Aside from a few remarks on Twitter, I wasn’t sure there was much to add on the unexpected collapse of Ralph Northam’s governorship and political career. But I saw a note from TPM Reader AW who asked me to share my reactions, thoughts, comments. So here goes.
When I first saw this news yesterday afternoon it was such a whipsaw, unexpected development it took me a short while to make sense of it. We see pols appearing in black face or in some kind of Confederate regalia or other similar situations. Usually the identity of the public figure isn’t a huge surprise. Though I don’t know a great deal about him, I certainly didn’t expect this from Ralph Northam. And this is about as over the top as you can get. Not just blackface but a guy in Klan robe as well. Other than a jocular reenactment of a lynching, it’s basically maxed out on racist aggression.
At first it wasn’t clear to me whether Northam would be forced to resign. It’s not hard to imagine someone who is a radically different person than they were 35 years ago. Certainly his public career suggests that at least to a degree he is.
That’s the root of my main curiosity: Is he a genuinely different person who had somehow blocked out this part of his past? Did he know these pictures were just sitting out there waiting to be found? Is he in fact not that changed and didn’t see it as a problem, perhaps a youthful indiscretion, despite being a man in his mid-twenties at the time? Was his first reaction that he knew this stuff might one day be found out? I find myself baffled and curious on these points. But it really doesn’t matter.
You can come back from almost anything in public life, certainly when something is decades in the past. As we discussed recently in a related context, second chances are one of the most important things about a humane, moral society. That remains true if some get fourth and fifth chances and some get none. There are not a few examples of the most hardcore anti-abolitionists in the pre-Civil War era who were radicalized into the most diehard abolitionists during and after the war and became aggressive defenders of racial equality. People change and we should be open to their change if it seems genuine and productive.
But change requires … well, change. The missing part of the puzzle is that if Northam was the man who put together that page and appeared in those photos and later became the man he seemed to be until yesterday afternoon, he needed to make some public accounting of how and why that happened. That may not be necessary for a private person but it is for someone in elected office. That doesn’t need to be self-flagellation but it does require some explanation. By failing to do that he made possible the breach that occurred last night in which the faith millions of Virginians had placed in him was just broken and probably broken irretrievably.
It’s also true that resignation isn’t the worst thing because holding public office isn’t a right. It’s a privilege. Let’s consider a hypothetical. Let’s say Ralph Northam is a genuinely different person than the guy in those pictures and is as anguished as you or I at what those pictures represent. If I were his friend and had reason to believe that was true I would not stop being his friend. In fact, I hope I’d be there for him in what I expect is a shattering moment for him personally. But I also think I’d realize he was no longer able to continue as governor. At a time in our history when people of color are demanding not only improvement but the full package of equality and rights right now and when white identity politics has permission to operate openly in the public sphere, that just doesn’t work. The breach is too great, regardless of who he might be today.
The events of today make those hypotheticals a bit distant and implausible. Denying the pictures are of him after admitting they were last night, admitting to a new blackface incident at a Michael Jackson themed talent contest, pleading ignorance about the yearbook. What is he even saying? These move from the implausible to the bizarre. I would say clueless but I think that gives him too much credit. He was already losing his office. Now he loses his dignity as well.
The country has one genuinely multi-racial political party, which is by nature an anti-racist party. It has another that is rooted in white identity politics. That no more means there are no racists or people with racist pasts in the Democratic party than it means every Republican is a racist. But the basic political configuration and dichotomy of U.S. politics today is clear. Northam just isn’t in a position to lead a state still shaped by the history of the Confederacy, not as the candidate of Democratic voters.
