The late great Robert Conquest, Sovietologist, historian and poet, propounded three “laws of politics”. They are (as recalled by John Derbyshire at National Review):

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 bureaucracy sometimes actually IS controlled by a secret cabal of its enemies – e.g. the postwar British secret service.

We would add as more examples of the Third, the US State Department and the Republican Party.

And Emmett Tyrrell, writing at Townhall, finds that once an organization – true to Conquest’s Second Law – begins its leftward trend, it forgets what it’s for:

When any entity falls under the dominance of liberalism, it loses all sense of its fundamental purpose.

A city [authority] loses all sense of its purpose, which is governance.

A university loses all sense of its purpose, which is education.

You name the entity – if it falls under the dominance of liberalism, it becomes utterly confused as to its goal.

Now, under liberalism’s more extreme evolutionary stage, called progressivism or leftism, progressives and the left cannot even maintain a public toilet facility for men or women. Going to the bathroom at a public comfort station today can be a source of embarrassment, or even an actionable civil rights matter where the left is in charge.

So if you, as an organization, take the left road – the one more traveled by – you’re on your way to aimlessness, worthlessness, futility.

It seems that is the road the whole of the Western world, our civilization, has taken.