Summary: Ralph Northam has managed to get his tit into the ringer. The 73rd governor of the Commonwealth of Virginia has come under heavy attack for a picture in his 1984 medical school yearbook. Though the story of the photograph was published originally by a Republican website with ties to the right wing Internet, Democrats have practically wet themselves in their haste to virtue-signal and to demand Gov. Northam’s resignation.
The cowardice of the Democrats, though contemptible, is not surprising. Democrats have a tendency to fall into a crouch and wet themselves, drifting away on waves of their own fear pee every time a Republican says “boo.” By seeking to impose “zero-tolerance” policies on a remote, if tacky, conduct, and by seeking to “distinguish themselves the Republicans” on these kinds of issues, Democrats are doing nothing more than seeking “moral high ground” on which to engage in their customary enterprise of abject and unconditional surrender.It is time for Democrats to stop behaving so spinelessly in the face of obvious Republican dirty tricks.
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The cowardice of the Democratic Party has been on full display again in the Commonwealth of Virginia. Democrats, mistaking cowardice for “moral high ground,” and conflating our cowardice with self-righteous, virtue-signaling “zero tolerance” attitudes that contain zero common sense, have been all over Gov. Ralph Northam, demanding that he resign because of a racially insensitive posting in his 1984 medical school yearbook.
Oh, please! Let’s consider first of all that this is an obvious hit piece orchestrated by a right wing website which is also trying to allege that the Commonwealth’s lieutenant governor, Justin Fairfax, is somehow guilty of a sexual assault more than a decade ago.
Democrats need to strap on their balls and realize that this is a Republican attempt, or should we say a Republican dirty trick in the style of Roger Stone, to decapitate the Democratic leadership of the Commonwealth.
The blunt fact is that while Northam’s yearbook page from 1984 is, by the standards of 2019, “problematic,” it was not so when it was created in 1984. And it is by the standards of 1984 that we must judge Gov. Northam’s tacky picture, which was apparently not unique in the yearbook of his medical school.
The criticism of Gov. Northam seems to be coming from a lot of people outside the American South, or from people who have no experience with the often unfathomable social mores that obtained in the American South in the early years of the 1980s. Though we must acknowledge that standards have changed in the last 35 years, the fact still remains that those of us who did our undergraduate or graduate work in the South in the 1980s stand, frankly, in a far better position to evaluate in the context of its time Ralph Northam’s vulgar, but not resignation-worthy, yearbook page.
For those of us who were in college in the American South in 1984, facts on the ground were far different than they are today. Let us shame the devil, tell the truth, and acknowledge that in 1984, white privilege was so endemic and pervasive in higher education in the South that capers like those of Ralph Northam --and others-- in their medical school yearbook were simply the kind of thing that went without discussion.
And in such a climate of pervasive, endemic white privilege pulling a caper like dressing up in blackface or wearing a faux Ku Klux Klan costume (which actually resembles the costumes worn by penitents in Seville during Holy Week far more than any KKK regalia) was simply not considered morally blameworthy. Among the Tidewater and Belle Meade ladies I knew when I was in college, such a display, like the Kappa Alpha Order's "Old South Week," with callow frat boy undergraduates gallivanting around in Confederate uniforms, might have been considered borderline vulgar, or the sort of gaffes to be expected from white southern males, or "boys," of a certain age.
Beyond that, however, it would not have been considered anything worthy of clutching pearls, having vapors, or demanding resignations over. At most, it might have called forth a private reproval and the deployment of that dreaded Southern adjective of disapprobation: "tacky," or a Stare of Wintry Disapproval from the formidable Tidewater matriarchs, both Black and White, who still set many of the standards by which Virginia society evaluates appropriate behavior.
Indeed, the Democratic vapors, pearl clutching, and theatrical demands for Northam’s resignation are exactly the kind of thing the Republicans expect and plan for. Democrats have had a history for too long now of trying to “stake out moral high ground,” presumably by accepting uncomplainingly and uncritically every Republican double standard which the Republican Party, those masters of transactional politics, seeks to set.
Let’s be real, if this kind of caper had come from a Republican governor, the right wing website which rushed the current Northam narrative into circulation would have killed the story. If the story had come out, no Republican politician would have been caught dead calling for such a Republican governor’s resignation. Republicans prefer to leave it to the Democrats to eat their own, while rallying behind the most morally compromised, and potentially treasonable Republican president in the history of the Republic. Thus, when vocal Bernard Sanders-supporter Michael Moore appeared on Real Time with Bill Maher and theatrically demanded that Northam resign within the hour, Moore was falling into every Republican trap known to political operatives in this country. (It should be recalled that the Vermont Senator himself, also morally compromised, by the way, was a vocal supporter of Tom Periello, Northam's opponent in the Virginia gubernatorial primary.)
Democrats tend to be transformational, which unfortunately means the Democrats tend to stake out moral high ground on which to surrender unconditionally to thugs and dirty tricksters. The Republican leaning website that broke the story, Big League Politics, is run by a 29-year-old activist/dirty trickster with a long history of work for lashups like Breitbart, InfoWars, and The Daily Caller, all of which have a reputation for Republican dirty tricks.
Unfortunately, the so-called “Zero Tolerance Policy” the Democratic Party has apparently adopted, means that just about every Democrat alive is vulnerable to such Republican dirty tricks. Democrats, in their haste to seem “virtuous,” have managed to ignore one of the most important principles of our constitutional liberty and rule of law: no ex post facto laws or policies are permissible in our constitutional politics.
More simply put, the constitutional prohibition on ex post facto laws means that one cannot be punished at a later date for an act not criminal when committed. By insisting on a “zero tolerance” policy for indiscretions that were, quite frankly, not considered blameworthy at the time they were engaged in, the Democratic Party has left its commitment to the rule of law very much open to doubt. It is simply not defensible in our politics to engage in ex post facto or retroactive blame casting.
Let us take, hypothetically, the case of an out gay Democratic activist in California who attended a southern institution of higher learning in the 1980s, when sexual intimacy between two males was stigmatized in most southern states as “the abominable and detestable crime against nature,” with a mandatory 10 year to life prison sentence of incarceration in the state penitentiary. Would the Democratic Party choose to range itself on the side of right-wing homophobes by invoking its so-called “zero tolerance” policy against such an activist?
The Democratic Party has become a prisoner of a profoundly neo-Victorian, neo-Puritan, censorious approach to its political activists which will have the effect of driving good, but imperfect, people out of the political world altogether. As much as one should prefer an imperfect friend to a deadly enemy, one should also accept that our chiefs are human beings with a whole range of human imperfections.
We should really make an effort to be more like the French, who have an entirely civilized attitude toward personal indiscretions. When French Pres. François Mitterrand, who had had children by both his wife and his mistress, died, his funeral was attended by both his families. His official wife and children stood on one side of the grave; the maîtresse-en-titre and her children stood on the other. There was no moral judgment from the French press or from most mainstream French politicians.
Unfortunately, America, and particularly the Democratic Party, remains tainted by her original sins of Calvinism, Puritanism, and Protestant Nonconformity. We Democrats demand a kind of perfection from our politicians which we should think twice about expecting. Ralph Northam has feet of clay. Ralph Northam came of age at a time and in a place where tacky capers based on white privilege were routine, and where his caper was not unique. We should be loath to assign the counsels of perfection of 2019 to the feckless, but at the time unexceptionable acts of a young man of 24 which occurred a generation and a half ago.
If the Democrats live down to their traditional cowardly stereotype and hound Ralph Northam from the governorship of the Commonwealth of Virginia on the basis of a story published by a Republican-leaning website run by an habitué of the seemiest underside of the Republican Internet, and if the Democrats do the predictable next thing of hounding Lieutenant Governor Julian Fairfax out of office on the strength of an unproven sexual assault republished by the same Republican website as well, they will have only themselves to blame for losing the Commonwealth for a generation.
Democrats need to be transactional and stop insisting on moralizing transformationalism. The hypocrisy needs to end. The surrender to Republican efforts to hold Democrats to standards to which the Republicans will never hold themselves must end. Democrats need to learn how to fight back. Democrats need to take the counsel of Sean Connery’s character in the 1987 remake of The Untouchables: "they pull a knife, [we] pull a gun; they send one of [ours] to the hospital, [we] send one of theirs the morgue!"
It’s time for Democrats to get over their spinelessness in the face of dirty tricks and rally behind Ralph Northam.
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Paul S. Marchand is an attorney who lives in Cathedral City and practices law in Rancho Mirage. He has been an official of the California Democratic Party and served eight years as a city councilmember in Cathedral City. He is also a 1984 graduate of Vanderbilt University, in Nashville, Tennessee. He has a personal recollection of the pervasive and endemic white privilege present at the time in institutions of higher education in the American South. He and Gov. Northam are fairly close contemporaries.
