The practice is the doctrine

Sep 30, 2026 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

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(Kaieteur News) – The call for renewal within the PPP is essentially a call for the removal of the oligarchy which now controls that party and dominates state policy. But to posit, in the same breadth that a political party exists principally to win elections is a different proposition altogether.

A political party is not a racing horse whose purpose is to cross the finishing line first. It is an organisation created to give political expression to ideas about the country: what the State is for, how power should be exercised, what obligations government owes to citizens, what kind of society is desirable and what limits should be placed upon those who govern. Winning is the mechanism by which those ideas acquire power. It is not, by itself, the purpose of the exercise.

If the purpose of a party is to win elections, then a party that wins by promising one thing and then governing by another has technically achieved its electoral purpose. But it has not necessarily achieved a political purpose. A party can win repeatedly and become increasingly hollow. Indeed, longevity can conceal decay. The machinery may continue to function long after the reason for its existence has become obscure.

In the same way, leadership is not merely the ability to win, retain office or command an organisation. It is also the ability to impose limits upon oneself and upon one’s followers. A leader is tested not only when he can obtain power, but when power becomes inconvenient. Can he hear disagreement? Can the organisation remove him? Can he acknowledge error? Can he permit institutions to operate independently of his wishes? Can he subordinate personal survival to the longer life of the party?

These are  among the elementary tests of political leadership. The great danger in political organisations is that success begins to be confused with virtue. A leader wins, therefore his methods are presumed justified. He remains in office, therefore his continued presence is treated as evidence of indispensability. The party survives, therefore the arrangements that sustain it are declared necessary. Eventually the organisation ceases to distinguish between the party and the person who controls it.

This is how political institutions become personal estates without anyone having formally announced that this is what has happened. There is a weakness also in the argument treats ideology as existing as though it exists only when a party has printed its name upon a particular political doctrine. The removal of Marxism-Leninism and socialism from a party constitution does not create an ideological vacuum. It merely removes the old vocabulary.

Politics does not occur in a vacuum. Every government makes choices about property, taxation, public expenditure, regulation, welfare, labour, investment, foreign capital, race, class and the distribution of opportunity. Those choices reveal an ideology whether or not the party has the courage or inclination to call it one. An undeclared ideology is still an ideology. A party may say that it is pragmatic. It may say that it has moved beyond old doctrines. It may say that it is simply concerned with development, growth and the welfare of the people. But these words do not absolve it from explaining what kind of development, whose growth and by what means the welfare is to be achieved. There is an almost childlike faith in the idea that if ideological language disappears, ideology itself has disappeared. It is rather like removing the label from a bottle and announcing that the liquid inside has become neutral.

The more interesting question is therefore not whether a party declares an ideology, but what its conduct reveals about the principles by which it distributes power and opportunity. If wealth accumulates rapidly around political connections, that is political philosophy in practice. If the State increasingly becomes the instrument through which favoured groups obtain access to contracts, land, employment or influence, that too is political philosophy in practice. If political loyalty becomes the route to public resources, one does not need a chapter entitled “Patronage” in the constitution. The practice is the doctrine.

And here the test of leadership becomes severe. A serious political leader must be able to recognise when the methods that produced yesterday’s victory are producing tomorrow’s defeat. More importantly, he must be capable of changing those methods even when they benefit him personally.

That is the test the electoral arithmetic cannot supply. The electorate can determine who governs. It cannot, by voting alone, make a party democratic internally, make a leader self-limiting, or give an organisation an ideology it does not possess. Those things have to be created within the political organisation itself. The deepest weakness, then, is not that a party may lack a declared ideology. Parties can survive ideological transformations. History is full of them. The deeper weakness is the possibility that the party has ceased to ask what it is for. Once that question disappears, politics becomes administration in the service of survival. The slogans remain. The flags remain. The crowds remain. Elections remain. Even the language of national service remains. Only the purpose has gone. And when purpose disappears from a political party, victory can become the most dangerous form of failure: the machinery continues to win while nobody can quite say what the winning is meant to achieve.

(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this newspaper)

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• doctrine, Peeping Tom, PPP, practice

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