The Political is Personal

One of the features of the evolution to political liberalism was the replacement of ties of personal loyalty with ties of loyalty to abstract institutions and principles. Where once men swore personal oaths to lords, kings, and gods, men now swear oaths to flags, laws, and countries. The major exception being Canada, with the UK having an oath to both the Queen and to law and democracy.
The development of sovereign states following the Peace of Westphalia transferred loyalty from people, kings and lords, to the state. The development of ideology, the replacement of loyalty to people with loyalty to ideas, was another feature of liberalism. While political discussion and ideas existed prior to the French Revolution, it was only in the Age of Ideologies that loyalty to all-encompassing ideals become common-place.
At one point, the political was personal, based on ties of blood and fealty. Today non-local politics is impersonal, based on ideology and parties.
Abstract loyalty has become so commonplace, that it is hard to comprehend a political order without it, but is it necessarily good for man?
Personal loyalty gives man a sense of place, to know where he exists in hierarchy, while abstract loyalty is necessarily faceless and depersonalized. A man with personal loyalty always knows whom he serves, a man with abstract loyalty knows what he serves, but who is ever-changing.
Abstract loyalty is necessarily divisive. Once loyalty is placed upon ideology, then minor deviations of ideology lead to schism, hence, practically all ideologies being plagued by near endless infighting. If loyalty to an idea is paramount, there can be minimal toleration of those whose ideas differ, even mildly. On the other hand, personal loyalty requires only that one agrees who decides.
Abstract loyalty is a necessary precondition for liberalism and it may not be possible for liberalism to be undone without replacing abstract loyalty with personal loyalty.
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Interestingly, in contemporary politics, personal loyalty seems to be making a modest comeback in the US in the form of Trump and, to a lesser degree, Bernie Sanders.
Trump is not particularly ideological: his ideology, such as it is, is very loose, pragmatic, and undefined. We call it Trumpism because he cuts across traditional political ideologies so most labels don’t apply particularly well to him. His “conservative” critics make him out to be unprincipled, confusing ideological adherence with principles. He aligned himself against both major political parties, building his political success solely upon his own name and reputation.
Trump has built and continues to build a base of personal loyalty to himself outside the traditional abstract loyalties. He has identified himself with an Americanism set apart from traditional abstract loyalties.
I think encouraging this sort of personal political identification would help encourage restoration. American politics, being liberal politics, has always been heavily abstract with American political loyalty dedicated primarily to the Constitution and, post-bellum, the USG.
To bring about restoration, we need to develop personal loyalty in a restorer, to a king, that trumps loyalty to abstracts such as the Constitution and the USG.

6 comments

  1. Spenglerian Caesarism is essentially the natural result of personal loyalty to individual leaders replacing adherence to abstract principle and distant party in a late stage democracy. When people come to have more faith in the decrees of a popular leader than the rule of law, democracy’s days are numbered.

  2. I don’t think that’s true at all. A personal oath to a man you’ll never meet is not much different from a personal oath to a flag. And besides plenty of people did swear oaths to a flag, or standard. You’re being too liberal with the idea of a “person” vs an “idea”.

    What has indeed changed is the sacredness of the oath. We don’t swear oaths anymore. It used to be that an oath was a covenant of blood the betrayal of which meant the psychological destruction of the betrayer and a social norm that violently condemned oath-breakers. Today we have contracts which may be argued and renegotiated at whim ad naseum.

    It’s not that the politics is personal, it’s that NOTHING is personal. Everything is an abstract idea separate from the individual, who is an atomized pleasure-seeking (or pain-avoiding) entity.

    Bear in mind I think your posting is great. You’re wrong but I’m only commenting because you have so many good points and good ideas.

  3. I think it came up on other blogs already? I can only repeat myself: modern impersonal loyalty is simply fake, it is rhetoric for people who are “not getting the joke”. To be a loyal and hopefully not purged Soviet Communist you would not read Marx on your own and then hold your leaders to account every time they violate those principles. That is a recipe for a bullet. No, you simply parrot whatever Lenin says, then later you parrot whatever Stalin says. That is what you do if you “get the joke”. If you sort of still like to read Marx then basically you can wait until Lenin or Stalin denounces someone as a heretic, then accuse the heretic of violating those principles.

    If modern liberals would have impersonal loyalty, they would see Islam mostly as something like ultraconservative Christianity as far as women and gays are concerned and they would treat them like they treat the Westboro Baptist Church. But for them it is entirely personal as well. Not personal leaders, perhaps not yet, but personally hating rich straight white Christian males plain simply. Personal enemies.

    Nobody ever has anything like impersonal loyalty, but it could be that they generate rhetoric in that direction to mislead the people who are not getting the joke, or claim to have impersonal loyalty just because that is expected from them and that is how they express their personal loyalty or enmity.

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