THE DONKEY LEARNS TO LOVE THE WHIP:

There is a disturbingly strong historical analogy to the Republican Party's transformation into a cult of personality: the Communist Party of China under Mao Zedong. At the CPC's Lu Mountain Plenary Meeting in 1958, Marshall Peng Dehuai pointed out that Mao's judgment was flawed, and that he could no longer be trusted as primus inter pares. The only question was whether the other party grandees could move ahead without Mao's charismatic link to the party's gullible base.

But Mao struck first. While party officials like Peng Zhen, Luo Ruiqing, Lu Dingyi, Yang Shangkun, and Deng Xiaoping were purged, Peng and Liu Shaoqi both turned up dead, and the rest of the grandees got with the program.

That program was the total chaos of the Cultural Revolution. Recognizing that those who had benefited from the initial purges would need to be kept insecure and toothless, Mao continued to shake things up. Chen Boda was purged, Lin Biao was eliminated, and Deng - with his reputation for bureaucratic competence - was brought back into the fold, only to be purged again after being threatened with the promotion of Wang Hongwen (backed by the rest of the "Gang of Four" and Kang Sheng) and then Hua Guofeng.

Through all this shuffling, only two personnel qualifications mattered: obsequiousness and powerlessness. If the official in question fulfilled both, he would be praised, honored, and promoted. If he lacked one or the other, he would be taken down a peg, sent to work as a pipefitter, or assassinated (the one exception was Zhou Enlai, whose unfailing sycophancy perhaps made up for the fact that he wasn't entirely powerless).

This process could be sustained because there was always an ample number of party officials who saw the chaos as an opportunity for their own advancement. But while deferentially doing Mao's bidding could yield career advantages, he was old, low on energy, and on his way to meeting Karl Marx in the great beyond. So, the court intrigue continued, with officials falling over each other to "work toward the Chairman," even though nobody but Mao's nephew and closest aide could claim to understand his incoherent grunts and scrawls.

Even after Mao's death, various factions competed to show that they had been truer to his wishes than anyone else. Mao's immediate successor as party chairman, Hua, continued to quote Mao - "If you are in charge, I am at ease" - while extolling the successes of the Cultural Revolution. Wang and the rest of the Gang of Four boasted that they were Mao's true ideological heirs. Even Deng maintained quietly that he had remained in Mao's favor after his second purging, and that it had been Mao, via Wang Dongxing, rather than Deng's military allies, who had protected him from the Gang of Four.

The comparisons to the Republican Party under Trump should now be obvious. The most sycophantic and impotent Republicans are duly selected by Trump for promotion, while those with any modicum of power or self-respect are cut off at the knees.

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