Is Robert Conquest Right That Left-Wing Drift is Inevitable?

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, due less, I suspect, to a natural openness of the conservative mind, but rather more to do with the ubiquitous nature of the ‘progressive’ world view. It’s simply impossible not to be bombarded with BBC propaganda.

Consequently, I try to find chinks in the defences of those ‘progressives’ I know, through which I can either smuggle a conservative view or open them up to the calamitous consequences of their progressive ideals. Novels present one such opportunity.

No one can deny that in the world of contemporary fiction, it’s very hard to find an author who isn’t identikit ‘progressive’, with the result that their output is so cloyingly wet and boringly orthodox as to be virtually unreadable. Thank God, then, for Lionel Shriver and Michel Houellebecq, to my mind the only two writers around who can still get books published that contain two sides of an argument.

If you want to understand school shootings, read Lionel Shriver’s We need to talk about Kevin. If it’s an insight into the madness that took hold during Covid that you’re after, then read her book Mania. Satire’s not necessarily belly-laugh funny, but they’re both cruelly incisive.

I’ve just finished Shriver’s latest book, A Better Life, which explores the “suicidal empathy” that Gad Saad has identified as the emotional response that’s doing so much to destroy Western societies. The book focuses on a relatively wealthy, painfully liberal New York divorcee who volunteers to take in a recent migrant, with something other than hilarious consequences.

The scheme envisaged by Shriver was based on one proposed in 2023 by New York’s Democratic then-Mayor Eric Adams, whereby New Yorkers, in exchange for payment, would house a migrant in their own home. Conceptually, it’s very similar to the ‘Homes for Ukraine’ scheme launched by Boris Johnson in March 2022, an initiative enthusiastically taken up by families across the country, with the notable exception of those politicians who most warmly heralded it!

In Shriver’s book, the occupants of an up-market New York townhouse have got soft and idle, living beyond their means, dependent on an ex-husband and a dwindling inheritance. The house acts as a simile for the USA itself, and by extension the West in general, failing to recognise the threats from others who are prepared to fight for what they haven’t got.

A Better Life should be on the reading list of every book club in the country. It’s less than 300 pages long. It’s sharp, witty, topical and brilliantly written. Assuming the purpose of a book club is to stimulate debate, I can’t think of a book more likely to do so. But it’ll still take a brave book club member to propose A Better Life.

Book clubs have a tendency to conform to Robert Conquest’s second law of politics:

Any organisation not explicitly Right-wing sooner or later becomes Left-wing.

It’s an odd thing. Book-clubs are a quintessentially middle class, predominantly female institution. 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. They simply never put up a fight as they go with the flow towards ever greater orthodoxy of thought.

Sadly, Robert Conquest died in 2015. Consequently he didn’t live long enough to see the general shift to the Left of virtually all aspects of society. But it’s one thing to see an institution such as the Church of England drift Leftwards, it’s a whole different matter to see the Conservative Party and now Reform follow the same path.

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. Who can refute that Reform looks increasingly like a central-European social-democratic party?

Lionel Shriver isn’t the only contemporary novelist who can skewer a societal change through the pages of a novel. If you want to understand how an Islamo/Green/Socialist takeover happens just read Michel Houellebecq’s (pronounced Welbeck, as in Danny Welbeck, the Brighton and England striker) Submission.

This is definitely a book to stimulate a lively debate. Though given the raciness of the sex scenes and depending on the composition of your book club, it may produce too much stimulation all round! That aside it’s a brilliant thought-provoking book.

In a recent Daily Sceptic article, I wrote about the likely composition of a future Labour/Green/SNP/Lib Dem/ Plaid Cymru coalition. However, Houellebecq’s Submission is far more prescriptive about how, despite being about France and written in 2014, the minority partner in a coalition can exercise greater leverage than the majority partner. It’s exactly the same in Shriver’s A Better Life: between the Hondurans and the WASPs there’s only one likely winner. Conservatism loses unless it fights back.

Having mentioned Conquest’s second law, it would be remiss not to briefly look at his other two and how they impact on conservative thought. His first law states:

Everyone is conservative about what he knows best.

In some ways this first law predicts his second. It explains why book clubs don’t make a provocative choice such as A Better Life, but instead settle for the latest Sally Rooney, which will be tediously orthodox, shocking to your mother perhaps but in truth containing nothing out of place in a Guardian editorial.

Booker Prize winner Chinua Achebe titled his most famous book Things falls apart; he might have added that things fall apart only after everything has stayed the same. This is really the outcome of Conquest’s second law. Why does the new Archbishop of Canterbury Sarah Mullally sound as sententious as Justin Welby? Because she was chosen from within by a selection committee comprising Anglican and Anglican adjacent members, a recipe for continuity, literally a ‘self-selection’ committee. The C of E desperately needs to do something different, but in choosing Mullally the institution has guaranteed that nothing will change – unless it falls apart.

If you want change, you invariably have to recruit from outside of the institution you’re looking to shake up. When company boards choose the Finance Director as the new CEO, they don’t expect and they don’t get fireworks.

But probably my favourite Conquest Law is his third:

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

The post-Brexit Parliamentary Tory Party is perfectly explained by Conquest’s three laws. In choosing Theresa May, a Remainer, as leader it selected the least radical, the least fleet of foot, the least dynamic candidate available. At a moment when bravery and radicalism were called for it circled the wagons.

Following the path of least resistance, it adopted a slate of woke policies. Theresa May, Maria Miller and Penny Mordaunt betrayed just about every woman who ever voted Tory when they declared that ‘transwomen are women’. And as her parting shot May gifted us all the Climate Change Act. Of course, it could be argued that these were radical policies, but that’s simply to misunderstand how thoroughly the woke agenda had already permeated mainstream thought. The BBC never had a radical thought in its collective head. Once Cameron had encouraged us all to hug-a-hoodie, woke became orthodox, and that’s largely where it’s stayed.

An analysis of the Tory performance during Covid can’t escape the conclusion that every step it took was designed to betray its voters and its principles. Who but an implacable enemy could have come up with vaccine passports, effective house arrest or state handouts to stay at home? Liz Truss was in part kicked out because she committed uncapped state funding to subsidise energy costs, a wet dream policy of a rabid Corbynista.

If it’s any consolation, exactly the same forces are at work now within the Labour administration. Who but an enemy could come up with an energy policy that makes Margaret Thatcher’s efforts to close ‘heavy industry’ look half-hearted? Who but an enemy could belittle the white working-class girls who were the victims of the rape gangs? Who but an enemy could conclude that justice is best served by trying to do away with jury trials?

We see the same with the police, with the universities, the BMA.

Is it so very hard to do the opposite? To look for the radical rather than the hopelessly safe? To look for policies that work rather than ones that don’t? Why can’t we move in the direction of the individual rather than the collective; it’s not as if the case is hard to make that ‘freer market economics’ tend to produce better outcomes than over-regulated markets: just compare economic growth in the US and Europe since 2008.

It gets increasingly hard to get our political opponents to really examine the counterfactual to the orthodoxy. Yet Lionel Shriver may still get a pass in less informed literary circles who loved We need to talk about Kevin and never really noticed Mania. What’s more, Shriver was a Biden-supporting Democrat, and today she’s certainly no Trumpian. But to read A Better Life is to get smacked in the face by the all too predictable outcome of ‘progressive’ policies.

So, why not give it a go, use literature as something of a Trojan Horse. If you’re a member of a book club slip in Submission as a suggestion. Remind the rest of the book club how much they all loved We need to talk about Kevin, and get A Better Life or Mania chosen for next month.

It’s just too depressing if we follow the spineless response of the WASP characters in A Better Life and don’t fight back. Maybe Kemi Badenoch, who’s impressed me rather more than I expected, is the outsider in the political world who can reverse Conquest declinism in an avowedly ‘conservative’ institution. And maybe Shriver and Houellebecq can do something in the literary world and start to turn the tide from within the nation’s book clubs.