Robert Conquest (d. 3 August 2015) was a brilliant British historian and commentator. He wrote an absolutely GREAT book on Joseph Stalin’s terror campaign in the USSR: The Great Terror: Stalin’s Purge of the Thirties. He was a prolific writer and commentator who also wrote science fiction. During a lifetime of observing political machinations in the West, he also developed 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.
All three laws are great and true, but the focus of this article is on the second law. When the law is examined in the evolution of important American institutions over the past 60 years or so, the theory behind it is proven almost beyond the shadow of a doubt. Let us look at some examples.