carting around on sports trips to Exeter and St. Paul’s. I visited the Maine coast, but the money along it made upper New Hampshire and Vermont look even more bleak. And there was a difference in attutude toward things which I traced, if tentatively, to religion . . . Puritanisn, Unitarianism. The South, though highly Evangelical, has Anglo-Catholic roots. And, when I thought about it, it seemed to me that the Unitarian de-emphasis of the miracle of Christ and its emphasis on human perfection lend themselves to a form of liberalism as we ultimately come to worship Government, not God. Just a loose collection of thoughts, I know. But that was my experience.
I am from Georgia, but I lived for 3 years in upper New Hampshire, teaching at a boarding school. The state is utterly beautiful, as is Vermont, and is is Maine, but, I felt like a stranger in a strange land. And what I noticed about New England was (1) the sheer number of boarding schools . . . telling me that there is a helluva lot of money between Boston and New York, (2) that most of that money was not in the hands of ordinary people, whose lives seems rather bleak and stark in comparison to the rich kids I was carting around on sports trips to Exeter and St. Paul’s. I visited the Maine coast, but the money along it made upper New Hampshire and Vermont look even more bleak. And there was a difference in attutude toward things which I traced, if tentatively, to religion . . . Puritanisn, Unitarianism. The South, though highly Evangelical, has Anglo-Catholic roots. And, when I thought about it, it seemed to me that the Unitarian de-emphasis of the miracle of Christ and its emphasis on human perfection lend themselves to a form of liberalism as we ultimately come to worship Government, not God. Just a loose collection of thoughts, I know. But that was my experience.