While true once they get their replacement daddy Great Leader, in the absence of a suitable leader, they create their own groupthink. Tankies mostly lack leaders, instead passing around bad ideas like an STD; likewise, before Trump, the ultra-reactionaries in the US were more-than-willing to turn on their former leaders and idols for not following the stream-of-consciousness groupthink they’d developed, hence Rubio going from a darling of the Tea Party to a RINO in record time, despite becoming no less cretinous in that time.