Last month, Liberties assembled a number of specialists on regions or communities plagued by despotic leaders for a conversation on Zoom. Respondents were asked to respond to the question “How do despots in your respective countries or in the regions and eras you study use loyalty as a tool to enforce obedience?” What follows is a fascinating conversation enriched by personal experiences in places in which freedom is being wrung from ordinary life, and by lucidly articulated understandings about the mechanics of despotism.
Contributors:
Ibrahim Al-Assil is a political scientist and Middle East scholar. His work spans geopolitics, state and nation building, and regional security. He is a Professorial Lecturer at George Washington University and a Senior Fellow at the Middle East Institute. His background includes leadership roles in civil society groups and participation in conflict resolution initiatives.
Arash Azizi is a writer and an historian with special interest in Iranian contemporary politics and history. His books include What Iranians Want: Women, Life, Freedom and The Shadow Commander: Soleimani, the U.S. and Iran’s Global Ambition.
Qutaiba Idlbi is a senior fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Middle East Programs where he leads the Council’s work on Syria. His experience includes researching political imprisonment in Syria as the Syria expert at the International Center for Transitional Justice, analyzing economic sanctions and forced displacement as a nonresident scholar at the Middle East Institute, and profiling refugee entrepreneurship in Turkey and Jordan with Building Markets.
Enrique Krauze is an editor, essayist, and writer in Mexico City. His published works include Biografía del poder; Spinoza en el Parque México; Mexico: Biography of Power; and Ideas and Power in Latin America.
Ruth Margalit is a contributing writer for New York Times Magazine. Her reporting and essays also regularly appear in The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books. She lives in Tel Aviv.
Jessica Pishko is an independent journalist and lawyer who has been writing about the criminal legal system for a decade with a focus on the political power of law enforcement officials. Her book The Highest Law in the Land, about the roots and rise of the far right sheriff movement in America, was published last year.
Khalil Sayegh is the president and co-founder of Agora Initiative and a political analyst focused on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Khalil lived most of his life in Gaza and the West Bank, where he was involved in political activism and humanitarian initiatives.
Enrique Krauze: For most of the last decade, Mexico has had a one party system led by Andrés Manuel López Obrador. Americans know something about Manuel López Obrador because they now have Donald Trump. The two were either exact copies or perhaps mirror images. All his six years in office were devoted to persecuting criticism and opposition. Every morning he had a three hour conference in which only loyal journalists were invited and at each meeting he attacked critics. Being attacked meant real danger for many of us critics. Some were assassinated. Mexico is a place where it’s very dangerous to be a journalist. And as for myself, I had the honor of being the number one — Manuel López Obrador attacked me personally 774 times. Despite that, I did not leave the country. I continued to criticize him . . . and I bought myself an armored car. He’s now out of office, but he’s sticking to power.
Ibrahim Al-Assil: Growing up in Syria, every morning at school we were required to chant: “Unity, freedom, and socialism.” The ideal of Arab unity was always invoked to enforce loyalty to the leader. Anyone who questioned the leader’s political agenda was labeled as a traitor, a turncoat to imperialism, or to Zionism, or to Islamism and Muslim Brotherhood. That was the primary tool used to force conformity. After the uprising, that same dynamic persisted but with new ideals. If you weren’t chanting with the other kids in the morning, you were a traitor. Later, if you didn’t support the armed groups, you are likely to be called a traitor. And now, with the regime gone, new loyalties are again being demanded. The slogans change, but the pressure to conform remains.
In this context, I’m reminded of the work of Abd al-Rahman al-Kawakibi, the late ninteenth–century Syrian liberal intellectual and political theorist, who wrote intensively about tyranny, not only as the product of a ruler, but as a system embedded in society. Al-Kawakibi observed that under tyranny, a society may appear ordered, marked by respect of the young to the old and citizen to state. But what looks like respect is actually fear. And that fear is not imposed solely from above; it is reproduced across social relations, internalized by communities, and enforced horizontally as much as vertically. Tyranny becomes a way of life.
Ruth Margalit: The issue of loyalty is intrinsically linked with the notion of gratitude. We saw that very clearly with Zelensky at the White House, this idea that allies should not only be loyal, but that they should be grateful and that they must express their gratitude. It’s rather like a feudal system: the vassal is forever coerced to show his gratitude or else he is accused of being unappreciative. In Israel this dynamic is especially evident in the relationship between the government and Israeli Palestinians who represent twenty-one percent of the population. Their loyalty is constantly challenged and tested by the government, by Netanyahu. The status quo, the baseline assumption, is that Palestinian citizens are suspect, guilty until proven innocent. And not only are they suspected of disloyalty but in order to prove their loyalty they have to constantly be demonstrating their gratitude for living under Israeli law and not being subjected to, you know, the corruption of the P.A. or the conditions in Jordan, Syria, or Lebanon.
And there is a constant linkage between loyalty and gratitude when it comes to Netanyahu personally. But it’s a sort of subtle, and often self enforcing mandate. As a journalist it’s not as if I can’t be critical of the government; they won’t come after me. But there is a slow encroachment. So the government will pull advertising away from outlets that are critical of it, such as Haaretz newspaper and others.
Netanyahu expects total fealty from two groups of people: first, his ministers. Netanyahu would rather have ministers who are incompetent than ministers who are independent in their thinking. Likud is made up of members whose primary and really single credential is loyalty to Netanyahu, and to his family. It’s this kind of court system.
And the other group that must express total loyalty to him is friendly media outlets. It doesn’t have to be all the media outlets. There are media outlets that are critical, though again, they’re being slowly squeezed. But channel 14, for example, which is very pro Netanyahu, is not even right wing. It’s just completely loyal to him. And so it can be against a ceasefire–and-hostage deal one day and then as soon as Donald Trump convinces Netanyahu that the deal is necessary suddenly the channel’s main anchor will be wearing a hostage pin and promoting a deal.
Qutaiba Idlbi: Like Ibrahim, I’m drawing from my own experience in Syria. I think there is this small loyalty box that the authorities create and that they demand loyalists fit themselves into in order to stay in the government’s good graces. And what happens is those loyal to the government not only try to stay in that box but they also will monitor one another and the rest of society and distance themselves from those who are outside of the box. So if you are outside the box you are pressured by the authorities and also by your fellow citizens who isolate you out of fear for their own safety. And Syria under the Ba’ath and under the Assad’s were a great example of society leveraging pressure on behalf of the government. People who wanted to remain loyal to Assad for example would push out those who were outside the loyalty box.
And the government used this pressure directly while cracking down on free speech and on opposition movements. Consider the way government officials would interrogate activists or political figures: if the detainee was a little bit on the right, the interrogators would ask you, When did you join the Muslim Brotherhood? They didn’t ask whether the person was a member of the Muslim Brotherhood or not. Instead they placed them inside the outbox at the get go. And if the detainee was left or center left, they would ask, When did you join the communist party? And in these instances we’re talking about interrogations that were happening in dark basements and government buildings, but what’s fascinating is that because of the state sponsored media these concepts of right wing and left wing outgroups transferred to the public vernacular. By watching and reading state-approved media the public learned the same terms. Out in the world if someone is considered on the right normal people would say, He must be Brotherhood, or if someone was on the left, He must be a Communist, so the government created these boxes to make it easier for the vast majority of society to shun those people who were dangerous for the government.
And now of course the question of loyalty to Assad, since Assad’s fall, is seen in a totally different light. Now everyone wants to know where to draw the line between who was pro-Assad and so a war criminal, versus who was just sort of the ordinary, run of the mill loyalist who expressed loyalty but didn’t necessarily commit crimes. Where do we draw the lines? And people are asking this question very seriously because there has been this very positive sense that everyone is willing to move forward. In Syria, after fourteen years of direct civil war, I think we all expected rivers of blood in the street now that people have the opportunity to take their revenge on. But it’s fascinating that people were on automatic discipline. And I would say that the mechanism for that disciple is a sense of national loyalty to Syria. After Assad fled Syria, and the regime fell suddenly a loyalty to Syria itself, beyond the religious or local, or ethnic sub-identities, suddenly lit up. It was suddenly reestablished.
Khalil Sayegh: My first thought on this subject is that loyalty is a good thing in itself, right? It’s good to be loyal to your nation, it’s good to be loyal to your country, and it’s good to be loyal to your society. Now, what about within the Palestinian context specifically? For Palestinians the question of loyalty presents itself literally on a daily basis, yet you don’t really think of it in a systematic or abstract way because it’s just a practical thing you have to navigate. Now, because of the Israeli occupation, Palestinian society in general is in a constant state of self-protection. Loyalty to Palestinian society and to the Palestinian nation is a question of personal and communal safety. I mean this in a practical sense, because the Israelis are trying to infiltrate the society. Israelis are trying to find those who could be disloyal to the nation and to leverage that disloyalty for Israeli gain. If you’ve seen the Israeli series, Fauda you can see very clearly what I’m talking about — Israelis are always trying to hide among Palestinians and find those who are disloyal in order to infiltrate the nation. So say you are a Palestinian in a refugee camp, you are always paranoid about this possibility. You are always asking yourself who is the person who’s working for the Israelis here and who might actually be Israeli. We call those people mostarivim, Israelis would pretend to be Arabs to infiltrate. And Palestinians try to guard against these infiltrators. Sometimes they kill people suspected of being spies and sometimes they kill the wrong people by mistake. This could happen in a refugee camp.
Now, let’s consider the two regimes we have — it’s actually ironic that we are one of the few peoples in the world which does not have a country yet but we do have two regimes! I mean aside from the Israeli regime, the third sort of overarching, occupying power, but then we have two regimes: Fatah Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza. And when it comes to the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, it’s less authoritarian than Hamas. It’s less repressive than, let’s say, Al Ba’ath or Syria Assad, but it’s still an authoritarian regime. And Mahmoud Abbas, Abu Ma’azin, uses loyalty always to keep people in order within Fatah itself.
In public, we don’t really have the same manifestation of authoritarianism that they had in say Assad’s Syria. In the West Bank there aren’t pictures of Abbas everywhere and we don’t have to pledge loyalty to him and we don’t have to always prove that we are part of the Fatah party. But if you are within the government, then you really have to do that. Gaza is totally different. There is Hamas, and Hamas controls all the apparatus of states.
It’s essential to understand that Hamas has created this notion of being loyal to the concept of resistance. Not loyalty to Palestine, not loyalty to the Palestinian struggle or even the Palestinian revolution as Fatah would describe it. No, in Gaza you have to be loyal to something called the resistance. Now, it was clever of Hamas to call it resistance because when you get down to the details of what resistance actually means, what they really means is just Hamas. It’s not really about any resistance at all. And there is constant pressure to prove loyalty to Hamas. And in Gaza it is similar to Syria, we have horrific methods of torture that Hamas adopted from Arab states and from the Iranian regime as well. There the first question they ask you is, Are you spying for Israel? And again that is clever because they have managed to instill the notion in society that the very real paranoia about Israeli infiltration is tied to the idea of disloyalty to Hamas. That specific question so effectively destroys the detainee’s standing within society, because if someone is known to be cooperating with Israel they are isolated from everyone, even their own father. And that’s a very painful thing. And Hamas uses this all the time. If you criticize them, even if you’re patriotic, you’re branded as unfaithful to Palestine, and then right away you are spying for Israel.
The second thing that they started using in the last few years, obviously before October 7, 2023, is they will accuse people of spying for the Palestinian Authority. Literally, that’s actually a legal can see that both of these terms are no longer confined to the borders of Gaza, these accusations and these repressions and the questioning of loyalty have spread. Hamas PR has managed to infiltrate the pro-Palestine movement globally. Now people abroad will question anyone who questions Hamas, and will accuse them of being disloyal.
So, as I say, there are two authoritarian regimes — the PA and Hamas — which use the idea of loyalty to pressure citizens and to quash dissent but it is crucial to our context to understand that the reason that strategy is so effective is because of the omnipresence of the Israeli occupation and the Israeli regime which actually does seek out and exploit Palestinian disloyalty.
Arash Azizi: I’d like to talk about the concepts of authoritarian obedience and irresponsibility, and specifically how those concepts are treated in the extremely specific case of Iran by Ayatollah Khamenei. But I do want to start by saying that, as Khalil said, you know, loyalty can of course be positive. And not just loyalty to an idea, but in fact, loyalty to a political leader. It can be a good thing. But that’s quite different from believing it is a good thing when a head of state demands loyalty from the population.
So I was born in Iran in 1988, and since 1989, when I was one year old, one man has called all the shots in Iran. His position is usually translated into English as supreme leader but that’s sort of a made-up term that the Western media came up with. The real constitutional term for it is sort of the leader, but the sort of the bigger term, which is also in the constitution and based on unprecedented readings of Islamic theory by Ayatollah Khomeini, the founder of the Islamic Republic, is what is called the Wali Faqih, which means the guardian jurist. So the idea is that he’s a jurist.
Now usually Faqih is a boring job. It’s a lawyer, basically, it’s a sort of a jurist, right? And the guardian has this idea that the jurist sometimes comes to play the role of a guardian. Traditionally in Islamic history, guardians were appointed to protect the vulnerable such as orphans for example who would be given a legal guardian, as the west calls it. So that was traditionally the case. Ayatollah Khomeini did this really massive reworking of this theory and cast himself as a guardian for an entire nation. And, you know, as many have pointed out, Khomeini’s main influence for this idea didn’t come from Islamic history but from a book that all of you would know, I imagine all of you have read, and that’s Plato’s Republic. He invoked the idea of a philosopher king. And this syncretic application has had two iterations: Khomeini and Khamenei. So the idea is that a “Supreme Leader” is someone who is considered to be this wise man who was elected technically by a group of his peers, an assembly of experts, essentially a group of old clerics who decide on him. Now if the Assembly of Experts actually did its job it still wouldn’t be a real democratic process, but at least it would have been more democratic. But over the years the Supreme Leader made sure that the Assembly of Experts looked the way he wanted it to. He made sure no one appointed to that role would question him. And what he’s done, which Khomeini didn’t do, is that he’s bureaucratized and militarized the institution so that it enforces loyalty to him. So he secures loyalty not through personal charisma but through thousands paid, armed thugs whom he has stationed everywhere. There’s a Supreme Leader representative in every institution in Iran. And that is the official title of the position, every institution has a person who works there whose function is “Supreme Leader Representative.” Most of them are men, and all are directly picked by Khamenei. Their job is to make sure everybody in their institution is loyal to the system.
Ayatollah Khamenei doesn’t have 100 percent power, but he has pretty close to total power. If he decides that Iran is producing too many lemons and not enough oranges, he makes sure to intervene and correct the difference. And this is a man who has not given a press interview pretty much since 1989, and he doesn’t accept any responsibility for his actions in fact if you listen to Ayatollah Khamenei you wouldn’t think this is the man who makes all the decisions in Iran you would think he’s an opposition leader or he’s like a dissident figure. It is essential to his persona that he is above politics. And this is important because Iran has a very active politics. There are different political factions. They’re always going at each other. There are reformists, centrists, conservatives, and they really do fight, etcetera. And then there is just the Supreme Leader who sits above all of this back and forth. He uses this position he has to not be a guy you can criticize on anything.
The most obvious manifestation of this was around the time of Iranian nuclear negotiations. All of Iran was intensely debating this question: should we have a deal with the United States or not? Different political factions said different things, there were public arguments and at every step no matter who was saying what everybody understood that nothing at all would happen without approval from Khamenei. In June of 2015 the historic Iran deal between Iran and the United States and five other countries was finally reached. The way we found out the deal was agreed to was when a leading Iranian negotiator posted simply a picture of Khamenei’s hand on his Instagram. Right, we all knew that that’s what had to happen. And yet, when he speaks about it, he says, well, some people went and signed the deal. I was never sure if it was a good thing or not. He famously said during those days, he said, I’m not a diplomat, I’m a revolutionary. Right? So my point is basically there is something to this idea of loyalty, that you need to be loyal and obedient to this leader who will also not accept any responsibility, or any accountability.
But if there is going to be loyalty and if loyalty is going to be healthy there needs to be accountability. The most obvious form of accountability is elections, but you also generally need to have, even if you’re winning elections, you need to have accountability to your citizens and some mechanisms for ensuring that. And that’s what Khamenei has been able to evade by his philosopher king position.
Jessica Pishko: How do we understand loyalty in the American context? The way that Trump runs his administration, the way he runs his gang, the kind of fealty that he demands from his cronies, is reminiscent of two non-government institutions: law enforcement and the mafia. Both of these institutions are supercharged by a deep sense of brotherhood, and of loyalty to a raced masculinity. And both are also bound by a sense of being persecuted by others. For the mafia this comes from the persecution against Italian Americans. And law enforcement officers, for their part, particularly after the summer of 2020, are bound by the feeling that they’re treated unfairly. And this sense of persecution engenders intense loyalty to each other.
In both institutions, and of course in the Trump administration, loyalty incurs financial remuneration. When you join the Brotherhood, you are able to recruit your own. But if you recruit your own, you must also win, you must prove that you can be useful to the brotherhood. So if you are accepted into the Brotherhood, you have a responsibility to prove you are, as Tony Soprano used to put it, a good earner. Otherwise you are kicked out or threatened with violence. Think of Trump’s address to Congress when he talked about taking Greenland and then pointed to Marco Rubio and said, it’s your job. He was implying that if this fails it’d be Rubio’s fault. And think of Marco Rubio face at that moment. He looked exactly as you’d expect a person to look if the President of the United States was threatening him. And we all saw in that moment that it wasn’t enough for Marco Rubio to be loyal. Which he is, right, he’s proven that by now. But that’s not enough. He has to be given an impossible task and be humiliated in front of the entire country and the world by being threatened for failure to complete which is of course inevitable. It is not enough to say the right thing or where the right pin — you also have to bring the leader the spoils.
Celeste Marcus: As all of us know from our studies or our experience, being in the opposition requires loyalty to the opposition. Without a sense of loyalty the opposition becomes fractured and ineffective. I wonder how that pressure has manifested either in your studies of the opposition or in your own experiences. Do you feel pressure to be loyal to your group? Are you punished for disloyalty? How do dissidents navigate that pressure?
Enrique Krauze:. Loyalty is one beautiful word, of course, a beautiful concept, but loyalty to whom? An intellectual and a writer must have loyalty first and foremost to the truth. This is particularly difficult now in Mexico because if you are a critic of the government today, you are labeled as a traitor of your homeland. The situation is this. Donald Trump has said that the Mexican government is in a very close organic alliance with organized crime, which is sadly true. So next Sunday, Claudia Sheinbaum’s government will have 500,000 people in the center of Mexico gathering to defend the homeland against the threats of Donald Trump. I would reject any kind of military intervention of Trump in Mexico, of course, even against the drug cartel. But on the other hand, Donald Trump is saying something which is true. Mexico is the government, the regime of López Obrador has very close bonds with organized crime.
So where does that leave me? To whom do I owe my loyalty? Once again: to the truth. Not to the opposition. I am a writer and I must write was is truth. Maybe writing doesn’t move mountains but it is important. We have to believe in objectivity, in truth, and in reason. That’s my main loyalty E. M. Forster once said, “If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.” Well, we don’t have to betray our country. We don’t have to betray our friend. We just have to not betray ourselves and our commitment to honest seeking the truth.
Ibrahim Al-Assil: Individuals come together to form groups in order to achieve something they could not accomplish separately. But once the group is formed, it begins to take on a life of its own. It becomes something external to the individuals, an entity with its own interests, its own desires, its own will to survive. And often, those interests come to contradict the very individuals who created the group in the first place.
This always happens regardless of who the individuals are or what the group stands for. It is a recurring danger: the individual subjugates themselves to the group. And that danger remains, no matter how virtuous or essential the group’s mission may be. The sacredness of the individual must always be protected.
Ruth Margalit: What I’ve noticed, and this is specific to Israel, is that since October 7 and the war in Gaza, outlets that are independent or that sort of aim to be independent and that have been very critical of the government, and of Netanyahu, these outlets have changed since the war. Now there is a pervasive self-policing that is going on, a kind of self-censorship. And this is motivated by a desire to be loyal to the army, the state, “our side,” however vaguely defined. And so it’s not even a matter of the government coming in and saying, you can’t do this, you can’t do that. Although they do do that, they banned Al Jazeera and other examples. But mainstream outlets rarely talk about the Gazan side of the war. They show hardly anything from Gaza. Anytime the question of humanitarian aid comes into play, it’s seen through the lens of Israel, the hostages, the Israeli army. Even questions about how the army is conducting itself. Military reporters used to be very incisive about the army’s internal conduct. Now they are constantly saying things like, Our enemies are listening or, We know that Hamas leaders are paying attention and so we won’t talk about the weak points. We won’t talk about the failures. They won’t necessarily use the term boost morale, but that’s sort of the assumption: that we don’t want to dampen the Israeli spirit. We don’t want the enemy to be listening and to benefit from what they are hearing if they are. And so even reporters whose job it is to report critically about these very institutions, there is an inner policing going on. And that is extremely problematic. It’s even more problematic to my view than the government coming in and saying, You have to do this and that, because here it’s vaguely defined and it sets very tricky precedents about the future of journalism, the future of independence. Even once this terrible war is over these precedents will remain.
Qutaiba Idlibi: I want to move kind of like from loyalty on the authority level to loyalty on an individual level. One of the good experiences of the last fourteen years in Syria is that it forced Syrians to wrestle with the question, “Who are we loyal to?” The breakdown of national identity opened our eyes to the larger bond that we have. And that breakdown allowed us all to disintegrate the sub identities and the blocks within Syrian society to some extent and to embrace a more inclusive national loyalty that transcends even geographic borders. We have a loyalty to the people who survived the regime in Syria but then there are people fled Syria and went into Europe following ISIS attacks in 2015 and 2016 and then there was a sense of loyalty to a new community that was rapidly formed and then sustained. And even though I wasn’t in Europe, I felt that loyalty and it wasn’t just the sort that binds victims against a common enemy, it was also a loyalty which was the product of commitment to specific principles. Are we welcoming to those who are escaping prosecution? Are we all unified by our ideals? Are we all unified about the values we want to see implemented in the world, whether we are in Washington, in Damascus, in Gaza, or other places.
And I hope that now that we have gained Syria back we won’t lose this type of loyalty which was forced on us but which made us richer.
Khalil Sayegh: The Palestinian context is just different than everyone else’s. We have to really think of two things all the time. Because again, we’re not living under one regime. There is the regime that is really oppressive overall, which is the Israeli regime. And then you’ve got your own communal regime, right? Which is the Palestinian Authority or Hamas’ government. And dissidents of the government like me have to always keep in mind that whatever we’re saying about this regime can always be used and twisted by the Israelis to dehumanize our own people. And that’s the challenge. It’s not that they would just take it and say, here’s the truth or whatever. Let’s say you are saying that Hamas does such and such. The Israeli society or Israeli apparatus, including the media, might cite your critic and say, listen, here is a Palestinian confirming that Hamas is doing this everyone in Gaza and so all are fair victims, etc. And that’s always the concern. We’re always paranoid about that. Can I really make this critique without giving the enemy ammunition against my people? How can I do it in a way that is responsible, right? Like how do I say it without endangering my people?
In a sense this remiss me of what Ruth was saying. It’s sort of a mirror image between the Israeli context she described and the Palestinian context. And although there is inequality, and obviously we’re on the weaker side it’s a similar dynamic. Israeli media would think, Okay, the enemy is watching, how will the enemy perceive what we are saying? How could they use it? I think it’s the same for us, because everyone has to censor themselves all the time. How much can I speak, and how much will this negatively or positively effect the enemy. I find myself always having to be really careful when I make my critiques that I am at the same time not aiding the bigger oppressive power when you’re dealing with two oppressive powers, the overarching one and the smaller one. But at the end of the day, I think it goes back to what Ibrahim was talking about, which is you have to value the individual first and foremost. And again, it’s easier said than done because we live in the U.S. here and it’s still a fairly liberal society to a large extent, even on the right, although it’s diminishing. But I think it’s easy to say that individuality demands loyalty while I’m here, but in a society like in the Middle East, other places where liberal ideals and ideas haven’t been really weakened — I mean, there are liberals, but it hasn’t become the overarching ideology or it’s not the ideology that won in the debate — it’s still challenging, but I think the only way through which we can ensure that our loyalty is moral and supportable is to remain loyal first and foremost to truth and to the individual. And I think that’s what we have to do though as I say it’s easier said than done,, given the really dire situation Palestinians are dealing with today.
Arash Azizi: I do believe loyalty is important if you want to do political work. Khalil and Ibrahim have both said not that we have to value the individual. I know what they mean by that. And I agree in a general sense, but I do believe that there is a special suffering and a lot of movements on the left or from liberal movements suffer because of sacrifices that political movements make for the sake of individualism. Political action is collective by nature.
Now we can choose to be intellectuals rather than political activists or politicians and we can prioritize our vision. There are roles in which that’s appropriate. But if you want to get political work done, you’re going to need a deep loyalty to a collective, a loyalty to a piece of land, a loyalty sometimes to a particular leader. If you elect someone, you have to trust them for four years, for five years. And think about what just happened in the last election in the United States. We had two big groups of people attacking Kamala Harris: Trump supporters, and then a huge number of people on the left, who considered it their personal mission to spend the time leading up to the election attacking Kamala Harris. And then they wonder why she didn’t get elected. Or maybe we should forget this past year because of Gaza and because Harris was aiding war crimes and that changes the issue. So let’s forget that. But four years ago it was the same thing. Four years ago people on the left were attacking Biden as a candidate just as much as they were attacking Trump. Political loyalty precisely sometimes means that you have a candidate, you have a process, you have a party. And if you want to get political work done, you commit to it.
Jessica Pishko: I’d like to just say that it can be useful to distinguish between loyalty and solidarity. Loyalty suggests that a person must set aside everything that they think in order to follow someone else’s leadership. But solidarity is perhaps a more useful term, it’s more forgiving. And if the resistance in America could borrow the idea of solidarity perhaps it could facilitate the creation of broader coalitions and greater impact.