Subjects and sovereigns

A covenant between authority and legitimacy binds on the one hand the rights of the sovereign to wield power both against external threat and for internal harmony and the corresponding duties of the subjects to submit their will to defend with courage against those external threats and to accept with modesty and chastity (submit their desire to) the sovereign's prerogatives and exclusive rule, and on the other hand, with the rights of the people both to know the truth and to maintain what is fair and just, and the corresponding duties of the sovereign to harness his power to proclaim as true what is the truth and to proclaim as lies what is false, and to be righteous in administering with an even hand distributive justice (out of his desire) and punitive justice (out of his will). 

Failures of the covenant can take a variety of forms: 

• The sovereign does not exercise his right to defend against external threat; 
• the subjects do not submit their will to do their duty and defend against external threat with courage; 
• the sovereign does not exercise his prerogatives to exclusive power internally; 
• the subjects do not submit their desire to do their duty and respect the exclusive prerogatives of authority. 

These are all acts of dishonor. 

• The people do not demand to know the truth or they revel in the legitimation of falsehood; 
• the authority lies to the people or dissembles about the exact state of affairs with propaganda; 
• the people engage in racial, class or ethnic discord or they administer frontier justice without due process; 
• the rulers favor one party or class over the others or they write or administer different laws for different groups. 

Partisanship moves the political calculus from the positive to the negative, from how well to dispatch duties and responsibilities to how to deal with the complement's failure so to do. The partisan anti-liberalism of the right offsets the revolutionary posture of the left. The right is criticizing the left's popular culture while the left is criticizing the right's elitist leadership. 

These are the two complements of the covenant – subjects and sovereigns. When the left turns honor into a matter of personal conduct in resistance to or rebellion against the general code of honor that over the course of the 20th century had fallen into disrepute, it is criticizing the honor code of the sovereign; when the right highlights the degeneracy of the modernist, secularist public mores, it is criticizing the lack of dignity of the general populace, which is the outcome of a rejection of authority.