Bill Kristol recently tweeted an admission that he and other neoconservatives underestimated the accuracy of the view that “demography is destiny.” Kristol was forced to accept this notion and its implications after examining the voting data from the election on November 6. Racial minorities and Third World immigrants, Kristol’s tweet implies, overwhelmingly voted for the Democrats and seem for the most part cool with moving the country toward the social and cultural left. Although I’m not sure how one of the left’s most vocal and most powerful voting blocs, white college-educated women, confirms this conclusion, other groups on the left most definitely do. It appears that Kristol is conceding the argument of those on his right who have warned against the cultural transformation caused by immigration. He punctuated his comment with this pregnant tweet several hours later: “We’re having a census every two years as much as an election.” 

Friends on the right happily informed me of these statements and took them as a form of vindication. Of what I have to wonder. Do they really think the balance of power in the conservative movement will be changed because a once influential opponent of theirs has just admitted that they’d been right on some critical point? Nothing is likely to change at the Wall Street Journal or on Fox News, certainly not because of the tweet. Kristol has painted himself into a corner by turning his back ostentatiously on the GOP and by appearing as an honored discussant on CNN-bashing Republicans. He has engaged in such pranks without really aligning himself with the other side, probably in order to keep all his options open. Moreover, the GOP is more likely to pull all strings in order to woo minority voters than it is to openly state that certain minorities are inevitably allied to the other side.

Even more relevant, my presently euphoric friends on the Old Right are ignoring the teaching of that brilliant Italian sociologist (and classical liberal economist) Vilfredo Pareto. According to Pareto, social behavior is driven by irrational or nonrational instincts that manifest themselves collectively. Pareto’s first residue is the “instinct for combination,” which expresses itself in revolutionary action and in the more general drive toward overturning any apparently settled human condition. The second residue listed by Pareto is “the persistence of aggregates,” and this manifests itself in what I see at work in the conservative establishment. Just as those driven by the instinct for combination want to overturn an unpalatable status quo, those who act in response to the second residue are intent on keeping things as they are. According to this theory, societies can only function without major civil disturbance if the second residue balances the first. Out of this balance, however precariously maintained, it is possible to produce some kind of equilibrium.

Like most establishments, those who succeed in the conservative movement respond to the persistence of aggregates. They shun dramatic change. If those whom they have solemnly excommunicated or studiously ignored express an obvious truth, conservative leaders don’t run to welcome longtime heretics into their club. One can always modify the mistaken view in a position paper or on a television broadcast while leaving personnel and other party lines in place.  It is also more expedient to go on telling half-truths than to say something that might offend those groups that are being targeted as potential voters.

Other organizations beside the conservative establishment manifest the persistence of aggregates in a dramatic fashion. As a professor at a small college, I noticed that however much my institution changed, going from being a German Anabaptist school upholding traditional sexual mores and banning alcohol on campus to becoming a dispenser of multicultural ideology, the same power elite remained in place. The more things seemed to change, the more they remained exactly the same. Committees that hired new presidents and provosts underwent hardly any change in personnel; and even when choices turned out to be misguided and financially costly, the same people continued to dominate. The most that committee members have done to recognize past mistakes is to promise they’d try harder the next time they’re elected to a search committee.  (And they continue to receive this honor from their unchangeably trusting colleagues.)  

One should not confuse the instinct to keep everything in place with holding conservative principles -- or for that matter with adhering to principles of any kind. Wanting to keep things as they are, which may be what has kept Angela Merkel in power as German chancellor for many years despite her horrendous decisions, most disastrously in the matter of immigration, is based on a reluctance to change. We should not confuse this with a worldview or belief system.  In the case of the conservative establishment, what looks like inertia is also based on the need for funds and for keeping sponsors content. This strengthens the operation of Pareto’s second residue on an establishment that would not be inclined in any case to reverse a policy course once taken. We may therefore doubt that Bill Kristol’s recent discovery -- that immigration can gravely affect the nature of one’s government -- will have much effect on the conservative establishment. Its talking heads and institute executives are unlikely to turn against further legal immigration. Nor are they likely to revisit other positions that their movement abandoned decades ago, like whatever their views were on foreign policy before they adopted the neoconservative position.