This article is one of 10 essays in the Summer 2026 print issue, The End of the World as We Know It.

“The age of party democracy has passed,” Irish political scientist Peter Mair declared in a book posthumously published in 2013. He had spent his academic career peering at a specific organism in the life of humans as political animals—the party, with its leaders, members, functionaries, and voters, operating both in parliament and on the street. To Mair, who died in 2011, modern politics was hard to imagine without it; at times, he wondered whether democracy might survive its demise. Yet by the end of his life the verdict became irresistible. The species he dedicated his career to was threatened with extinction. The ecosystem might persist but now without its previously dominant specimen.

Mair’s statement still carried a sense of premonition at the time. Then, the effects of the global financial crisis were still rippling through Europe; Donald Trump’s ruthless takeover of the Republican Party was some years away. In 2026, however, his warning seems anything but trite, with both Labour and the Conservatives wiped out in the last U.K. council elections. In the U.S. and European political systems, it has become apparent that democratic politics will no longer be conducted with parties as traditionally understood.

“The age of party democracy has passed,” Irish political scientist Peter Mair declared in a book posthumously published in 2013. He had spent his academic career peering at a specific organism in the life of humans as political animals—the party, with its leaders, members, functionaries, and voters, operating both in parliament and on the street. To Mair, who died in 2011, modern politics was hard to imagine without it; at times, he wondered whether democracy might survive its demise. Yet by the end of his life the verdict became irresistible. The species he dedicated his career to was threatened with extinction. The ecosystem might persist but now without its previously dominant specimen.

Mair’s statement still carried a sense of premonition at the time. Then, the effects of the global financial crisis were still rippling through Europe; Donald Trump’s ruthless takeover of the Republican Party was some years away. In 2026, however, his warning seems anything but trite, with both Labour and the Conservatives wiped out in the last U.K. council elections. In the U.S. and European political systems, it has become apparent that democratic politics will no longer be conducted with parties as traditionally understood.

On both sides of the Atlantic, parties do still appear as participants on election lists. Officially, the party landscape has enlarged rather than shriveled. If the major 20th-century parties were lumbering dinosaurs, their disappearance needs to be read against the rise of new creatures: digital outfits, one-man vehicles, so-called movement-parties, which had a shorter lifespan but could be equally active in their respective biosphere. As Mair already pointed out, however, such new creatures hardly seem deserving of the same name as the older ones they competed with.

The opening of the 34th convention of the U.S. Democratic Party in Atlantic City, New Jersey, on Aug. 24, 1964.AFP via Getty Images

Parties were not simply pop-up ventures for politicians seeking to win an election. Instead, as membership organizations, they were designed for longevity, persisting beyond a single media or election cycle. They were also the modern era’s emblematic tool for collective action, allowing elites to control masses but also offering a modicum of representation to the........

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