Mark Twain got it spot on: history does rhyme. But its couplets can make melancholy reading. You may have seen the two stories I am about to cite, because both have been part of the daily drumbeat of news over the past few weeks. They are episodes from two very different worlds and eras, with characters who could hardly be less alike in age, ethnicity and ideology. But viewed together, they say something very troubling about what kind of democracy Britain now is.

In the mid-1970s a Malaysian graduate, Aravindan Balakrishnan, sets up a Maoist sect in a house in south London. Styling himself Comrade Bala, he runs amok for nearly 40 years, behaving with the utmost cruelty towards his followers, physically and mentally coercing them into obeying his wishes, no matter their illegality or baseness. Finally, this month, he is convicted.

In the lead-up to this May’s general election, a Conservative activist, Mark Clarke, sets up an organisation called RoadTrip 2015, which deploys hundreds of young party members to campaign in key marginals. Dubbed the Tatler Tory, he is soon at the centre of a massive bullying scandal. Accusations are made of physical coercion, of smear campaigns against dissenters – and a 21-year-old, Elliott Johnson, apparently takes his own life. Finally, at the end of November, a former Tory party chairman, Grant Shapps, resigns over the debacle and an independent inquiry is established to look at the allegations.

The stories are very different but have elements worthy of note. For, shorn of their key personalities, these are tales of small worlds going mad, of political mobilisation detached from wider society. To term Balakrishnan’s commune a cult would not raise an eyebrow – but when Ray Johnson, Elliott’s father, also describes rightwing organisations that sucked in his son as “cults”, it seems difficult to disagree. Indeed, the rightwing Young Britons’ Foundation has been described as a “madrasa”.

‘Mark Clarke himself not only reported directly to Shapps, he worked from a budget agreed by Shapps, along with his co-chairman Andrew Feldman, campaign manager Lynton Crosby and deputy chairman Stephen Gilbert.’ Photograph: Peter Macdiarmid/Getty

Some will bristle at applying terms such as cult to the party of government. Doesn’t every big barrel harbour the odd rotten apple? But through his exhaustive reporting on RoadTrip for the Guardian, Simon Hattenstone found a growing number of young Conservatives were coming to him with allegations of bullying that went far beyond Mark Clarke. Clarke himself not only reported directly to Shapps, he worked from a budget agreed by Shapps, along with his co-chairman Andrew Feldman, campaign manager Lynton Crosby and deputy chairman Stephen Gilbert. Hattenstone notes: “Clarke’s RoadTrip was crucial because party membership had shrunk to less than 150,000, of whom few could be classed as activists and many were elderly. Anybody with the ability to mobilise members, particularly young ones, was an asset.”

We have historically reserved the term “political cult” for far-left or right grouplets. They have tiny memberships and thus inevitably have limited interaction with or knowledge of wider society.They are closed-off worlds in which the activists increasingly resemble each other, and where ideology has replaced ideas and debate. The RoadTrip debacle is evidence that the mass parties, the key institutions in our mother of democracies, are becoming so small that they are starting to develop cult-like tendencies.

In the early 1950s, 2.8 million Britons were paid-up Conservative party members

In 2015 it is easy to assume that the Conservative party has always been an organisation for the few. Not so. In the early 50s, 2.8 million Britons were paid-up Tory members; until well into John Major’s premiership it was the largest party in the UK. Now its base is shrinking fast and ageing: the “party of workers” is in reality the party of OAPs. For most of the past two decades, a similarly sharp decline has set in with the Lib Dems and (until the last few months) Labour.

Combine that with the rapid decline in party allegiance among voters, and you have a democracy in which the three main parties pose as representatives of the popular will even while commanding less popular enthusiasm than at any point in postwar history.

Everyone knows about the decline of the mass party – civil servants bemoan the trend, columnists come up with ideas for re-engaging public interest (Smartphones as mobile ballot boxes! Strictly Come Voting!). What hardly ever gets discussed, however, is what implications this has for the way our country is run.

For that, the best guide I have found is a book called Ruling the Void, by the political scientist Peter Mair. Mair died in 2011, and his book was published after his death, but debacles like RoadTrip would not have surprised him. His book opens with this declaration: “The age of party democracy has passed. Although the parties themselves remain, they have become so disconnected from the wider society, and pursue a form of competition that is so lacking in meaning that they no longer seem capable of sustaining democracy in its present form.”

That is Britain today, in which the parties have lost any interest in the public and the public have lost their interest in the parties. Mair mourned these trends, even while he understood them to be deeply rooted, reflecting the decline of social institutions such as trade unions and the church as well as the professionalisation of politics. Mass engagement in politics had allowed the public greater say, however imperfect, over how their countries were to be run and in whose interest. It is no accident that the golden age of mass parties in Britain was also the golden age of the Keynesian welfare state.

What remains, argued Mair, is a “governing class”. This is a kind of working aristocracy of politicians: some politicos sport distinguished family names (Kinnocks, Goulds and Benns), but all are increasingly divorced in background, education and profession from the people they are meant to be representing. And increasingly they are financed by the working aristocracy of business people and financiers who run our economy. Half of Conservative funding comes from the finance sector, which is duly repaid in tax cuts for the super-rich and advisory posts for private equiteers such as Adrian Beecroft.

Even Jeremy Corbyn’s rise can be explained through Mair’s lens: here is a not especially prepossessing backbencher who smashed his opponents for the leadership because he better represented the views of the Labour base. Writing in September, political scientist Henry Farrell argued that Corbyn proved Mair right – but that his party “will face relentless opposition from the elites that have replaced the masses as the main source of resources for parties and politicians”. That has proved eerily prescient. Britain’s party democracy is in its death throes; what is supplanting it is an unholy coalition of elites and cults.