Loyalty, its objects and its subjects
Loyalty, broadly defined, is tenacious support of the object of the loyalty, as in the Sen. Carl Schurz’s remark in the Senate on February 29 1872: "My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right."
Notice that the true loyalty in that phrase is loyalty to the right: if the country is in the wrong, Sen. Schurz would not support its actions, but rather work to set it right. This is similar to the loyalty of the two partners in a good marriage: each is aware of the other’s faults and recognizes errors when made by the other, and each tries to help the other set things right and do better.
But in business, politics, the military, and other venues, "loyalty" is often given another meaning by the powerful—and here I readily find many examples: Lyndon Johnson, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush, the Kennedy family, Gen. Douglas MacArthur, certain of the directors of Columbia Pictures International (from the book Indecent Exposure: A true story of Hollywood and Wall Street, which I just finished), and so on. This meaning of loyalty is often explicitly requested—"I want a staff that is loyal to me"—and is often a matter of supporting a person especially when they are wrong. They generally see loyalty as personal loyalty: you support the leader through thick and thin, and she or he will support you.
Of course, in the event (as countless thousands have discovered) loyalty is not really a two-way street: the powerful person has more to lose, and thus is less loyal to the underling than the underling is required to be to the person. Quite a few, for example, have been dumped by politicians seeking survival, regardless of how loyal they’ve been.
Indeed, anyone who demands your loyalty is suspect. Loyalty is properly directed to principles, and only for so long as it can be shown to support the appropriate goals. Being loyal to a person means, in my mind, telling them frankly when you see them as being in the wrong, and offering strategies to set things right. Being told you’re wrong is unpleasant—particularly if you are wrong—and powerful people don’t like to sit still for that. So they usually will say that the person offering the critique is being disloyal and move them out of the inner circle of "truly" loyal supporters. (That is how the powerful drift further and further away from consensual morality, and in particular from the consensual code of ethics.)
