When a Party Learns to Live with Its Leader

Dr. Shehab Al-Makahleh

George Orwell’s 1984 is often read as a warning about dictatorship. It is also a study of something subtler: how institutions and ordinary people can gradually adapt themselves to a political system they once regarded as unacceptable.

The machinery of Orwell’s Oceania does not depend on coercion alone. It requires officials to rewrite records, propagandists to alter language and citizens to reconcile contradictions. “Doublethink” is not simply the acceptance of a lie. It is the capacity to hold two incompatible ideas at once—and to behave as if there were no contradiction.

That is one reason 1984 has become a recurring reference point in arguments about Donald Trump’s second presidency.

But the more interesting question is not whether Mr Trump resembles Orwell’s authoritarian figures. Political analogies are easy; institutional explanations are harder. The more consequential question is what happens when a political party, confronted by a leader who repeatedly challenges its established norms, decides that accommodation is less costly than resistance.

That question matters well beyond America’s Republican Party.

Mr Trump did not invent political exaggeration, partisan loyalty or contempt for institutions. Nor did he single-handedly transform the Republican Party. His political success depended on thousands of decisions made by politicians, donors, activists, media organisations and voters. At crucial moments, many Republican officeholders concluded that opposing him carried greater political risks than supporting him.

That was the real transformation.

A political leader can challenge institutions. A political party determines whether those institutions have defenders inside the governing coalition.

This distinction helps explain the durability of Trumpism.

The politics of accommodation

The Republican Party’s relationship with Mr Trump has never been a simple story of a powerful leader imposing his will on a passive organisation. It has been a process of adaptation.

Republican politicians who once criticised Mr Trump have, in many cases, subsequently supported him. Some changed their positions on particular policies; others changed their language; still others accepted claims they had previously rejected.

The reasons are not mysterious. American politicians operate in an intensely competitive electoral environment. Primary challenges, fundraising, media pressure and the preferences of highly engaged voters all influence the incentives facing members of Congress.

Opposition has a price.

But accommodation has a price, too.

When politicians repeatedly subordinate institutional principles to short-term political incentives, the boundaries of acceptable behaviour can shift. Yesterday’s exception becomes today’s precedent. Yesterday’s embarrassment becomes today’s talking point. Eventually, the extraordinary becomes routine.

This is where Orwell becomes useful—not as a literal description of America, but as a way of thinking about political language and institutional memory.

In 1984, the state does not merely censor inconvenient facts. It controls the process by which facts are remembered.

Modern America is obviously not Oceania. It has competitive elections, independent institutions, a pluralistic media environment and constitutional protections that remain considerably stronger than those of Orwell’s fictional state. But the underlying warning about the manipulation of political reality is still relevant.

The danger is not that Americans will suddenly wake up in Oceania.

It is that political institutions can deteriorate incrementally while each individual compromise appears defensible.

The disappearing line

The most important institutional safeguard in a democracy is not the personal virtue of a leader. It is the willingness of institutions and political coalitions to impose limits on leaders when they exceed them.

That is why the Republican response to Trump matters more than Trump’s personality alone.

During the 2016 presidential campaign, Republican politicians faced repeated opportunities to distance themselves from him. The Access Hollywood recording created another such moment. The two impeachments created others. The aftermath of the 2020 election presented perhaps the most consequential test of all.

Different Republicans made different choices at each stage. Some resisted. Others supported him. Some remained silent.

The aggregate effect mattered.

A leader learns from the constraints imposed upon him. If those constraints are weak, the incentives change.

This is not uniquely an American phenomenon. Political systems across history have demonstrated that democratic erosion rarely begins with the abolition of elections. It begins when political actors discover that defending institutions is more difficult—and less rewarding—than bending them.

The institutional question is therefore not simply: What will Trump do?

It is: What will Republicans permit, defend, resist or normalise?

Loyalty as a political currency

One of the most striking features of contemporary American politics is the importance of political loyalty.

For much of the Republican establishment, loyalty to Trump has increasingly become intertwined with electoral survival. That does not mean every Republican politician agrees with him on every issue. The party remains internally divided on foreign policy, trade, spending, immigration and the proper role of government.

But disagreement has become more politically consequential when it is interpreted as disloyalty.

That is particularly visible when Republican figures who once belonged to Trump’s coalition subsequently challenge him.

The treatment of former allies such as Marjorie Taylor Greene and Thomas Massie illustrates the point, although their positions and political trajectories are very different. The relevant issue is not whether either represents a coherent alternative to Trump. It is that dissent within a political coalition can become more politically costly when loyalty itself becomes a measure of belonging.

This is where the comparison with 1984 becomes tempting.

Orwell’s Emmanuel Goldstein is portrayed as the ultimate internal enemy: a former insider whose betrayal makes him particularly useful as an object of political hatred. Modern American politics is obviously far removed from Orwell’s totalitarian system. Yet political movements frequently discover that former allies who defect can be more threatening than traditional opponents.

An outsider can be dismissed as an enemy.

A dissenter from within challenges the definition of loyalty itself.

The institutional bargain

Trump’s political durability therefore cannot be explained by charisma, media attention or voter anger alone.

There is an institutional bargain at work.

Politicians receive electoral energy, fundraising networks and a highly mobilised political base. In return, they have incentives to defend the leader, or at least avoid confronting him directly.

That bargain can be rational for individual politicians while being damaging for institutions.

This is one of the paradoxes of democratic politics. Collective outcomes can be produced by individually rational decisions.

A senator may decide that opposing the president would jeopardise re-election. A House member may conclude that a primary challenge is more dangerous than alienating moderates. A media organisation may discover that outrage generates more attention than sober analysis. A party activist may decide that defeating the opposing party is more important than policing his own side.

Each decision can be justified independently.

Together, they can transform the political system.

It is not simply a Republican story

None of this means that America’s institutional difficulties belong exclusively to one party.

The Democratic Party has its own internal divisions, ideological pressures and political incentives. American political polarisation is broader than Trump and predates him.

Nor should the history of the Republican Party be reduced to its relationship with one man. The party has governed the United States, produced presidents and legislators of radically different political temperaments, and remains a coalition containing competing traditions.

The more useful question is narrower.

What happens to a political party when loyalty to a leader becomes more important than loyalty to the institutional norms that previously constrained leaders?

That is a question Republicans must answer, but it is also a question for Democrats and for democracies elsewhere.

The lesson of 1984

The deepest lesson of Orwell’s novel is not that one extraordinary leader can destroy a political system.

It is that systems become durable when enough people adapt to them.

The bureaucrat who changes the record. The official who repeats the slogan. The politician who remains silent. The supporter who knows a claim is doubtful but repeats it anyway. None necessarily believes that he is participating in the destruction of a political order.

Each is making an adjustment.

That is precisely what makes institutional decline difficult to recognise while it is happening.

Trump’s political career has repeatedly tested the boundaries of the Republican Party. But the boundaries are not determined by Trump alone. They are determined by the politicians who defend them, the voters who reward them and the institutions that enforce them.

A demagogue operating alone is a political phenomenon.

A demagogue supported by an organised political establishment becomes something more consequential: a governing system.

America’s constitutional order has survived presidents with enormous ambitions before. Its durability has depended not merely on the character of presidents, but on Congress, courts, civil servants, state governments, journalists, voters and political parties being willing to exercise their independent authority.

That is why the most important question raised by the Trump era may not be what Trump believes.

It may be what everyone around him is prepared to accept.

Orwell’s warning was never simply about a tyrant at the top.

It was about the society that makes tyranny administratively possible.

And in a democracy, the first line of defence is rarely a heroic individual. It is the accumulated willingness of institutions—and the people inside them—to say no.