Stand by your man. This past weekend, one of the best followers of that admonition presided over her daughter’s nuptials — a wedding that was as close to a royal wedding as the United States gets.
When Chelsea Clinton wedded long-time family friend Marc Mezvinsky, Bill and Hillary were the quintessential thrilled parents of the bride. There is an undeniable irony in the fact that what is expected to be the very picture of a happy family is the same one that weathered a most public betrayal.
At the time Hillary’s decision to stand by her Bill was scrutinised, criticised and rationalised. But whether it was love, political calculation or a combination of the two, there must have been a certain satisfaction in surviving and presiding together over the celebration.
No doubt this parental pride was heightened all the more when the now disproved predictions of the Clinton’s marital longevity were contrasted, as they have already been by commentators, with the recent public implosions of the previously impeccable partnerships of fellow Democrats Al Gore and John Edwards.
There was no standing by those men by their wives in light of revelations about the former’s masseuse harassment and the latter’s love child. In Edwards’s case, the initial denial and cover-up of his affair with Rielle Hunter included one of his (married) aides, Andrew Young, claiming the child as his own. This was a short-term arrangement made by Edwards because he expected his cancer-stricken wife, Elizabeth, to die “any day” and wanted to spare her the knowledge of his betrayal.
Young claims to have agreed because he thought Edwards would be president (and no doubt reward him with a plum assignment). Now that’s loyalty to a political master.
As one of the principal commandments in politics, the instruction to stand by your man recognises how the twinned dynamics of patronage and loyalty scaffold every political establishment. They govern and shape the dynamics of power relationships, the payment of debts (political or otherwise) and the allocation of power, rewards and obligations.
But what is this thing called loyalty? In politics, it appears too often as loyalty to a particular person. And there lies the danger. Blind loyalty is not a virtue. Blind loyalty leads to factionalism and the sacrifice of higher policy aims to political score-keeping and slavish devotion to maintaining a pecking order.
Blind loyalty to personalities gave us the ongoing wars between the Thabo Mbeki and Jacob Zuma camps and the ANC Youth League’s leadership struggle. It gave us the paralysis of the Congress of the People. It gave us a former police chief guilty of sticking by his friend, finish and klaar. It gave us the “generally corrupt relationship” (or rather the “mutually beneficial symbiosis”) of Schabir Shaik and Zuma. It gave us yes-men and yes-women too afraid to challenge Aids denialism, arms-deal procurement and corruption when their political masters were involved.
Further afield, the recent failure by the top US commander in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, to stand by his man has prematurely ended a distinguished military career in disgrace and recrimination.
In the business world, BP chief Tony Hayward’s widely reported wish came true and he finally got his life back this week, but not before standing by him simply became too costly a public relations exercise for the beleaguered oil giant.
But then there was the refreshing news that Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan’s wife, Nobuko Kan, released a book last week in which she wrote frankly of her husband’s shortcomings. These include his fashion sense and oratorical skills, and, more bitingly, her musings on his competence to govern. Her robust criticism is captured in the book’s title: What on Earth Will Change in Japan after You Become Prime Minister?
Her husband is reported to have joked that he was afraid to read the book but, tellingly, repeated that he and his wife were equals, that their debate, although often acrimonious, on the issues and policies of the day counted with him. He never doubted her loyalty to him personally or to the political values they shared.
Surely it this type of loyalty that is valuable — loyalty with one’s eyes wide open, rather than loyalty blind to personal foibles, challenge and contradiction.
Perhaps loyalty is valuable only when it is coupled with fidelity to values extraneous to a person or a personality. Loyalty coupled in this way with integrity means that the truly loyal act may well look like betrayal — that dissent and criticism and a shift in views might just demonstrate true loyalty.
As Hannah Arendt put it: “Total loyalty is possible only when fidelity is emptied of all concrete content, from which changes of mind might naturally arise.”
Michelle le Roux is a member of the Johannesburg and New York Bars, and co-author of Precedent & Possibility: The (Ab)use of Law in South Africa