At first glance, a comparison between the Chinese Communist Party and the Wyoming Republican Central Committee seems almost absurd.
The Chinese Communist Party governs 1.4 billion people with an authoritarian iron fist, suppressing dissent through surveillance, detention, and state media control.
The Wyoming Republican Party Central Committee meddles in the affairs of a sparsely populated Western state where individual liberty is practically a religion. What could they possibly share?
Quite a bit, it turns out.
While the ideologies are different, the management structure of the parties is frighteningly similar. Political scientists who study one-party systems have long noted that the pathologies of political monopoly tend to converge regardless of ideology. Wyoming's GOP offers a striking American case study.
In China, the real contest for power happens inside the Communist Party, not in public elections. General elections are largely ceremonial; the meaningful competition, such as it is, occurs within party structures, in closed-door meetings and carefully managed processes invisible to ordinary citizens.
The CCP has a well-documented mechanism for disciplining members who deviate from the approved line: the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection. Officials who stray too far from party orthodoxy face investigation, demotion, or worse.
The Wyoming Republican Party has passed its own internal judicial system, run by party insiders, operating in secret, without rules of procedure, restricting the right to counsel and purporting to be able to issue money judgments against party enemies. Deviate from the dictates of the popular kids on the Central Committee and face public censure or worse.
The “Dispute Resolution Committee and Process” is, structurally, a loyalty enforcement mechanism. It sends a clear signal to every other officeholder: ideological deviation from the faction in power carries political consequences. In both systems, the result is a chilling effect on independent judgment. Officials learn to perform loyalty rather than exercise conscience.
One of the CCP's most powerful tools is its control over who is permitted to seek office. Candidates for any meaningful position must be vetted and approved by party structures above them. Outsiders, independents, and dissenters simply don't make it onto ballots.
The State Central Committee wants to replicate this model.
The Wyoming Central Committee, consisting of 3 representatives of each county and a collection of officers, wants to have the ability to certify who is a “true” party member. First, they want to endorse candidates. The next domino to fall will be the Central Committee restricting access to the ballot to only their “certified pure” candidates.
A small group of insiders will have the ability to dictate who gets on the ballot without the voters ever having a chance to weigh in.
The consequences are familiar to China watchers: candidates don't campaign to the broad public; they campaign to the party's most committed ideological core. Moderation becomes a liability. Survival depends on factional loyalty.
The CCP requires members to demonstrate fidelity to Marxist-Leninist theory and Xi Jinping thought. The substance is less important than the ritual of affirmation. In other words, the loyalty signal matters more than policy positions.
Wyoming's GOP has developed its own litmus tests: positions on election integrity, immigration, gun rights, and fealty to specific national figures have become sorting mechanisms. Candidates who fail to perform the right signals are treated as suspect, regardless of their practical governance records.
Most recently, the Wyoming Republican Party voted to eliminate any debate on the Platform and Resolutions by the delegates to the state convention. The state platform was curated by a select group of hand-picked insiders and presented to the convention floor as an undebatable edict.
Now, the party seeks to demand from a candidates allegiance to a platform that the convention delegates never had a chance to debate. In other words, the party central committee seeks to control all thought.
Republican are not totalitarians, but the party management is out of control. The only way to gain control of this runaway train is for good people to file for the office of Precinct Committeeperson.
When political competition disappears, parties in power tend, almost inevitably, toward monopolistic behaviors. They conflate party loyalty with civic virtue. They develop tribal rituals. They develop internal enforcement mechanisms.
The Founders feared exactly this. They were suspicious of faction for a reason.
Wyoming Republicans aren't unique in this regard; similar dynamics play out in deeply blue one-party urban environments.
But the Wyoming case is unusually vivid. And it is a reminder that democratic dysfunction doesn't require a dictatorship. It only requires the elimination of meaningful competition and a willingness to mistake party dominance for popular will.
Tom Lubnau served in the Wyoming Legislature from 2004 to 2015 and is a former Speaker of the House. He can be reached at: YourInputAppreciated@gmail.com
