Boston has an undeserved liberal reputation. Boston is extremely conservative, but in its own way. It's NPR-liberal, not fun loving socially open liberal, and definitely not San Francisco liberal. It's ideologically liberal but not culturally so.
It took me a year or two to wrap my mind around it as it's a sort of conservatism you just don't find elsewhere in the U.S. much. It took me aback. I had no conceptual framework to place it in. Eventually I realized it was an upper-crust blue blooded Ivy League thing, a bizarre hybrid where people are intellectually open minded but socially unbelievably reserved.
Coming from "that kind" (solidly middle-class economically, but culturally/intellectually what you described) I think that there is a fear in us of the impractical. We have a 400-year memory of weird religious fantasies, failed dreams, and dangerous frontiers. We are quite liberal, but also very cautious and it's bred into us. When someone tells us that he's gone "poly" and that he's quite fine with his "open relationship" (initiated by his more alpha girlfriend) we roll our eyes and see someone who got played. We have 400 years of experience with concepts far more impractical than that.
Also, we generally don't like taxes. We're fine with money going to important social programs (e.g. universal healthcare) of obvious value, but we're fiscally prudent and when we can't see where every dollar goes, it makes us suspicious.
Intellectually, I'm about as anti-conformist as it gets. But on some level, I feel like there are rules and traditions and boundaries that have some value. What I especially hate are powerful people (the current elite, who've eclipsed us, and who've outdone us economically by orders of magnitude by their willingness to associate with distasteful money, e.g. oil despots) who seem to have taken all the bad of our traditions (e.g. our haughtiness and faith in hierarchy) and thrown away the good (our respect for education and human dignity, our progressivism, our flair for the written word).
We are (as noted) terrible, as a set, at keeping in contact. This is probably why people perceive it as being hard to make friends in Boston. We will still consider a person a friend if we haven't seen him for 10 years... but we also tend to go 10 years without being in contact, which is a shame. We also go out of our way to be kind to people we barely know... but we're not exactly warm. This aloofness is certainly one of the northeastern traits I have that I don't like.
It took me a year or two to wrap my mind around it as it's a sort of conservatism you just don't find elsewhere in the U.S. much. It took me aback. I had no conceptual framework to place it in. Eventually I realized it was an upper-crust blue blooded Ivy League thing, a bizarre hybrid where people are intellectually open minded but socially unbelievably reserved.
Coming from "that kind" (solidly middle-class economically, but culturally/intellectually what you described) I think that there is a fear in us of the impractical. We have a 400-year memory of weird religious fantasies, failed dreams, and dangerous frontiers. We are quite liberal, but also very cautious and it's bred into us. When someone tells us that he's gone "poly" and that he's quite fine with his "open relationship" (initiated by his more alpha girlfriend) we roll our eyes and see someone who got played. We have 400 years of experience with concepts far more impractical than that.
Also, we generally don't like taxes. We're fine with money going to important social programs (e.g. universal healthcare) of obvious value, but we're fiscally prudent and when we can't see where every dollar goes, it makes us suspicious.
Intellectually, I'm about as anti-conformist as it gets. But on some level, I feel like there are rules and traditions and boundaries that have some value. What I especially hate are powerful people (the current elite, who've eclipsed us, and who've outdone us economically by orders of magnitude by their willingness to associate with distasteful money, e.g. oil despots) who seem to have taken all the bad of our traditions (e.g. our haughtiness and faith in hierarchy) and thrown away the good (our respect for education and human dignity, our progressivism, our flair for the written word).
We are (as noted) terrible, as a set, at keeping in contact. This is probably why people perceive it as being hard to make friends in Boston. We will still consider a person a friend if we haven't seen him for 10 years... but we also tend to go 10 years without being in contact, which is a shame. We also go out of our way to be kind to people we barely know... but we're not exactly warm. This aloofness is certainly one of the northeastern traits I have that I don't like.