Tiki | July 27, 2024 at 7:29 pm
Robert Conquest’s Three Laws of Politics:

Everyone is conservative about what he knows best.

Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing.

The simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies.

John Derbyshire adds this:

Of the Second Law, Conquest gave the Church of England and Amnesty International as examples.

Of the Third, he noted that a bureaucracy sometimes actually is controlled by a secret cabal of its enemies — e.g. the postwar British secret service.

John Moore thinks the third law is almost right; it should read “assume that it is controlled by a cabal of the enemies of the stated purpose of that bureaucracy.”