When I moved to Virginia from Minnesota in 1995, I was impressed by the calm surface of local politics. My new home, Northern Virginia, had moderate Republicans and Democrats representing it in Richmond and in Congress. Angry invective was rare. It was refreshing after my stint in politics in Minnesota, where the so-called Independent Republicans warred among themselves; I was only chosen to be a delegate at the State Independent Republican convention in 1995 because both the social (pro-life) and economic conservatives (business climate first!) could stand me.
When I commented on peaceable-seeming Virginia politics, I was told that something called “the Virginia Way” still carried some weight. Nobody defined it for me, but if you look it up, you will find it was a political approach at the state level that emphasized decency, honor, and gentility in politics, and a bipartisan consensus that effective governance mattered more than short term partisan political gains. After the scrapping about substance, both sides would shake hands, so to speak, and move on. In 1926, Douglas Southall Freeman wrote in an editorial for The Richmond News Leader that the “Virginia way is not one of contention, but of understanding, not the making of humiliating laws, but the establishment of just, acceptable usage. Public sentiment can be trusted now, as always, to find the best ‘Virginia way.’” (from Bacon’s Rebellion, Robin Beres, 2023).
Today, especially after the election on November 4th, Democrats hold all seats in Northern Virginia, including areas that in 1995 were exurban or even rural. (WMRA.org, 5 November) If you listen to our alleged leaders, some seem to be truly deranged. Citing TRUMP!, our new supermajority in Richmond will be trampling over the voters who wanted a bipartisan electoral redistricting commission. One can only conclude the Virginia Way is dead, and we are all worse for its demise.
On November 4th, Virginia voters elected as Attorney General a man who two years ago had texted unapologetically about his fantasies of slamming two bullets in the head of the other party’s Majority Leader. As if that were not enough, he also expressed a wish to kill the man’s two children in their mother’s arms, saying that someone’s policy preferences change only when he is personally affected. Jay Jones, who has served two terms in the House of Delegates, had already said he thought police officers should be killed so they would no longer be able to kill presumably innocent civilians. He is said to be a professing Catholic church member in Norfolk.
A man like this—we won’t even get into his driving record and attempt to weasel out of community service—is patently unqualified for any law enforcement or prosecutor position in any state or city, let alone in Richmond. And yet the voters elected him.
Unfortunately, the early voting season had already been underway for several weeks when National Review broke the story of Jones’ texts. So many voters may simply have done their partisan duty by voting for Jay Jones, driving record notwithstanding. The Jones case is more proof that extended early voting is risky from the standpoint of an informed electorate.
For a week or two, the revelations panicked Virginia Democrats. Gubernatorial candidate Abigail Spanberger and Ghazala Hashmi, candidate for lieutenant governor, resisted pressures to force Jones to leave the race, or withdraw their endorsements, although they made muted expressions of regret over the content of his texts. Hashmi said Jones “must take accountability for the pain that his words have caused.” But “must” was not a command. In the end, the Democrats decided to go full speed ahead, batten down the hatches, and bluster their way to the election. Since it was too late to replace him on the ballot, a Republican could not be permitted to win.
This turned out to be a correct, if amoral, strategy. Spanberger, Hashmi, and Jones made a clean sweep of the three statewide positions. The Democratic voters, given permission not to care about a sociopath as Attorney General, because after all, TRUMP, voted for Jones, employing various kinds of cognitive dissonance strategies to excuse their own moral failure. (“he apologized”; “Trump said he could shoot people on Fifth Avenue and get away with it”; “it happened years ago.”).
The sadness I felt was not the familiar sadness of losing a partisan election. It was about saying a final farewell to that “Virginia Way.” The Virginia Way, which can be traced to the colonial era, has admittedly been on life support in recent decades. Like anything that existed in Virginia before 1970, the Virginia Way has come under fire from detractors in recent years to stigmatize it as enabling slavery, Jim Crow, and Virginia’s “Massive Resistance” (to desegregation). But that would be claiming that correlation is somehow causation.
Senator Harry Byrd Jr. argued in his later years that his and his father’s opposition to desegregation had actually prevented unrest and violence (albeit at the expense of many black children’s education when the public schools were closed). Thus “the Virginia Way” is properly understood not as a policy outcome, but as a style of governance in which parties accept each other’s good intentions and reach outcomes with civility and decency. It appeals to the best instincts of politicians, not the lowest. And it is fair to say that you cannot have expected Virginia politicians in 1855 or 1926 to have shared the morally elevated views we congratulate ourselves on holding today. But many or even most were still honorable men who sought to do their best.
The zero-sum nature of our national politics in recent years has been nibbling at the Virginia Way. An opposition campaign worker following George Allen during his 2006 senatorial campaign was referred to by Allen as a “macaca,” which was declared to be a racial slur, and it probably contributed to his loss. In 2014, President Barack Obama’s Department of Justice prosecuted then-Governor Bob McDonnell and his wife for public corruption for accepting gifts; the Supreme Court overturned their convictions in 2016. Governor Northam weathered a 2019 scandal in which a Halloween photo on his page of the medical school yearbook led to questions about whether he was the guy in minstrel blackface or the KKK hood. He did not need to pretend shame once he realized he could claim he was neither partygoer, although every other photo on his yearbook page featured Northam. (On November 7, Northam was appointed to lead Jones’ transition team).
This year, candidate Spanberger told voters, “Let your rage fuel you.” Under pressure, she and her supporters at bluevirginia.com backtracked, arguing that she was only urging them to let their rage propel them into door knocking, phone banking and voting. In any case, Spanberger was not trying to calm the waters, or discourage the use of such unhinged language. She seemed to agree that rage was a perfectly acceptable emotion in Virginia politics. But as GOP Delegate Kim Taylor, who shortly afterwards received a death threat during her reelection campaign, wrote, “…’rage’ does not equate to civic participation. Rage is anger, division, and it creates a climate where threats and violence are no longer unthinkable. Words from our leaders matter, and when those words encourage hostility, we should not be surprised when hostility spills over into real life.” (Daily Signal, October 3).
Even before they gained a supermajority in the new House of Delegates, Democrats were already indicating that they would shatter norms of civility and fairness to seize full advantage as fast as possible. Ignoring the bipartisan 2020 electoral commission, they are determined to redistrict Virginia’s congressional seats (now 6-5 Democrat) so that Republicans will be squeezed out, as they have been in deep blue California, Maryland, and New England, a region where a 40-percent Republican voter base has NO Republican congressmen at all. Virginia Democrats are voting to amend the state constitution before next year’s midterms and bypass the commission. This may not survive judicial scrutiny, since the amendment must be approved before an election, and after another, after which it goes to a statewide referendum. The first vote took place in the final week of an extensive early voting season, which cannot be said to be “before” an election.
The Virginia Way carries no purchase with the increasingly leftist politicians who govern Virginia. As neo-Marxists (even if they don’t realize it), they most value the demolition of institutions that stand in the way of their acquisition of more power. Opposition, even principled opposition, maybe especially principled opposition, offends them. The gentility of a Glenn Youngkin (the current governor) is tolerated but secretly despised. And with Virginia’s almost unique law about no consecutive gubernatorial terms, he will soon leave office.
What made Virginia unique, under both majority Democrat and majority Republican governments, has virtually evaporated. We are now engulfed in the national maelstrom of partisanship under which no rage is too great, no pettiness too small. Fair play is whatever benefits your side. There is no moderation out of respect for the opposition, let alone respect for the opposition. The Democrats are largely to blame, but they will drag the GOP down with them if this continues.
Paula T. Weiss is the author of The Antifan Girlfriend and The Deplorable Underground. You can find her essays and short stories on braeburnroadbooks.com.
Illustration of postcard, c. 1945, published courtesy of Steve Shook of Moscow, Idaho. Licensing by Wikipedia Commons Attribution 2.0 at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en
No changes have been made to the original graphic.