Helen Rittelmeyer has offered an answer to the criticisms of her earlier argument with an interesting post.  The most important part of the post seemed to be this:

The moral here is that some people think that keeping any and all disagreement on the table deepens friendship; I think that’s true for most kinds of disagreement (my friends are the ones I trust to slap me in the face when I need it, for instance), but in cases like my friend’s hypothetical, it cheapens it. Friendship, like loyalty, entails responsibilities, and you need to know what you’re getting into when you start calling yourself a friend. Or a conservative. 

While I might join with James in saying that political alliances are no more like friendships than they are like familial relations, I think that kind of reply would not do justice to Ms. Rittelmeyer’s view.  Let us take the comparison to friendship as the appropriate one for the sake of argument, and consider what that might mean.  The emphasis on loyalty is also very important, but if anything I think Ms. Rittelmeyer does not emphasize the importance of loyalty nearly enough.  That is, she seems to apply it only to one side, as if the voters were vassals who owed service to their lieges but expected–and received–nothing in return.  Loyalty is supposed to be reciprocal, which I think includes an important distinction from the merely contractual arrangement that she has imagined that Conor, Andrew and I endorse.  As I said about party loyalty in a different context:

Something that the defenders of party loyalty seem never to be able to grasp is that loyalty is a mutual obligation.  It is not only something that supporters are supposed to give to their party, but it is something that party leaders owe to the people who put them and keep them in their positions. 

Thinking of this relationship in terms of friendship, wouldn’t we agree that a friend who deceives you, abuses your trust, betrays you, cheats you or in some other way defrauds you for his own advantage is not much of a friend?  I don’t know whether the others would put it this way, but I would.  There is room in a friendship for disagreements and even blunders–there would have to be–but there are limits that friends do not cross.  Forgiveness is possible in friendship, but even among friends it is not infinite.  If I took party leaders as my friends, that would be a mistake, but worse still would be the error of continuing to reward them with my friendship after they had already shown that their purpose in cultivating the relationship was essentially exploitative and self-interested. 

That said, suppose that I continued to offer these politicians my loyalty by supporting them every step of the way no matter what.  If they were in error, would it not be more important to challenge them over their errors in an attempt to help them correct their mistakes?  If you judge that someone to whom you owe loyalty has made a grave error (as Conor has determined concerning the Palin selection), do you not then owe it to him to say so with whatever means you have available to you?  There does seem to be an assumption here that the critic and the dissenter are the ones acting disloyally by speaking out, when there is a powerful case that those who remain silent and enable self-destructive behavior are the ones not fulfilling their obligations.  Even as they are not living up to their responsibilities, the enablers are assuming responsibility for the calamities that befall the people they neglected to warn.