Avoiding Conquest's Law

Imposing a status penalty on members helps keep conservative organizations conservative

Robert Conquest’s Second Law is that “Any organization not explicitly right-wing will eventually become left wing.”

There’s something to this. It does seem that as society trends in a more progressive direction over time, most institutions get pulled with it.

Part of this is simply that conservative spaces are often quite vibrant. This causes more moderate to liberal people to seek entry to them, and those people then become a constituency agitating for change in a more liberal direction.

Think about the paradigmatic case of people leaving blue states for red ones. While I think growth is more a product of climate and other factors than politics, a place like California has a stellar climate - and yet weak demographics.

There’s a lot not to like about how red states are run, but they do seem to make it easier to build housing. They do have powerful constituencies in favor of law and order. They do tend to check the worst progressive excesses. They aren’t as captured by liberal client groups like public employee unions.

As a result, you end up with booms in many of these places. While some of this is turning states like Idaho even redder, some of it has no doubt shifted the politics left in places like Georgia and North Carolina, which are now effectively purple states that may shift blue.

The same factor is at work in suburban migration. The city I live in is superbly run and features an extremely high quality of life at a very reasonable cost by national standards. This was built entirely by Republicans. But there is a large and growing Democratic resident base here. I know personally people who are hard core progressives who would tell you they never wanted to move to Carmel - but they did it anyway, because the package is just too attractive. And naturally they want to bring the same kind of ideas to the suburbs that they supported in the urban core.

We see it also in churches. The more liberal churches such as the mainline denominations have been bleeding people for decades. They are often boring and with an attendee base that skews older. More conservative evangelical churches are much younger, more vibrant, have great community, etc. This draws people by itself quite apart from the theology - which might even be a secondary factor. Many of these new folks are actually uncomfortable with more conservative theology, and become a constituency for shifting away from that.

To the extent that conservative organizations actually do function better - and while this isn’t universally true, it is in many cases - they will attract more liberal participants who are drawn by that very success.

This isn’t the only factor driving institutions to the left, of course. Status signaling counts for a lot, too. In today’s America, liberal positions are high status and conservative ones low status. Most of us rationally prefer to embrace high status rather than low status views.

Many conservatives in the “MAGA” world have openly embraced a low status, low class, cringe style. The net result is a Republican party that’s been bleeding college educated people who are very turned off by this type of behavior.

But there’s something to be learned from this. The repelling effect of low status actually can play a role in inoculating conservative institutions against attracting a more liberal constituency that would fight to push the organization to the left.

Imposing a negative status penalty on prospective members is one way to help avoid the effects of Conquest’s Second Law. This doesn’t work for large scale entities like statues or political parties, which need to attract a broad base of people. But for smaller organizations like churches it can be effective.

A good example here is the Christ Church community in Moscow, Idaho. They have built an extremely vibrant community, with lots of healthy families, their own school, university, businesses, social spaces, and real estate. It’s attractive for a lot of people, and in fact they’ve grown a lot by attracting people from around the country to move to Moscow to be part of it.

The key figure in his is of course Doug Wilson, who runs a popular but extremely controversial and provocative blog. He’s a hard core culture warrior type, promotes some bespoke theologies that are out of step with the rest of the evangelical world (e.g., paedocommunion), and has become an infamous figure similar to Trump.

Wilson’s persona is something of a double edged sword. But one of the positive functions that it has served for them is to filter out people who aren’t aligned with their vision.

In order to move to Moscow, Idaho and join the Christ Church community involves taking a status hit in mainstream and even evangelical society. You’ll have to tell people that you are a member of Doug Wilson’s church.

As a result, despite having an extremely vibrant community, Christ Church seems not to have attracted a lot of more liberal people that would become a constituency pushing people to the left. Their people seem very aligned around a vision and an ethos.

Even at the state level we can see something of this effect. There have been a number of articles talking about how socially conservative policies in Texas are causing people to leave or reconsider the state.

From the standpoint of someone who values conservative politics above having a technology scene, this is actually a good outcome. In fact, some people suggest discouraging liberal in-migration is a good reason to pass controversial laws. This is what the left has been doing in places like California for some time in the other direction.

While the specifics would vary from case to case, imposing some type of material status penalty on prospective members of an organization is one way to help keep conservative organizations conservative. Again, I don’t think it’s necessarily a good play for large scale entities like political parties. But for churches or other small organizations it could be a viable approach.

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