Melinda Henneberger

Opinion columnist

It’s starting to feel like such an epic meltdown in Virginia that, like Lot’s wife exiting Sodom, the last one out of Richmond could look back and be turned into a pillar of salt.

Yet even if every last Democratic official in the commonwealth had to step down, this story would still be about so much more than 2020 or how the state party will survive this self-inflicted reckoning.

It’s certainly about how warped we are still by slavery; otherwise, why keep play acting scenes that are so hurtful? A Missouri nurse was fired just a few months ago for wearing blackface to a Halloween party.

But could we have two political tribes with more divergent reactions to the same sickness, which is a deadened disregard for whole groups of humans because of who they are? Racism, misogyny and ableism are only different strains of the same virus. But because our politics don’t recognize that, I’m not sure when America as a whole will ever recover.

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The Democratic tribe has a governor who lost me when he talked about babies with physical deformities who survive third-trimester abortions being “kept comfortable” and “resuscitated if that’s what the mother and the family desired.” But, naturally, only the other tribe — Republicans — cared about that initial affront to human rights by Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam, a doctor.

Then we saw the disturbing Ku Klux Klan and blackface photo in Northam's medical school yearbook, and heard about that time he dressed up like Michael Jackson, complete with the shoe polish that was so darn hard to wash off his cheeks. Democrats across the land rightly said no, you can’t lead after that, not in this party.

No blackface in my former sundown town

Everyone knows this except Dr. Northam, and possibly Virginia Attorney General Mark Herring, who as it turns out also darkened his face for a college party he attended as rapper Kurtis Blow in 1980. You boys have a lot to work out is all I can say.

Even in the virtually all-white former sundown town in Southern Illinois where I was growing up about the same time these Virginia officials were in school, I never heard of anyone feeling compelled to put on blackface — maybe because there was no one around to humiliate with such a display.

But still today in the Republican Party, the most blatant shows of racial disrespect are laughed off, if not lapped up. Sometimes there's an apology, and then a repeat performance.

It's in the GOP that you can say your African-American opponent will “monkey this up” and still be elected governor of Florida. In 2018. After robocalls featuring a man speaking in a minstrel dialect. It’s Republicans who for years put up with the racial stylings of Iowa Rep. Steve King, who imagines immigrants with “calves the size of cantaloupes because they're hauling 75 pounds of marijuana across the desert."

And of course, the GOP is now led by a man who tried to put white supremacists shouting Nazi slogans like “blood and soil” on equal moral footing with those protesting racism. Donald Trump has lied again and again about the criminality of immigrants and, according to The Washington Post, is considering a “far-reaching rollback of civil rights law that would dilute federal rules against discrimination in education, housing and other aspects of American life.” The president himself has told us how he treats women, and I believe him.

Pathology and partisanship all around

Democrats are generally more inclined to believe allegations of sexual assault than Republicans are. Yet inconvenient as it would have been under the circumstances, Virginia Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax was not immediately disqualified by allegations that he had sexually assaulted a woman at the Democratic National Convention in Boston in the summer of 2004.

“What began as consensual kissing quickly turned into a sexual assault,” the woman, Vanessa Tyson, a fellow at Stanford University and associate professor at Scripps College, said in a statement. She accused Fairfax of forcing her to perform oral sex and said, “I cannot believe, given my obvious distress, that Mr. Fairfax thought this forced sexual act was consensual.”

NBC News reported that Fairfax, who has said that everything that happened between them was consensual, “used profane language in a private meeting Monday night, while referring to his accuser, Dr. Vanessa Tyson. Two sources tell us Fairfax said of Tyson: “F--- that b----.” How delightful.

The point is not that there’s pathology all around, true as that is, but that we’ll be stuck right where we are until we’re no longer partisans first. And the next generation of leaders, whose every stumble will have been recorded, shared and made searchable, can only get out ahead of this by doing better.

Melinda Henneberger is a columnist and editorial writer for The Kansas City Star and a member of USA TODAY's Board of Contributors. Follow her on Twitter: @MelindaKCMO