Partisan Loyalty is Not a Virtue

It just makes you an incredibly cheap date.

I consider myself a very loyal person. I’m loyal to my family. I’m loyal to friends. I’m loyal to those I work for. I’m loyal to people who’ve done me favors when they had no reason to other than their own sense of generosity.

With family and friends, personal loyalty is largely a good thing (though there are exceptions). Occupationally, it can be more of a mixed bag. There’s certainly honor in a strong work ethic and being a committed employee, but relegating yourself to a dead-end job can cost you opportunities that would have better benefited you and those, outside of work, who rely on you; I’ve fallen into that trap a few times myself.

The “favor” game is a tough one too. For example, throughout my course as a writer, there have been notable individuals in the media who’ve gone out of their way to bolster my work. In turn, out of my own accord, I’ve avoided publicly commenting on the self-demeaning and culturally corrosive professional transformations some of them later subjected themselves to in the interest of a larger paycheck. Fortunately for my conscience, that list is pretty small… though the voices of those on it aren’t exactly insignificant.

But the worst loyalty of all, I believe, is partisan loyalty — the kind many voters extend, without conditions, to politicians and political parties. Unwavering loyalty of any type can blind one to otherwise obvious realities, but when it comes to politics, the consequences of that abject blindness can be serious and pervert one’s very identity.

A couple things committed partisans tend to lose track of are that political parties are supposed to be vehicles for achieving goals (not sports-teams we’re obligated to shake pom-poms for), and political officeholders are supposed to serve us (not the other way around). By no means should they be objects of religious faith.

These misconceptions have led to party platforms largely falling by the wayside in deference to traits like personality, fear, grievance, and political correctness… all of which can stoke (and have stoked) cult-like obsessions. Even a number of those who don’t quite buy into the spiritual allure of today’s politics manage to maintain their partisan loyalty through nostalgia and muscle-memory from an earlier time when the parties were held together by the strength of guiding principles. That we still hear the words “conservative” and “liberal” identified with today’s Republican and Democratic parties, when those parties share so little in common with the commonly understood definitions of those terms from even just ten years ago, is compelling evidence of that.

I mean, if the Republican Party were still shaped by the conservatism of a decade back (which began a few decades earlier), I’d still be a Republican.

But it’s not. I left the party in May of 2016, and haven’t for one minute regretted the decision. I’ve been an unaffiliated voter ever since.

Still, as anyone who’s read my work since then could tell you, I’m much more interested in Republican politics than I am Democratic politics. That’s because, while I’ve never found much political common-ground with the Dems, I was a Republican for 16 years. I wasn’t just a reliable Republican voter during that time, but also a GOP donor, precinct captain, and campaign volunteer who served twice as a delegate at Colorado’s State Assembly. I’ve long understood the Republican psyche, and still understand it quite a bit better than those on the left do… which strikes me as ironic being that today’s Right has become, in large part, yesterday’s Left. Even as an outsider looking in, the regular reminders continue to amaze me.

Last Sunday on the morning news-shows, as the party establishments were making their closing arguments for the 2024 election, what I kept hearing from Republican leaders was the same type of rhetoric that disgusted me back in the early 2000s, when it was shouted from the mouths of radical leftists. (I remember the era well, as it was when my political leanings, in the wake of 9/11, began to take shape.)

Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance claimed that high-ranking members of the Trump administration, including decorated military generals and Trump’s own vice president, have spoken out against Trump not because they have legitimate concerns, but because they wanted to send people into war and Trump stopped them. Further adopting Code Pink demagoguery, Vance trashed Trump-critic Dick Cheney (whose past support Trump gladly accepted), saying he is “responsible for the deaths of millions of innocent Arabs and tens of thousands of innocent American troops.” He even defended Trump’s calls to place Liz Cheney in front of “war tribunal,” and said she “would like to lie us into war.”

Just days earlier, Trump himself shouted into a microphone that Cheney is a “Muslim hating warmonger” who “wants to invade practically every Muslim country on the planet.”

Eat your heart out, Cindy Sheehan.

In 2018 Marco Rubio absolutely gushed over the integrity of John Kelly, the four-star general and Gold Star father who served as Trump’s longest running chief of staff. On Sunday, however, Rubio joined Trump and Vance in impugning Kelly’s character, accusing him and General Mark Milley of lying about Trump in remarks they’ve made about the former president’s fitness to serve.

Even Lindsey Graham got in on the action, trashing Kelly, Milley, and James Mattis over their thoughts on their old boss, by attacking their military service in Afghanistan and Iraq. Yes, Lindsey Graham… one of the most outspoken military hawks in the Senate.

Remember when the Republican Party was up in arms over then President Obama assuring then Russian President Dmitry Medvedev that he’d have “more flexibility” to negotiate with the Russian government after the 2012 election? This was the same election, you may recall, in which Obama infamously mocked Mitt Romney over his clear and correct understanding of the threat Russia posed. Obama’s stance later proved to be an embarrassing error, one Republicans have never let the former president forget. Yet, today the party is led by a Putin fanboy who’s reportedly been in secret discussions, outside of government channels, with Russia’s president. And anyone who’s ever listened to Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, talk about Russia and Ukraine knows that Vance has reserved all of his disdain over the conflict for the country that was illegally invaded.

Ronald Reagan is rolling over in his grave.

Of course, foreign policy is just one of many areas in which the Right has become the Left. Trump has been campaigning on Bernie Sanders’ trade policy on steroids (which would amount to the largest middle-class tax hike in half a century), vowing to put a far-left anti-vaxxer entirely in charge of public health matters, and is proposing economic policies that would drive our national debt and consumer prices even higher than those of his very liberal Democratic opponent. And don’t even get me started on his disrespect for the Constitution and the rule of law, and all of the moral and ethical concessions his party has made for him.

So, when I see purported righties refer to the conservatives and Republicans, who won’t pledge their support to Donald Trump and his disciples, as “traitors” and “liberals,” I can only shake my head at the profound display of unself-awareness their partisan loyalty has wrought.

As American citizens, we don’t owe politicians anything. We don’t owe political parties anything. The more people come to recognize that, the better off our nation will be.