O'Sullivan's First Rule

In an excellent Thanksgiving Day post by John Hinderaker of Powerline, there is a mention of something I’d never heard of before: “O’Sullivan’s Law”. I did a little googling to find out about it, and it turns out to actually be “O’Sullivan’s First Rule", by John O’Sullivan, the former editor of the National Review. Here it is in its original form:

From National Review online:

All organizations that are not actually right-wing will over time become left-wing. I cite as supporting evidence the ACLU, the Ford Foundation, and the Episcopal Church.

Ouch (on the “supporting evidence")!

Naturally, being the skeptic that I am, I immediately started on a quest for counter-examples — and my brain kept tracking toward more supporting examples. As I write this, I have not come up with a single clear counter-example. Can you?

O’Sullivan goes on to write:

The reason is, of course, that people who staff such bodies tend to be the sort who don’t like private profit, business, making money, the current organization of society, and, by extension, the Western world. At which point Michels’s Iron Law of Oligarchy takes over — and the rest follows.

Michel’s Iron Law of Oligarchy is one that I’ve run across before. Basically it says that any organization eventually will concentrate effective power in the hands of a few people (without regard to the founding principles of the organization). I’ve long regarded this as formalized common sense.

So O’Sullivan is saying (with that “of course” that raises my hackles!) that simply because the people who join such organizations are self-selected to be left-wingers. Hmmm… Maybe. Or maybe there’s another dynamic at work here. But forget the “why” for the moment, and think about the underlying observation (that organizations tend to drift leftward). Doesn’t that observation ring true, based on observable evidence?

It does for me. I’m going to add “O’Sullivan’s First Rule” to my bag of thinking tools…