This article by Ben Landau-Taylor was published at Palladium Magazine on October 16, 2026.
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On Brazil’s Election Day I was talking to Renan Santos, the Mission Party candidate for President. He had recently cast his vote in front of all the news cameras—as he sat down with us one joker asked “So who’d you vote for?”—and we were still several hours away from getting the first results. As Renan was telling us about the Mission Party’s history, he said that, to run an outsider political campaign, you have to be willing to “lose, and lose, and lose, and win.”
After twelve years of campaigning, Renan and the Free Brazil Movement had hoped that this election would be the beginning of victory, with an impressive showing in the presidential race and serious gains in the legislature. It was not to be, as we learned that night. Renan came in fourth place with 2.6 million votes, 2.2% of the total, and his party kept its single seat in the federal legislature but failed to add any more. It was a thoroughly mediocre result. The Mission Party boys are dusting themselves off and plugging along, continuing to build up the movement’s fundamentals—cadre, doctrine, mass mobilization—and get ready for next time.
As Renan tells it, the Mission Party developed as a way to continue and institutionalize the energy of mass protests against the corruption of former Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff. After their initial goals had been achieved, the movement’s organizers, like Renan, realized there was no good reason for them to pack up and go home when their country still faced so many problems. With a bunch of quality people and free energy lying around, they began the trial-and-error process of turning this raw material into a durable organization. They are maintaining their energy—just watch any videos of their events—and not giving up.
This is the correct move in their position. There have been plenty of insurgent political parties in modern history. Most failed. The successful ones generally follow a similar pattern. They go through a long period of wandering in the wilderness, building up their infrastructure internally but thoroughly gatekept from the mainstream. They grow numerically, and more importantly train up their core cadre of political operatives and establish their doctrine and ideology, but they are marginalized as far as respectable politics is concerned.
Then a big segment of the political mainstream suffers a sharp collapse. Very rapidly, the insurgent party steps in to fill the vacuum. They are ready to go with the skilled organizers and the well-developed ideology and the mobilization to fill the streets with screaming young men.
The most famous example is the Russian Communists. The first Russian Marxist organization was formed in 1883; their various groups built out their machine throughout the 1890s through all the newspapers, party conferences, arrests, prisons, and exiles; in the 1905 revolution which established a short-lived constitutional monarchy they played a relatively minor role, a “dress rehearsal” in Lenin’s phrasing. By 1917, when the exhausted Tsarist regime totally collapsed under its own weight and the strain of World War I, Lenin’s Bolsheviks were quick to maneuver their way to the head of the rioters and mutineers, and seized a position from which they could fight out the Russian Civil War and grind their way to total power.
In America, the most important case was political opposition to slavery. The first anti-slavery political party was the Liberty Party, formed in 1841. In 1848 much of the Liberty Party merged into the Free Soil Party, which won a handful of congressional seats opposing the westward expansion of slavery. In 1854 the Whig Party, one of the nation’s two major political parties, was shattered as the Kansas-Nebraska Act’s westward expansion of slavery broke apart its exhausted coalition, and the Free Soilers merged into the new Republican Party as it cohered from the wreckage, providing major Republican figures like Salmon P. Chase and Charles Sumner.
In America today, both major parties are undergoing their own much less dramatic versions of this process. The Democratic Party’s old political machine is being gradually supplanted by a new machine with a new ideology, coming from the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). The group was formally founded in the 1980s, but its current incarnation dates to 2016, when Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign popularized the term “democratic socialism,” and the existing organization reorganized itself around providing a home for his supporters. By 2017, the DSA had loosened its chapter formation rules, quintupled its membership, and formally left the Socialist International. In 2018 the DSA sent its first members to Congress. The DSA has functioned as an insurgent caucus within the Democratic Party, building its cadre of young organizers and its doctrine and mobilizing its get-out-the-vote campaigns, all of which have become steadily more effective over time.
At first the mainstream Democratic machine cast them as disreputable radicals. This changed as the Democratic mainstream has collapsed—the old Democratic Party’s exhausted liberal ideology was fully jettisoned with 2020’s total embrace of unchecked looting of the treasury by favored client groups coupled with para-intelligence suppression of opposition, and the party machine lost all its internal legitimacy in 2024 after the one-two punch of campaigning for Joe Biden’s feeble husk and then replacing it with Kamala Harris, who lacked the excuse of senility.
In the aftermath, much of the DSA platform has been openly adopted by mainstream Democratic candidates for the highest offices. Their signature electoral success came when Zohran Mamdani became Mayor of New York City by defeating Andrew Cuomo and Eric Adams, products of a New York City machine which had managed the difficult feat of imploding even more drastically than the national machine.
A few years before the old liberal Democratic Party collapsed, we witnessed the collapse of the exhausted conservative Republican Party, which never recovered spiritually from Barack Obama dismantling its conservative ideology in their own eyes, and then finally gave up its pretenses during the 2016 presidential primary election. If there had been any organized, insurgent right-wing faction, this would have been their opportunity. But there was none. All of the organized right-wing factions were built as subservient components of the conservative Republican coalition and failed to build an ideology which would justify actually ruling the coalition when the previous center abdicated the field.
Meanwhile those right-wing factions which believed themselves fit to rule were disorganized and had failed to build any cadre whatsoever. Instead, the vacuum was filled by Donald Trump personally. The lack of any cadre made his first term almost completely ineffective. By his second term the MAGA coalition has come to some vague semblance of order, and is now able to pursue bureaucratic goals effectively, at least in comparison to his first term. Even so, the coalition lacks the interpersonal and ideological cohesion found in the earlier examples.
Other examples of this phenomenon include the rise of the Young Turks as the Ottoman sultanate decomposed, the British Labour Party filling the vacuum after the Liberal Party’s abrupt collapse, the rise of the Nazi Party as the Weimar government disintegrated, and Charles de Gaulle’s French Fifth Republic supplanting the Fourth Republic.
What does this mean for an insurgent party’s strategy? It is all about building up so that you’re ready to seize the moment of opportunity, if and when it arrives. You can sometimes foresee the collapse of the ruling order in broad strokes, but you cannot time the collapse with any precision, because the details depend so strongly on particular individuals. If Joe Biden’s health had hung together for a few more years, if H. H. Asquith and David Lloyd George had kept their rivalry in check rather than splitting apart the Liberal Party, if Franklin Pierce had not backed the Kansas-Nebraska Act, then any of these collapses could very likely have been delayed by years or even longer.
When the collapse comes—and you do not know when it will come—then the vacuum will be filled by whoever has the best combination of pre-existing party infrastructure, skill at navigating the intrigues of the moment, and the sheer will to take critical risks at the critical time. That might be Vladimir Lenin with a well-organized vanguard party and cells inside the military, or it might be a lone New York real estate wheeler-dealer with no plan and no ideology opportunistically taking possession of a nearly uncontested field. But the vacuum will be filled. You want to be in a position to fill it.
Back in Brazil, the Mission Party may see its opportunity in the not-too-distant future. The upcoming run-off election is between Lula, the 80-year-old incumbent president who has previously spent time in prison, and Flavio Bolsonaro, the feckless son of former President Jair Bolsonaro, who is currently under house arrest and disqualified from seeking election in his own capacity. Neither is widely beloved, but the party machines remain functional enough to manage the electoral process—for now. If and when they fall apart, the vacuum will be filled by whoever is ready.
Ben Landau-Taylor studies society and industry for The Students. You can follow him at @benlandautaylor.
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