In post 18 of 100, I talked about why I think loyalty, as a value, is a misplaced effort to create security in a relationship, because it is something that can only be shown to someone who is in a position of authority over another person: to test or expect loyalty from another person is to exert some amount of power over another person (This is what I talk about in that post and why I don’t think it is bad for people to value loyalty, but that in a society where people have different levels of power over each other, loyalty is not a value that can be fairly expected of all people equally).
Advocates of patriarchal misogyny want loyalty from followers/subjects/subordinates, because truly loyal subjects require nothing in exchange for their faith and dedication to the cause. As long as they feel like they are trying to prove their loyalty to their patriarch, there is almost no act of fealty that they will not do. Eventually, with no return on the investment their loyalty has cost them, some followers will grow bitter and jaded, but to the rest, that will just be read as a sign of disloyalty. This is a very old pattern that infuses hierarchies much older than patriarchal misogyny.
One of the strangest things about the kind of patriarchal misogynistic value system we have seen established under Trumpism, at least to my eyes, is that Loyalty is incredibly heavily sought after and tested, but from the top to the bottom, it doesn’t seem like accountability is valued at all. In many hierarchal social structures, it is very common to teach that anyone with authority over other people has certain obligations to those people that they are expected to carry out and that leaders are expected to be accountable not just for their own mistakes, but the mistakes of their subordinates. Now I am not saying that this valuing of accountability was always put into practice by other hierarchal systems, but it was often preached and reinforced with storytelling and myth-making within that system. This is just 100%, transparently not the case with Trumpism. From the top down, it is very clear that the patriarchal misogynistic hierarchy being established places no value what-so-ever on leaders taking accountability for their own actions or the actions of those beneath them. It is a system firmly rooted in pointing the finger at anyone else when something goes wrong and refusing to ever admit any wrong doing, under any circumstances. You see this kind of thing in the flimsy fascist caricatures of empire presented in media, such as with the Empire in Starwars, or many of the different portrayals of Prince John from the Robinhood myth, but it doesn’t seem like you see it for very long in real world hierarchal regimes…except maybe I am wrong about that. The thing about both of the two fictional examples that leapt to my mind, is that these were relatively short lived examples of empire. Like the starwars empire might feel long, lasting at 24 years, but the Republic it replaced lasted thousands of years before it, and Prince John’s rule barely ever gets off the ground in the Robinhood myth, even if it seems like he later returns to power, uncontested, after King Richard’s death, but that is rarely a well-told part of the myth.
So maybe we do tend to see authoritarian systems abandon the longer-term value of accountability on behalf of their leaders, but most frequently towards a paranoid collapse of those systems? Maybe this is something that can give us a little bit of hope as we see no leaders within Trumpism demonstrate leadership traits that inspire the kind of loyalty that is necessary to keep extremely authoritarian systems running for more than a brief period, often punctuated by violent unrest? It seems like it will be incredibly ineffective to try to build a lasting patriarchal system of power on a model of masculinity that completely refuses to take accountability for anything. I guess I did nothing to answer the question I pose in this blog post’s title, but it does seem like the consequences of it are already starting to undermine the authority of Trumpism.