Liberalism and Loyalty Revisited

I caught a little guff a while back for saying, in so many words, that liberals don't understand loyalty. I'll cop to that being an overly-sweeping statement, but I'd like to throw up some evidence on each side of the argument before deciding how far I want to walk it back.

First, take this bit from Naomi Wolf's Onion interview in which she offers up the military (and, for that matter, Christian) virtue of obedience for shock value:

I asked Colonel [David] Antoon—who is an Air Force colonel, he's a very patriotic, very heroic military man, now retired—I asked him, "What happens if the president tells the First Brigade to shoot at civilians?" And his answer was, "They have to do it." I asked, "Can the First Brigade arrest Congress?" He said, "They have to if they're given orders by the president." "What happens to Congress then?" "They're at the mercy of military men." And I asked, "What if other military speak up and tell people to rebuke the order?" His answer was, "They'd get arrested."

When a leader has deployed a private army, that is one definition of a police state.

This story from J. P. Diggins sees liberalism digging its anti-fealty hole, jumps in, and keeps on digging. (Certainly, one may be inclined to discount his comparison on the logic that any theory of obedience has to recognize an Italian Exception.)

In the mid-1970's, I was asked to give a talk at the University of Florence on the subject of American radicalism. Italian students and professors, many of them Marxists and feminists, seemed to appreciate my account of a student phenomenon that could never successfully reach beyond the campus. Then came a question from the audience. What did I think was the biggest mistake the American New Left made? I replied that if young radicals desired to reach the "masses," they should have refrained from abusing the symbols of American patriotism. The New Left was almost unique in turning against America's own patriotic heroes and traditions. In Italy, Antonio Gramsci, who loved his country as much as his cause, was both a radical socialist and an ardent nationalist, a Marxist and a Mazzinian. My remarks were received more with respect than with rancor.

Yet shortly afterward, in Philadelphia at a historian's conference, I made the same reply in response to a similar question regarding the failure of the New Left. This time my remarks about patriotism were greeted with hisses, and I was told that no one could love a country that tried to carry out genocide in Asia.

Obviously, there exist liberals who believe that a man's loyalty to an institution extends exactly and only as far as his agreement with it. And yet there exists also Aaron Sorkin:

TOBY
We're bleeding here, Mark.

RICHARDSON
What?

TOBY
We're bleeding here, for God's sake. You can work with us or you can be ignored by a Republican President, but those are your choices.

RICHARDSON
How bad is it?

TOBY
Buckland's coming after us. He’s been meeting with Victor Campos.

RICHARDSON
And while you guys are defending yourselves against special prosecutors and Jack Buckland, what happens to the people who got you here?

TOBY
Who are you talking to, Mark? We're not gonna forget about failing schools in central cities. We're not gonna forget about after-school care, health care for uninsured kids. We're not gonna forget about drug treatment, or urban redevelopment, or community policing!

RICHARDSON
Yeah?

TOBY
But you gotta not forget that we're bleeding!

There's also Noah, of "special snowflake"-gate, and also every Boston Irish Democrat ever, but before I let Beantown walk away with my argument, never to return (that's how they roll up there), I'll pull a page from its political history. In the days of James Michael Curley, my political hero, Boston politics were not so much dominated by left and right as by machine and reform. From Jack Beatty's biography of Curley:

An archetypal Boston story illustrates the resulting clash of political cultures. A Beacon Hill lady once went ringing doorbells in Irish South Boston on behalf of a high-minded candidate for the School Committee. At one house, an Irish housewife listened politely to the lady's pitch for her paladin, and then asked, "But doesn't he have a sister who works for the schools or who has something to do with the school system?" The Beacon Hill lady was shocked at what she took to be a suggestion of patronage. "I assure you, madam," she said, "he is not the kind of man who would ever use his position to advance the interests of his sister!"

To which the South Boston Irish housewife responded, "Well, if the son-of-a-bitch won't help his own sister, why should I vote for him?"

The elite vs. the working class; Brahmin vs. Irish; Unitarian vs. Catholic; reform vs. magnanimity. I'm not sure which is code for which—was Boston politics a class struggle masquerading as cultural clash or vice versa?—but ideological progressivism (abolitionism, women's suffrage, temperance) seemed always to find its home with the Unitarians and not the Irish. (Beatty blames Irish Catholicism's spirit of resignation: "To the Irish, pessimists by history and religion alike, such meliorism was impious, a prideful tinkering with a Creation that it was the task of humankind to accept, not to set right.")

Someone whose only point of reference was early twentieth century Boston might formulate the following rule: If your liberalism means putting the poor and disadvantaged first, you'll have a deep appreciation for political loyalty; if your liberalism looks more like a system of high-minded reforms, you won't. (If you reframe the difference as liberal particularism vs. liberal universalism, the rule becomes intuitive.) Obviously, this doesn't hold all the time, but it generally did there/then.

So, having looked at both sides of the question, results are inconclusive; at the end of the day, lots of people think loyalty and obedience are just excuses not to think for oneself. I suppose all I really want to do is point out that, if you are a liberal who wants your side to take the virtue of loyalty seriously, there are parts of your intellectual inheritance that you'll have to push against, whereas I'm not sure that's true for the right.