On political loyalty

During political campaigns, you see the expression of party loyalties. The way we live our lives online these days, even more during the slow, devastating burn of the pandemic, means that we publish those loyalties more broadly than the short-lived yard sign or the too-long-lived bumper sticker. And, in this era, campaign season is the only season. 

Maybe because of the ubiquity of this political signaling, it seems we identify ourselves to ourselves and others in terms of party loyalty more than we used to. I don’t have proof that this is so, but when I was a young Hoosier, there was something slightly shameful about being heavily invested in a party. I remember my mom deriding another relative for being a “red-hot Republican” with the emphasis on “red-hot”. My grandma used to tell a story about a couple playing cards with (I think) her aunt and uncle during the Great Depression. Her uncle joked that someone ought to “take care” of Roosevelt. The other couple reported him to the government; that led to a fruitless, though frightening, investigation. The point of the story was that it was embarrassing to be more deeply committed to a party than to your friends and neighbors. Loyalty was due to your loved ones and your community and even your country, but not to something like a party. 

There is something suspect and confused in the very idea of party loyalty. I want to be clear that there is nothing wrong with commitment to values and principles and political goals; this is often—depending on the valued and principle and goals—admirable and good. But, values and principles and goals are only incidentally and contingently embodied in political parties. I think that Simone Weil was largely right in On the Abolition of Political Parties to identify the entire purpose of political parties as the gaining and maintenance of power. This means that a party may, at some points, include as a part of its platform some laudatory goal, like prison reform or support for families or the expansion of voting rights or some other policy that you think is right and good. They include it because doing so will mean power. Perhaps this is cynicism, or perhaps it is realistic. 

The history of political parties—not just in this country—is one of changing positions, including central ones. How do you go from the Lost Cause politics of Woodrow Wilson through the Dixiecrats to the embracing of civil rights legislation  among the Democrats? How do you go from the drive to preserve the union through federal power and unease about slavery to Reconstruction to the adoption of the “southern strategy” and the (selective) states’ rights and libertarian positions of the Republicans?  How do parties flip on foreign intervention or trade? How do you get the fluid positions on same-sex marriage or abortion or guns that then calcify into partisan orthodoxies? You might claim that each party has come to realize through time what position its core commitments logically entailed. While there might be a few core beliefs that stand relatively firm, overall that’s too optimistic. 

Party leaders are interested in building coalitions that give them power. This means adopting positions that will allow them to raise money and win elections. They adopt positions that allow them to build coalitions and some of those positions mean shedding other parts of their former coalitions. Partisan politicians mostly follow the trends they predict from the zeitgeist; rarely do they lead. Of course, there are crusading political reformers, but they are usually outside of the mainstream of their parties, if they identify themselves with one at all. Leading is left to others: activists, community leaders, the occasional thinker. The logic of a political party is Darwinian, as read by Nietzsche. That is, the party wants to survive and have power. There’s nothing more.

This is why there is something wrong with the idea of being loyal to a party. Since we’re stuck with parties, we should view them in terms of their utility. Because a party wants to survive, we can try to push it to adopt the positions that we take to be the morally and politically correct ones and, when one will work for more of those than the other, it makes sense to support that party. When it no longer does, it makes sense not to support it. 

Our attitude to a political party ought to mirror a party’s attitude towards its members. That is, we ought to be mercenary: use it when it serves our interest and can be bent to our ends, but abandon when it no longer does. We absolutely ought not to feel a sense of loyalty to it, nor—and this is a more serious problem, perhaps—should we derive our belief about ends from a party. I ought never to believe anything “as a Republican” or “as a Democrat” or “as a Green” or “as a Democratic Socialist”, though it makes a good deal of sense to believe things as a republican or democrat or socialist or communalist or someone who cares about the environment. The latter are identities from which it makes sense to draw substantive conclusions precisely because they are tied up with substantive commitments about the good and ends, but the former are little more than team names. It’s sad when people feel loyal to a team that would gladly abandon their city for more lucrative pastures somewhere else and uses that fact to squeeze concessions from taxpayers. It’s say when people feel loyal to a party that would abandon their interests if it meant more votes. 

Loyalty should be saved for things that have inherent, rather than merely instrumental value: friendships, loving relationships, the communities that nourish us. 

Story Time

This week, I participated in a story-telling event at USD. The theme was "Bang," but that was to be interpreted however one wanted in the context of some personal story. Here is the prepared text—I diverged and embellished and cried—of that story:

When Professor Bowman asked if I’d be willing to tell a story, I said, “yes,” because that’s what I tend to do. I agreed to do Mortar Board’s Last Lecture one year without knowing what it was and went to the end of the year celebration for Beta without realizing that I was being honored. But, I didn’t know what story to tell. I have a lot of stories that I tell students in class, but those tend to be very short and everyone has heard them multiple times.

I finally figured out what to tell you today when I was reading The Shining at the end of the summer. I’m not going to tell you a horror story, but my story will be about a little boy and family and it partly takes place in Colorado.

And, I’m not sure the story is going to have the kind of bang the theme calls for,  but it does deal with something that has hit me with a bang several times throughout my life.

When I was a very small boy, my parents broke up. They never really should have married each other and everyone around them knew that before they got married. But they did and if they hadn’t, there’d be no me. So it’s a good thing, I suppose, that they did. They were separated when I was still a baby and divorced when I was two. Not long after they divorced, my dad moved out of our small hometown to the “big city” of Fort Wayne, Indiana, about a half hour away. I would visit him every other weekend and sometimes he would be in town seeing his family. But, already there was a good deal of distance between us.

After a few years, he remarried and he and his new wife moved to Denver. The emotional distance was enhanced with physical distance.

The summer after kindergarten, he arranged for me to come and visit for two weeks. I should say that I have never liked being away from home. I still find even the best vacations difficult because I’m not in my own bed around my own things following my routine. Still, this was a big adventure for a little kid.

So, my mom and grandparents drove me to the airport in Fort Wayne. I flew for the first time. This was when flying was a lot more pleasant than it is now: big seats, full meals with real plates and flatware, the whole deal. And, if you were a kid flying alone, you got wings and to visit the cockpit and the cabin crew checked up on you all of the time, like a VIP, all of it very exciting for six-year-old towheaded me. I remember being excited and I remember the man who sat next to me. He talked to me through the whole flight and entertained me. I remember him teaching me how to write my name in Korean, even though it must have been exasperating being seated next to a little kid.

Anyway, I got to Denver and my dad picked me up at the old Stapleton airport. I don’t remember much about the time I was there on that visit. I remember more about later trips, including one where the trip out was by Greyhound, but I do remember going to work with him a few times on that first trip. He was a schoolteacher, but he hadn’t found a teaching job yet, so, at the time, he was driving a bookmobile. I can still picture the old school bus that had been painted sky blue with a scene of clouds and balloons and filled with shelves of children’s books.

What I can remember vividly is how miserable I was. I didn’t like what I was fed; they made me eat breakfast and it always involved both eggs and syrup either on pancakes or waffles or French toast, none of which I was used to eating. I’m still not much for a daily breakfast. And, my dad’s wife really like to attempt Chinese food. Nothing was like I was used to and I wasn’t at home.

I cried. A lot. I cried when I was trying to fall asleep at night, but I also cried a lot during the day. I was homesick and there was nothing my dad could do about it. We aren’t a particularly demonstrative or talkative people; I don’t think he knew what to do or what to say. And, though we’re obviously related, we just weren’t family to each other.

He had tried as well as he could, but it didn’t work. And, he was mad.

We’ve gone through long periods, once almost two decades, where we haven’t talked to each other at all. But now we’re perfectly happy to be in the same room almost talking.

So, he called my mom. That wasn’t easy. She had gone to the lake cabin of a coworker, a pretty big vacation for her. In the era before cellphones or even answering machines, it took some effort to get ahold of her and to arrange my early return. Instead of a two-week stay, I was on my way back home after just a week.

I remember getting home, after the flight and the drive from the airport, and getting back to my neighborhood. I grew up on a street that only ran two blocks between the two main streets in my small hometown. It was a quiet street and I was an only child of a single mother when that was still an uncommon thing, so I spent most of my free time going from house to house and hanging out with adults. Next door to us lived the Tacketts, Uncle Ben and Aunt Ginger, and their two daughters who used to watch me when mom was at work. Next to them were the Dolbys, who I called the Doblys. She taught me to read when I was three. There were other Dolbys across the street, his brother. Mrs. Johnson whose husband had gone to prison forty years before—a thing no one forgets in a small town—was directly across the street.  She used to give me the toys out of cereal she bought for her visiting grandchildren. Then there was the house on the corner with old Mr Ray. He had had a stroke and I would walk over on summer nights and sit with him on their front porch and talk to him. He never talked back, but he’d smile at me with his eyes. And, I haven’t thought about him in four decades.

Anyway, the first thing I asked for when I got back home was to see Uncle Ben. I had gotten a new bicycle earlier in the year, for my birthday I think. It was a sweet red Schwinn, with a sparkled paint job. We’d gotten it for free because the owner of the bike shop had a habit of not cashing checks. But, the bike still had its training wheels. 

I wanted Uncle Ben because I wanted him to take them off. I wanted to really ride my bike. And, he did. And, I did. I don’t know whether I wanted to show that I was growing up even though I hadn’t been grown up enough to go away for two weeks, but it was super important to me to show that I could ride that bike.

It wasn’t just my mom that I had missed, though I’m sure my dad thought I was a mama’s boy. She lives in San Diego now, so maybe. It wasn’t just my house or my things or my routine. It was my family that was missing. And, that family wasn’t just people I was related to. It was the people around me who mattered and to whom I mattered. They were the people I belonged to. They were home.

Through most of my life, I’ve felt like I didn’t quite belong in the way I was supposed to, but there’ve always been people around who felt like, and were, family. At least sometimes, to bastardize Madonna, family’s where you find it.