In 2013 at the Manning Networking Conference, a consistently cheerful and low-key annual gathering of Canadian conservatism’s various streams at Ottawa’s convention centre, the big crowd draw was Ron Paul.

Ron Paul — some readers will already have forgotten — was a long-time member of the House of Representatives from the 14th District of Texas. He was (and remains) a hardcore libertarian, convinced that freedom would blossom if the U.S. federal government were shrunk to about the size of a dinner muffin. This message got him close to nowhere against Mitt Romney in the 2012 Republican primary race. But for a minute in 2013 it was possible to imagine that, in some hard-to-conceive future world without Barack Obama, Ron Paul or his son Rand or somebody who thought like them might become president someday.

That happened to be the minute Paul found himself in Ottawa. He was mobbed. Young conservative political staffers, party members and hangers-on packed the hall where he spoke. They gave him a rapturous standing ovation. They crowded around him as he left the hall, so that it became difficult for anybody else to battle their way through the clot of admiring libertarian humanity.

Probably a lot of the same people are at the Manning conference this week, cheering a distinctly different strain of conservatism. This week the big applause lines include anger at “the media” and “the elites,” evocations of the shadowy Hungarian-American billionaire George Soros as a funder and organizer of protests against Donald Trump and various other flavours of paranoia, self-pity and obsession with image.

Canadian conservatism, in other words, is today a little more Trumpified than it was only a few months ago.

What changed? Only the movement’s leaders. The base is the same. But the base’s instincts have morphed to suit the preferences of its leaders because of a powerful phenomenon we might as well call “followership.”

We think a lot about leadership and not much about followership, even though there will always be far more followers than leaders. It’s not a partisan or ideological phenomenon. My examples so far have been conservative, but there are examples from across the spectrum.

Many years ago, when I worked at Conrad Black’s National Post, my boss was in an extended feud with Jean Chrétien. Chrétien buttonholed me at a poultry industry reception in Halifax. Politics is weird. He started bending my ear about what a nasty so-and-so that Conrad Black was. I took pains to forget the details of Chrétien’s argument as it happened because at least one of my colleagues had written about a conversation with Chrétien and found himself deposed by Black’s lawyers for his troubles. I liked both men and thought their argument was bringing out the worst in both.

But my point is that while Chrétien was bending my ear, a cluster of Liberal MPs and their spouses gathered around us, and quite spontaneously, several of them started cheerleading. “That’s right, prime minister!” one said. “And we love you for it!”

Within months, some of those MPs and their families would begin industriously betraying Chrétien because Paul Martin, who seemed to offer a brighter prospect, had let it be known he was available for Chrétien’s job. One of followership’s most distinctive characteristics is its flexibility.

In its purest form, followership goes galloping past mere loyalty to become the reflexive self-abasement that nobody likes except a political boss. Lyndon Johnson famously prized loyalty — expressed as the willingness to abandon one’s family, life and hopes in favour of the continued advancement of Lyndon Johnson — above more common attributes, like intelligence or a regard for rules.

In its more diluted forms, followership becomes a political culture whose eccentricities match the leader’s perceived preferences for — and to me this seems crucial — no good reason. The National Post once quizzed young Conservative staffers in Ottawa about their lifestyles. Every one of them claimed to get their coffee at Tim Horton’s, because that was part of the party’s branding at the time, and apparently none of them could imagine making coffee at home or getting some at McDonald’s. It’s followership that makes people mortgage their brains like that.

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Followership takes its cues from leaders, and since one of the leaders on offer is Donald Trump, this season’s followership is unusually self-pitying and chaotic, with gusts to nastier stuff. If there’s any consolation, it’s this: much of it won’t last. The pack will be happy to imitate the next new leader. Some day.

Paul Wells is a national affairs writer. His column appears Wednesday, Friday and Saturday.

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