Conquest’s Laws

Conquest’s Laws
By John Derbyshire
Several readers have asked me for Robert Conquest’s Three Laws of politics.
As best I can remember, they are:
1. Everyone is conservative about what he knows best.
2. Any organization not explicitly and constitutionally right-wing will
sooner or later become left-wing.
3. The behavior of any bureaucratic organization can best be understood by
assuming that it is controlled by a secret cabal of its enemies.
Of the Second Law, Conquest gave the Church of England and Amnesty
International as examples.
 Of the Third, he noted that a bureaucarcy
sometimes actually IS controlled by a secret cabal of its enemies–e.g.
the postwar British secret service.