Loyalty
Posted on October 9th, 2008
by Daniel Larison |
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Helen Rittelmeyer has offered an answer to the criticisms of her earlier argument with an interesting post. The most important part of the post seemed to be this:
The moral here is that some people think that keeping any and all disagreement on the table deepens friendship; I think that’s true for most kinds of disagreement (my friends are the ones I trust to slap me in the face when I need it, for instance), but in cases like my friend’s hypothetical, it cheapens it. Friendship, like loyalty, entails responsibilities, and you need to know what you’re getting into when you start calling yourself a friend. Or a conservative.
While I might join with James in saying that political alliances are no more like friendships than they are like familial relations, I think that kind of reply would not do justice to Ms. Rittelmeyer’s view. Let us take the comparison to friendship as the appropriate one for the sake of argument, and consider what that might mean. The emphasis on loyalty is also very important, but if anything I think Ms. Rittelmeyer does not emphasize the importance of loyalty nearly enough. That is, she seems to apply it only to one side, as if the voters were vassals who owed service to their lieges but expected–and received–nothing in return. Loyalty is supposed to be reciprocal, which I think includes an important distinction from the merely contractual arrangement that she has imagined that Conor, Andrew and I endorse. As I said about party loyalty in a different context:
Something that the defenders of party loyalty seem never to be able to grasp is that loyalty is a mutual obligation. It is not only something that supporters are supposed to give to their party, but it is something that party leaders owe to the people who put them and keep them in their positions.
Thinking of this relationship in terms of friendship, wouldn’t we agree that a friend who deceives you, abuses your trust, betrays you, cheats you or in some other way defrauds you for his own advantage is not much of a friend? I don’t know whether the others would put it this way, but I would. There is room in a friendship for disagreements and even blunders–there would have to be–but there are limits that friends do not cross. Forgiveness is possible in friendship, but even among friends it is not infinite. If I took party leaders as my friends, that would be a mistake, but worse still would be the error of continuing to reward them with my friendship after they had already shown that their purpose in cultivating the relationship was essentially exploitative and self-interested.
That said, suppose that I continued to offer these politicians my loyalty by supporting them every step of the way no matter what. If they were in error, would it not be more important to challenge them over their errors in an attempt to help them correct their mistakes? If you judge that someone to whom you owe loyalty has made a grave error (as Conor has determined concerning the Palin selection), do you not then owe it to him to say so with whatever means you have available to you? There does seem to be an assumption here that the critic and the dissenter are the ones acting disloyally by speaking out, when there is a powerful case that those who remain silent and enable self-destructive behavior are the ones not fulfilling their obligations. Even as they are not living up to their responsibilities, the enablers are assuming responsibility for the calamities that befall the people they neglected to warn.
Filed under: politics
look, if you think of yourself as a Republican, then obviously you’d want to support McCain. but maybe you are a conservative, in which case you would not want to support McCain. it’s that simple.
Yeah, that’s about it. As a 25+ year fan of the Cincinnati Bengals, I think I have a pretty good handle on the point where loyalty and stupidity intersect, and I freely admit that I crossed the line into stupidity quite some time ago. Fortunately, all my clinging to a forgone negative conclusion does is to occasionally enrich the pockets of NFL jersey manufacturers.
You hit the head of it here; “The emphasis on loyalty is also very important, but if anything I think Ms. Rittelmeyer does not emphasize the importance of loyalty nearly enough. That is, she seems to apply it only to one side, as if the voters were vassals who owed service to their lieges but expected–and received–nothing in return.”
Yup. The argument that I should pull the lever for McCain because Obama will be worse ignores the fact that McCain will be little, if any, better. And “settling” for the proverbial lesser of two evils only ensures that you will get a even lessers of two evils next time around. Loyalty is a two-way street. What has the GOP done for me lately?
Not to stray too far off topic, but I’d like to take a moment and recognize DaveA’s sacrifice of 25+ years.
Thinking of this relationship in terms of friendship, wouldn’t we agree that a friend who deceives you, abuses your trust, betrays you, cheats you or in some other way defrauds you for his own advantage is not much of a friend? I don’t know whether the others would put it this way, but I would.
I would, too.
Daniel, off-topic, when you can spare a moment, would you briefly follow the hyperlink below? A question is asked there that one suspects that you could shed some light on. Look at the question, if you would—which in itself will not take much time—and then decide whether it is worth your further time and interest to address it.
(For some reason I cannot persuade the blog software to let me hyperlink the following in the usual way, but here the address is in plain text.)
http://econnat.us/?p=119
Howard
From Rittelmeyer’s post:
As livid as I was, her answer absolutely satisfied me: “I could never be friends with anyone who worked or wrote for the other side because being someone’s friend doesn’t just mean spending time with them and enjoying their conversation. It means being there for them. I never want to be in a position where my response to ‘I had a terrible day at work’ has to be ‘Good, I’m glad.’ That’s not what a friend does.”
This is a sad and unpleasant view of friendship. Why does the response to “I had a terrible day at work,” have to be “Good, I’m glad”? That’s only the case if you’ve chosen to make your job and/or your political opinions more important than your friendships. It seems perfectly possible to me that people whose professional interests clash could still genuinely care for one another.
It’s interesting that her argument in favor of party loyalty ended up here. Elevating political loyalties to the same level as family loyalties and loyalty to friends produces a warped approach to public life. But, at least in this case, it also seems to produce a warped approach to friendship.
As she explains herself more fully her original argument just seems more and more pernicious and empty.
It’s a cult. It’s why I got out. As soon as someone said ‘you don’t sound like a republican’ I got out. I can’t be a part of a group that won’t let me think on my own. I will not ignore bullshit just so my side can win an election they can’t win on merit.
It is a cult. And Sarah Palin is a cult of personality.
I am so glad I have no party affiliation.
I think that the conflation of friendship and loyalty to The Party is offensive on several levels. But, to play along: Sometimes there may be occasions where you take your friend’s car keys and don’t give them back, no matter how much they plead and talk about “our friendship”, because they are in no condition to drive. This doesn’t make you less of a friend — just the opposite, in fact.
When Rittelmeyer uses the euphamism of “friend” or “family” to describe one’s political orientation and philosophy, what she is really doing is turning conservatism into a cult. In other words, there are real friends and real family, and we all know who our real friends and real family are. People who share a similar political orientation and policy are simply not our friends and family, and they are not owed us that kind of allegiance. To say that they are is to make a political movement into a cult, which is to say, a fake family that uses its claims on our loyalty to manipulate us into doing things which no real friend or family would ever do. My father was a Goldwater Republican, and he never once tried to use his family influence upon me to dissuade me from being a liberal, or from criticizing his politics (or he, mine). Real families don’t require ideological purity or blind loyalty on political issues. Neither the GOP nor the conservative movement is a family in any sense of the word, and anyone who tries to tell you otherwise is trying to manipulate you using cheap cult tactics. I say, resist those people like the devil himself, regardless of their “good intentions”. And that of course appies equally well to liberals and their loyalties.