Of all the lessons learned from the Blue Wave Blowout in the US, an essential one has been largely missed: a political party should not subordinate its fortunes to the thrall of one person, i.e., “the duty of the party is to itself.” This is a core axiom of organisational theory.
The original take on this is from the sociologist Robert Michels, Political Parties (1911), in which he coined the phrase “iron law of oligarchy” to describe the organisational features of successful political parties in democracies. Mutatis mutandis, I have conceptually repurposed here.
The irony is that “vanguardist” parties organised by Lenin-inspired Marxists, Maoists and other “hard” Leftists are the ones who fully embraced Michel’s principles. They understood that in order to reproduce as a political organisation, the Party had to supersede the individual ambitions of the people within it, regardless of the ideological purity that they professed. That is why vanguard parties are in part identified by their regular use of purges and other casting-off or marginalizing measures to curb the enthusiasm for individual independence within the ranks.
The Chinese Communist Party under President Xi Jinping is a good example of this, although the irony is that he is violating the iron law of oligarchy and vanguardist principles by attempting to perpetrate his control over the party rather than the other way around. In other words, he is more like Trump or Kim Jung-un because he desires to turn a complex organization like the CCP into a personalist dictatorship with dynastic pretensions. That violates the iron law of oligarchy but the reason Xi and Kim are able to do so with some success is that they are at the top of authoritarian regimes without the system of institutional checks and balances, electoral openness and representation of interests associated with democracies.
That is where Trump’s admiration for dictators failed him. He failed to realise that what works for them cannot work for him, at least in equal measure, because of the institutional apparatus in which he is inserted. He may rail against the “Deep State” and to an extent he may be correct in that it is the ongoing historical institutions known as free and open elections and their accoutrements that, despite MAGA /GOP efforts to gerrymander and engage in voter suppression and intimidation, proved to be their and his undoing. Perhaps they should have read their copies of Michels’ famous tract more closely because the worse thing that they did, contrary to the wisdom embedded in the iron law of oligarchy (which in spite of its name is not a defense of authoritarianism), was and is to not only ride Trump’s coattails during his first term, but then morph into a cult that transcended politics and become a cultural flash point in his second term.
Interestingly, the organisations that have most assiduously followed Michels’ dictums are labour unions and business associations. There are many reasons for this and a dedicated literature that explains them in detail, so I shall not attempt to do so here. What is relevant here is that in the democratic political realm, many parties such as Labour and National have attempted to adopt types of vanguardist approaches to internal party organization, whereas other like the Greens have tried, with very mixed success, to adopt anti-vanguardist principles when it comes to leadership selection and decision-making. As for others such as Winston First and ACT, the personalist nature of leadership is both their immediate strength and eventual Achilles Heel.
The case against subordinating party fortunes to the fortunes of one person applies to all complex organisations, but in politics it is especially true. Even Obama, Kennedy, Roosevelt or Reagan understood that Party came before person. If we add in the corruption, racism, bigotry, cruelty, vanity and assorted other pathologies contained in the persona known as Trump, then the makings of the 2026 Blue Wave disaster began long before this week. It was only a matter of time before he took the GOP down with him.
Two early signs of this was, first, his purge of “moderate” Republicans from Congress during his first term and during his stint out of office. He used forced resignations and primary election targeting to remove from office all those in the GOP he considered disloyal or not supplicant enough. The second indicator was the drop in Fox News viewership in his second term, which in the last fiscal year fell 27 percent compared to the previous year, which itself was well below the historical average for that network. Trump claims that viewership fell because they started criticising him, but the reality is that his claim is the mirror version of the real reason: it was because of their blanket platforming of his lies and stupidity in the face of deteriorating economic and social conditions caused by his actions that even conservative people stopped watching Fox News.
Now even the freak show talking heads on the network are barking at each other about who is to blame. The larger point is that it is clear that Fox News was transmitting from a different reality–the MAGA bubble, as it were–that ran counter to the lived experiences of his most ardent supporters. And because everything was about him, his administration and GOP supination to MAGA excess on a variety of fronts, both viewers and constituents eventually voted with their eyes and feet. Blue Wave Tuesday was the result.
As an aside it should be mentioned that one of the risks of prioritising personalist loyalty over all other traits is that the effect obeys what I will call Pablo’s Law of Personnel Appointments: “The degree of loyalty is inversely proportional to the level of competence of the individual involved.” With a retinue of grossly incompetent yes-people, grifters, opportunists and charlatans surrounding him (including in the media), Trump’s violation of Michels’ axiom and Pablo’s Law have become fatally egregious for the GOP.
Now the knives are coming out within the GOP. The sharks sense blood in the water. The rats are looking to jump ship. The fleas are leaving the dog. The roaches are running for cover. Think of scum like JD Vance and Vivek Ramaswamy, who went all-in with Trump and Trumpist cruelty in the midterm campaigns. Or Ken Paxton and Greg Abbot in Texas, two Trump toadies now looking for honest jobs that they are singularly unsuited to hold. Or closet Queen Mike Johnson, yesterday the Speaker of the House and soon to be out of politics altogether. Or, speaking of closet Queens, Lindsey Graham, who even in death is now being brutally outed as the hypocrite that he was in service of his Trump master and whose sister became a living symbol of political nepotism at its finest (and Pablo’s Law). Then there is the low-hanging impeachment fruit waiting to be picked: Hegseth, JFK Jr., Sean Duffy and others. It is only a matter of time before the floodgates open and the moment of serious reckoning begins.
In the end, for all of the talk about the Iran War, gas prices, candidate quality and reverse coattail effects, along with the old saying about “its the economy, stupid,” the truth of the Michels dictum remains above all other lessons learned.