Loyalty, Cont'd
Recently I wrote:
…insofar as an administration must work as a team toward common ends, its employees should be loyal so long as they are working under the president. But once their job ends — and especially once the president leaves office — maintaining loyalty for its own sake does nothing for the country…
Will Wilson responds:
1) Is Conor really telling us that loyalty to an abstraction (”the people”) is preferable to loyalty to a person (”the President”)? As a conservative, does he think that the former is even a well-defined concept? Possible given human nature? Desirable? Let’s ignore, for now, the fact that “the President” is in some ways just as damnable an abstraction as “the people”, Bennett doesn’t use that language — almost certainly on purpose.
Yes, I am saying that loyalty to “the people” is preferable to loyalty to “the president,” at least when it comes to people who are hired to help execute the people’s laws, paid by the people to do so, and commenting on the president’s performance in executing his own duties to the people. In this case, I think the people is a very well-defined concept. It refers to all the citizens of the United States of America. The same group is name-checked in the tenth amendment. Is it possible to be loyal to a group so large? Yes, I think so.
2) I’m assuming that Conor doesn’t use the standard of “loyalty so long as we are on a team” in his private life, so is the change in stance here entirely a result of consequentialist concerns? Does the good of providing future historians with material outweigh the bad of craven betrayal even whilst craven betrayal remains bad, or are we shifting to a whole new set of rules?
I do think that different rules govern personal and professional loyalties. I may owe a professional loyalty to the book agent who discovers me and advanced my career through early unprofitable years to refrain from jumping ship at the earliest sign of a better deal elsewhere — but I don’t owe that person the same kind of loyalty that I owe my sister (for example, I don’t feel bound to take the side of my book agent in any divorce to which he may be a party).
Of course, it is possible for someone to be a colleague and a friend, or a mentor and a boss, so clear lines are difficult to draw, but I think, for example, that President Bush is owed one kind of loyalty by his wife and his daughters, and a very different kind from his staffers, so if everyone observed the same behavior, it might be the case that his family would do well to keep it to themselves, whereas his staffers would do well to reveal it.
Mr. Latimer’s critics — specifically Mr. Bennett — speak as though he owes personal loyalty to the president merely by virtue of having worked underneath him. Why? For all we know, President Bush hadn’t any personal hand in hiring the man, and treated him badly during his employment. Why is the assumption that this man, whose salary is paid for by the people, owes a greater loyalty to the president he served under?
3) Conor mentions “maintaining loyalty for its own sake”. I’m curious as to whether he thinks that that’s ever an accurate description of why people are loyal to one another.
Yes, I think so. I’ve stayed loyal to friends who didn’t particularly deserve it, though this is irrelevant to the discussion about Mr. Latimer, because I challenge the assumption that he owed President Bush loyalty of the kind that would demand that he refrain from any future criticism of the man. (Note: I haven’t read Mr. Latimer’s book, and he may well have written some things in it that would bother me on loyalty grounds. For example, if President Bush invited Mr. Latimer into his private quarters while he was dressing, and Mr. Latimer made an observation about his boss’ anatomy that would be embarrassing were it revealed, I’d think very poorly of Mr. Latimer for making that revelation.)
I’m curious to hear Conor’s answers. I was on board when, back at Culture 11, he criticized loyalty to the conservative movement. Now that he’s criticizing loyalty to people, I’m about ready to jump off this boat.
This sounds as though I am criticizing the very concept of loyalty, but it seems quite obvious that loyalty among people is owed sometimes, and other times it isn’t — and that there are good and bad reasons to break loyalty. Surely even someone who thinks subordinates do owe loyalty to the president would deem it better in some circumstances to break that bond.
Before I conclude, I’d like to make the additional observation that people who earn loyalty almost never need to demand it, whereas people who are least deserving of loyalty tend to invoke the concept constantly as though it is due them for the mere fact of being powerful. These people seldom feel as though loyalty works in both directions. With regard to President Bush, there can be little doubt that if a conflict arose between what was good for the American people and what was good for Matt Latimer, the president would be duty bound to fire him immediately. Yet here I am imagining a conflict between what was good for the American people and what was good for President Bush, and folks are suggesting that Matt Latimer should be loyal to the latter.
I may well be confused about some aspect of loyalty, and I thank Mr. Wilson for engaging me on the subject — I’m eager to hear more about his view of things, and quite open to the idea that my intellectual understanding of the subject is incomplete or mistaken.
But I remain convinced that Mr. Bennett’s statement about Mr. Latimer is wrongheaded.
Not to mention that this kind of logic could be used against any whistleblowers. I mean, in most cases, they are being disloyal to their immediate bosses or the organization they are (were) working for.
Point could be made that someone has to break the law before we have a reason to blow the whistle, but I’m sure there are other concerns where whistleblowing could be equally moral and courageous.
But what if your boss/organization was using some sort of a loophole to do something that is morally reprehensible and potentially endangering the lives of other people?
(Another issue is that, when it comes to Presidents, a lot of things they do could be potentially dangerous.)
I know that this might not be relevant for the purely abstract debate on the merits, but still – Monica Lewinsky. Have Mr. Bennett or Mr. Wilson or any other critic of Mr. Lattimer expressed similar outrage at her?
(I only thought of this when Conor made the Bush’s anatomy example. But haven’t we actually heard unnecessary details about Clinton’s private parts?)
— Marko · Sep 26, 10:13 PM · #
I certainly don’t like the idea of loyalty to the president when we’re talking about public servants who should, indeed, be loyal to the people they serve.
However, watching Latimer on Neil Cavuto’s show the other day made me sick to my stomach, but this has to do with the character of Latimer, not the concept of loyalty. He’s an opportunist little punk seeking to make a quick buck — he was trembling with excitement at the prospect of being controversial, and, thus, noticed. Although the principle of loyalty to the people rather the president stands, Latimer is no example of virtue.
— mike farmer · Sep 26, 10:51 PM · #
The whole riff implying that one can’t be loyal to something so abstract as “the people” is just bizarre. I wonder if Will thinks loyalty to one’s country is a similarly gossamer concept. Or, say, the constitution.
— southpaw · Sep 26, 10:55 PM · #
“Although the principle of loyalty to the people rather the president stands, Latimer is no example of virtue.”
That’s the trouble with these sorts of things, isn’t it? The principle is only tested in the case of despicable characters. Imagine how I feel advocating on behalf of people like Paul Little.
— Tony Comstock · Sep 26, 11:19 PM · #
This Wilson person seems to claim to be a conservative but apparently his conservativism is quite paleo. Like, before the 18th century. Hell yes loyalty to an abstract concept is more important than loyalty to a person! The entire edifice of democratic self-governance collapses if you can’t distinguish between the office and the person holding it. When you work for the President, you work for the President. You don’t work for Barack Obama. You work for an institution.
The whole revolution of the Enlightenment and of democratic self-government is premised on this idea. And it is a revolution. If you go to many countries in Africa and other developing countries, you will encounter plenty of officials who genuinely don’t understand why it’s wrong to take bribes and kickbacks. That’s because they don’t distinguish between themselves and their office.
So of course loyalty should be to an institution and not a person. And if Wilson is having problems with the definition of these perhaps he should look up documents that include words like “we the people.”
So yeah, pretty big FAIL there.
— PEG · Sep 27, 07:20 AM · #
This conversation reminds me of an article from the New Yorker written during the Clinton administration post-Lewinsky called The End of Loyalty: http://tiny.cc/Peci0 (this is the abstract). In it, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (yes, the Harvard professor arrested recently for breaking into his own house) criticizes George Stephanopoulos and Leon Panetta for failing to demonstrate loyalty to Bill Clinton, for criticizing him because he lied to the people around him and the America people. For Gates, being loyal to principles rather than to people is a symptom of modernity, a favoring of abstractions over relationships.
I’m not sure what Bill Bennett had to say about disloyalty when it was displayed by people like Panetta and Stephanopoulos in 1998, but I imagine he and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., weren’t in total agreement. Perhaps Bennett is displaying what he means by loyalty in his comment: he’ll stand up for loyalty when it’s directed at the people who agree with him, but he’s loyal to people rather than principles; whenever somebody is disloyal to someone he doesn’t like, he’s free to admire that person’s commitment to principle.
— David M · Sep 27, 07:58 PM · #
Your later point that loyalty is fundamentally earned not owed is critical. Even more fundamental, though, is that it is a private question between individuals. Bennett can claim the writing of this book is an act of disloyalty and shameful, but in fact he has no standing to make that judgement, and his view of the matter is irrelevant. Loyalty is between the person we might think has cause to be loyal and the person we think he might be loyal to. Public vetting of others’ loyalty or lack there of to third parties is totally unfounded.
— Mike · Sep 28, 11:25 AM · #