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Writing is very much a solitary vice. Writers, simply by the nature of the work, tend to spend a lot of their time holed up in wherever their workspace may be, be it a nook under the stairs or a dedicated library-office, staring at a blank page or screen and trying to invent new ways to procrastinate. One supposed antidote for this is ‘writer’s groups’.
Like many writers, I joined a writer’s group, assuming that it would be a way to not just expand my social circle but solicit peer support and advice. Ha. In reality, it turned out to be exactly the same as ‘writer’s festivals’: a gossipy echo chamber for idle left-wing women. Little writing and a whole lotta clucking, all of it about the Current Thing that had lefties frantically updating their online profile pics. I quietly dropped out in late 2023, after one of the group wittered about a fundraising event for Gazans: ‘Nothing for Jews, then?’ I asked, to stunned silence.
If I thought writer’s groups and writer’s festivals were bad – and they are – then ‘book clubs’ are even worse.
Book clubs have a tendency to conform to Robert Conquest’s second law of politics… Originally, they were on the whole conformist, polite, small-c conservative. Their tragedy is that it’s for these very reasons that they’ve drifted leftwards and taken their members with them. Those members don’t want to come across as unkind, confrontational or non-conformant.
Robert Conquest, the great chronicler of Soviet horrors, had a knack for cutting through cant. Among his sharpest observations were his three “laws” of politics. The second is the one that stings: Any organisation not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing.
It’s a law that explains far too much of the modern West’s institutional rot. Book clubs, churches, universities, charities, even conservative parties – time and again they slide leftward, dragged by the currents of fashion, bureaucratic self-interest and the quiet cowardice of people who just want to be liked.
To put it in the parlance of Team America: World Police, leftists are assholes and too many conservatives are pussies. “Pussies think everyone can get along… all the assholes want is to shit all over everything.”
I’m sure you’ll have experienced this too: don’t you find it’s almost impossible to get a left-leaning friend to even entertain a right-leaning argument? This is much less true the other way around… It’s simply impossible not to be bombarded with BBC propaganda.
Leftists rarely budge. Conservatives, surrounded by the progressive monoculture, often concede ground just to keep the peace. The result is predictable. Book clubs – middle-class, mostly female, eager to signal virtue – are tailor-made for the drift. They reach for the latest Jacinda Ardern hagiography instead of anything that might challenge the orthodoxy. They certainly won’t be caught dead reading Lionel Shriver. Shriver, after all, provoked walkouts at an Australian ‘writer’s festival’ simply for the heinous crime of wearing a sombrero (Cultural appropriation! Reeeee! – I’m not making it up).
But if her sombrero was enough to send the Gumbie Cats of the ‘book club’ world into fits of the vapours, her new novel would have them screaming for the exits, en masse. A Better Life is a sharp, brutal takedown of what evolutionary psychologist Gad Saad calls Suicidal Empathy and the migrant-housing fantasy gone wrong.
Sadly, it’s not just the ladies’ knitting circles posing as book clubs. The same pattern repeats across institutions. The Church of England drifts into rainbow theology and climate activism. Universities become re-education camps. Charities morph from helpers of the poor into lobbyists for open borders and identity politics. Even explicitly conservative outfits aren’t immune.
Can I be so bold as to suggest that Conquest’s Law needs to be amended to read: All organisations sooner or later become left-wing. Even organisations that are explicitly right-wing now move to the left.
Look at Britain’s Tories post-Brexit: Theresa May’s Remainer backstabbing, only exceeded in quisling betrayal by Boris Johnson, in the endless woke capitulations and net-zero zealotry. Australia’s Liberals have their own version – moderates chasing inner-city greens while the suburban base evaporates. Reform UK already smells of social-democratic drift. The pattern holds: without explicit, repeated commitment to first principles – limited government, individual liberty, national cohesion, biological reality – political and cultural entropy does its work.
But why?
Conquest’s first law offers partial explanation: Everyone is conservative about what he knows best. People cling to the familiar in their daily lives but defer to expert consensus on everything else. That hands the high ground to the left, whose worldview dominates media, academia and bureaucracy. Hence Conquest’s Third Law: The simplest way to explain the behaviour of any bureaucratic organisation is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies. Look no further than Anzac Day: the RSL was once the bastion of Australian conservatism, now it foists the hated, fatuous ‘Welcome to Country’ on Anzac Day. It’s a wonder Bruce Ruxton hasn’t risen from the grave like an avenging Imhotep and smashed the current RSL leadership to atoms.
The list goes on: Big Business stumping for energy policies that cripple industry. Police ignoring grooming gangs while hounding wrongthink on Twitter. Universities churning out activists instead of scholars. Who but institutional enemies could produce such consistent self-sabotage?
The left understands power. As independent journalist Tim Pool puts it, the right approaches power like a connoisseur appreciates wine; the left approaches power like an alcoholic appreciates wine.
But the left doesn’t just crave power like a junkie craves a fix: it knows how to score. It captures the institutions that shape culture – schools, newsrooms, NGOs – and uses them relentlessly. Just ask them: it’s exactly the blueprint Dutschke and Marcuse laid out for the Long March through the Institutions, in the late 1960s. You can’t deny that it’s been stunningly successful.
Meanwhile, conservatives, allergic to ‘culture war’ talk and terrified of being called any of the left’s endless lists of ‘isms’, keep trying to win on economics alone while ceding the ground that actually matters. The result is the slow boil we’re living through: speech codes, demographic transformation sold as enrichment, energy poverty dressed as salvation and a younger generation marinated in guilt and grievance.
Lionel Shriver and Michel Houellebecq still manage to publish novels that puncture the progressive balloon. Submission shows how a minority Islamist partner can dominate a coalition. A Better Life illustrates the inevitable consequences of naïve empathy meeting hard reality. These books should spark debate. Instead, they’re radioactive in polite circles.
Even worse are the authors who self-censor. Christopher Priest’s Fugue for a Darkening Island, published the year before the more well-known Camp of the Saints by Jean Paul Raspail, is an even harder gut-punch than the latter. Or it was.
Circling around a near-future England swamped by boatloads of African illegals and slipping inexorably into dystopian fragmentation, it holds a strong claim to being a more prophetic future history than anything written by Wells or Verne.
So much so, that, in 2011, Priest bowdlerised his own work, removing the ‘racist’ passages. Presumably, removing the gang rape and murder of the protagonist’s wife by African immigrants and his subsequent act – when through all of the book he’s been the quintessential impractical petty academic – of grabbing a rifle and going out to kill ‘Afrims’.
Still, I guess Priest was right that it was updated: not the gang rape and murder from immigrants, but the clearly ludicrous assumption that a middle-class British academic would actually do anything about it. One can only suspend disbelief so far.
This only goes to show that reversing Conquest’s Law demands deliberate, explicit resistance. Organisations that wish to remain conservative must codify their principles in founding documents, select leaders who actually believe them and refuse entry or advancement to those who don’t. Add status penalties for woke signalling help. Eternal vigilance is the price. Comfortable drift is easier – until the organisation becomes something its founders would despise.
Conservatives who keep playing nice, hoping reason will prevail, are simply surrendering the field. The left never does.
It’s time to get explicit. Define what you stand for and defend it ruthlessly. Otherwise, Conquest’s Law will keep claiming another scalp. And another. And another.
Maybe I should go back the writer’s group and start stirring things up a bit.
