In the spring of 1968 I spent my Saturdays knocking on doors in Indiana for Robert Kennedy. I was nineteen. I believed, without much question, that if you were on someone's side, you stayed on their side. That was what loyalty meant. You didn't have to relitigate it every week. You just showed up.
I met him once, about three weeks before he was killed. I remember his handshake more than anything he said, how tired it looked, how he still stopped for me like it mattered. Loyalty, at nineteen, felt simple. You picked your person, your cause, your side, and you stayed.
I don't believe that anymore, not in that uncomplicated way. Fifty-some years of watching people, counseling people, coaching people, has taught me that loyalty without a periodic gut check is how good people end up defending things they'd never have signed up for at the start.
In Reversing the Drift, I write about Marcus, a Black veteran in Detroit who believed deeply in hard work and personal responsibility. He felt betrayed by both parties long before he ever got pulled toward a strongman's promises of self-reliance. His loyalty wasn't to a party. It was to a set of values. But somewhere along the way, the values got mistaken for a team, and the team started asking for things the values never would have.
Psychologists have a name for what happened to Marcus, and honestly, to most of us at some point. It's called social identity theory, first laid out by Henri Tajfel. The basic idea is that we don't just hold beliefs privately, we belong to groups, and a good chunk of our sense of self gets wrapped up in that belonging. That's not a flaw. Humans are wired for it. But it means that when the group asks something of us that our private conscience quietly objects to, changing our mind can feel less like updating a belief and more like walking out on family.
That's worth sitting with. Not as an accusation, but as an honest question: what did loyalty mean to you five years ago? Was it loyalty to a party, a person, a label? Or was it loyalty to something steadier, your own conscience, the people you love, the truth as best you can find it?
Does that definition still hold up? If it doesn't, you're not disloyal. You're paying attention.
That's the whole argument of Reversing the Drift: that you can love the values you started with even while you let go of what got attached to them along the way. Not to a party. Not to a label. To yourself.
If you want to read the first chapter free, it's linked below. If this rings a bell for someone you know, send it their way. No pressure. Just a door left open.
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