Might seem like "duh" territory, but job-security careers repeatedly need research to verify the obvious. Also, vice versa, moderate candidates can become mute about speaking out about radical party members because they need their support, constituency voters, etc.
Decades ago, I used to draw a distinction between
abiding voter will and
civic leadership; even back then, Republicans consistently failed on civic leadership. Historically, this contributed to growing conservative mistrust toward institutions that they felt used to uphold and enforce conservative values; this, however, is a different discussion.
We can look back almost twenty years at a question of
rightward drift↗, and that was a question of Democrats in 2007 landing to the right of 1970s Republicans on FISA. The overton window, as such, is what it is, but it is not unchanging, is not fixed in place.
How liberal
are Democrats? Y'know, just for instance. Abortion, gay rights, lip service to civil rights. We can chart the difference, in our way: A Jesse Jackson speech in 1982, Clinton/Gore a decade later; in 2014, if the Democratic Party had finally managed an outward appearance matching Jackson's speech from once upon a time, a question remains what we bargained away or outright surrendered in order to get there.
These days, the difference between pandering to voters and actual civic leadership is beyond bothsides, it is a market expectation. To the other, what does that actually mean? Democrats are wary of labor, generally willing Zionists, and now so given to their habitual technocratic specialization that it reads like praxis; think of the difference between being disappointed in Dodd-Frank and where the Democratic Party is, today. It's one thing to ride populism about wealth, but it remains unclear whether Congressional Democrats are even capable of civic leadership. And in these Trump years, people have become very guarded; if liberals are unwilling to step out and take a chance, it is because they think they know how to read the market, and think they know the prospect is grim.
And this question of disloyalty arises, in its way, because it must. Even in '24, we could still find those weird holdouts who just needed to pretend something else was going on: They pretended the GOP under Trump was going to bring jobs, better economic growth, and border security. And they made dumb excuses about why others were unsatisfactory. Imagine voting for Trump because you don't like the sound of a woman's voice, or how a woman smiles.
Here is a basic comparison of disloyalty: Conservatives are angry if you don't follow along with every partisan whim. Liberals are distressed that someone would vote to hurt themselves and their families and community for the sake of the same thing that never comes true no matter how many times they betray themselves to vote for it. Conservatives easily accuse disloyalty; liberals easily wonder why people betray themselves, and of course that very word, "betray", describes disloyalty. But those who pretend the two conditions are the same are wrong.
Because there is this: Who said disloyalty, as such? That is, and just for instance, I've known people who would take that burden on themselves, as if by conscience, and then project in order to transfer the accusation to someone else. In fact, I don't think self-inflicted fears of disloyalty are really so uncommon. Examples
include↗, projections about "everyone who doesn't precisely agree with your talking points", or "the notion that any deviation from some perfected received wisdom you are privy to is somehow bigoted"; by comparison, to
wonder why↗ a would-be partisan ally trades so easily in oppositional thought
triggers bawling complaint↗ to silence the inquiry. Nonetheless, at some point, complaining about an "idee fixe that anyone who tries to engage in conversation with the Right is making excuses for them and/or secretly in cahoots with their agendas" reads like a self-inflicted question of disloyalty.
Similarly, does nobody recall the campus free-speech crisis, ca.
2022↗, including the
New York Times declaring the fundamental right of all Americans to "speak their minds and voice their opinions in public without fear of being shamed or shunned", and publishing an op-ed from a student describing
self-censorship based on projection: "We keep our voices lowered, as if someone might overhear us," she explained. And one time, "the room felt tense", and she "saw people shift in their seats"; apparently her roommate "shuts his bedroom door" when she mentions "a lecture defending Thomas Jefferson from contemporary criticism".
One of the reasons "disloyalty" is in trending, as such, is because "loyalty" has become such a common discussion in particular contexts. But, to some degree, some question of this disloyalty is the latest reiteration the same self-inflicted alienation we can find on small discussion boards or the editorial pages of the
New York Times, or in barfly conspiracism, and from small-town pulpits and even the occasional cardinal.
The expectation that people will appropriately line up and conform is risky, even volatile. And while dissent is often criticized as somehow wrongheaded, particular focus on loyalty is trending according to the fact of its marketplace demand.
As a matter of opposing factions and moderate ranges between, one side depends on loyalty in a context akin to religion; the other is largely caught up in the market trend. But if the right is akin to enforcing code among the cult particularly closely according to particularly narrow assertion of creed, questions of disloyalty left of center are more likely to be marketplace trend noise than, say, the perpetual leftist abstract sentiment that liberals are disloyal to the masses. I mean, seriously, not even DSA would―… Still, though, if the same old from the alienated left happens to coincide with the needs of today's right, then we should always be aware that what connects across the gap between the far left and right of the so-called horseshoe relies on what remains of common appeal between two otherwise disparate ways of thinking, and that pursuit of common empowerment is, by all historical accounts, dangerous.¹
Or maybe the answer is just as simple as saying, "Populism". Per the abstract transpartisan cause of nation and constitution and patriotism, the Republic and its blessings of liberty were what connected liberal and conservative. In populist dualism, what connects left and right is not some lofty notion of statecraft that transcends our differences, but a more personal and even intimate appeal to empowerment. It's almost the same as it ever was, but it feels somehow ossified or concretized, as if we're at the break but never bend part of the story. In a permanent dualism, there is only us and them, and if you're not with us, then you're with them. Oh, right, loyalty in a context akin to religion.
But that's the thing, it doesn't explain the proverbial everybody else; that's why marketplace demand becomes a consideration as defining or affecting influence.
____________________
Notes:
¹ Earlier this year, on the
Horseshoe Theory↗ itself, "It's worth reminding there's a gap between the Left and Right extremes … Bridging that gap relies on what remains of common appeal between two otherwise disparate ways of thinking, and that pursuit of common empowerment is, by all historical accounts, dangerous." Circa 2019, on the
radical center↗, "The answer reminds the horseshoe or circle or whatever the model of the radical center doesn't really exist; the common ground is antisociality".
