Loyalty is not a primarily valuable character trait or societal good.
It’s understandable that it used to be. Nature wired animals that work together for survival to stick together via loyalty. In a far more simplistic, direct society, more closely facing a daily struggle for survival, a society making simpler decisions about surviving or not, loyalty makes sense. The decisions and functions being carried out within any group are essentially the same as those being carried out in any proximal, rival group, and are effectively all geared towards immediate survival.
So it makes sense, too, that most humans have loyalty hard-wired deep in their psyche as a primary desire or impulse.
But we largely no longer live in societies struggling that closely every day with survival, or dealing with such simplistic, immediate needs. We live in societies dependent on very high level ideals and abstract concepts. We have defined various notions of right and wrong. We look at individuals and say we value each individual, and wish to avoid individual pain and suffering, and avoid curtailing individual freedoms, because that individual’s experience matters. Because that experience matters to us ourselves each individually.
In light of such a world, oriented around individual freedoms, people who appeal to loyalty are up to no good. At the very least they lack confidence that people will stick with them based on the agendas they’re carrying out or who they are as a person. They appeal to forcing people to stick with them, despite whomever they are and whatever they may be up to. Generally, they are using appeals to base human urges, not because what they are doing truly needs done, but likely because what they are doing somewhere violates the higher principles we proclaim we are adhering to and that we proclaim make us “human”.
A people following right ideals and principles of good, and following good principles, don’t need loyalty to force each other together, to punish others for not adhering to the “cause”. People following the good will be working together, even if they disagree on how best to potentially solve a specific problem. It ultimately does not matter if they go different directions, because good people do not backstab, undermine, lie, steal secrets, violate bodily autonomy, or constrain others’ freedoms where they are not doing harm to others or inappropriately constraining others’ freedoms in turn. Good people cannot “defect” to the “other side”. There is no “other” side among good people. Good people let others go where they need to go, and do things as they need to for themselves.
In good causes, among good people, loyalty becomes a side effect, not a primary requirement.
Caveat: Now, of course, in this, as all things, there is always the way to twist it. And the “Devil’s Advocate” will always tear anything valuable down by doing so. Of course this can be twisted, such that a person no longer following the good will just say they are following the good, and what they are doing is for the “good”.
But, as in all things, you must always use your judgment to recognize such people and such purposes. It is always best and most important to develop and utilize your own judgment.
The main point is that someone demanding action or judgment based primarily on loyalty to a person or a selected group of other people, and not necessarily to a set of principles that you are able to critically validate match the broader set of good principles, smells of manipulation and deceit towards a goal based in selfish, one-sided gain or base fear where such gains and base fears are not actually justified or proportionate, and generally, therefore, do not align with a principle of good.