There is an axiom that is often attributed, probably wrongly, to the historian Robert Conquest. Any organisation that is not explicitly rightwing will sooner or later become leftwing. The genius of the insight is that it avoids paranoia. It doesn’t pretend that there is a plot afoot. It doesn’t imagine some Gramscian scheme to train up leftist cadres and send them on a long march through the institutions. It just recognises a general gravitation of left-leaning people to careers where the profit motive isn’t paramount ...

Imagine, if you can bear it, the life of the average stand-up comedian. You traipse from pub to club for a small fee and expenses. “Success” is the occasional slot on a television panel show. You start a deeply unremunerative podcast. You self-publish a novel and lose money on it.

No one who is financially motivated would enter this world. Those who prioritise other things, such as creative expression or public exposure, might. And that — not the innate unfunniness of conservatives, not a liberal plot against them — is why comedy is a near-monopoly of the left. The right is usually the first to say that a state of affairs can be “unequal” without being “unfair”. It struggles to do so in this instance.

Conservatism is to a large extent self-eroding. A philosophy that (rightly) salutes enterprise will not attract enough people who want to serve in the culture-shaping institutions. Sure enough, the culture becomes less and less conservative. This problem is all the more acute in the US, where conservatism so exalts the profit motive that it is itself an industry. Burning away in the Republican gut is a historic grievance. Even as the “movement” achieved electoral success over half a century, the texture of life in the country went the other way. The school curricula. The policing of language. The positive discrimination. Nixon, Reagan and the Bushes didn’t win for this.

Some conservatives have rationalised this discrepancy between electoral triumph and cultural retreat as a kind of leftwing swindle. Or, worse, as proof of democracy’s futility. Their own complicity is lost on them. There are Republicans who can’t believe how leftwing universities are and also can’t believe that anyone would ever choose the unlucrative life of an academic. At some point, you’d hope, the irony will dawn on them.