Have there been any studies done deconstructing the left-to-right ("Saul-to-Paul") political conversion narrative that the right-wing loves to throw around?
I'm talking about people like former CPUSA members who turned state like Whittaker Chambers, Bella Dodd, and Louis Budenz; neocons like Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz, and David Horowitz (rest in piss); or contemporary "conversion" stories like those of Abby Johnson. I'm obviously talking about Americans here but I'm sure you can name plenty of examples from other countries. What psychological factors cause someone to abandon leftism and fully embrace the right, and even worse, turn on their former comrades?
Is it simply the case that they upheld leftism as a dogma, so when their "god" died they found another god? Is it because they were always authoritarian assholes and embraced the right when the right gave them a better outlet for being authoritarian assholes? Was it because they found that the left was moving in a direction they didn't approve of, so they gradually became rightist? Or, using the narrative they themselves most often parrot, they felt "betrayed" by the left so in turn they betrayed the left?
Also, why do we rarely see any prominent right-wingers turning to the left?
151 posts and 22 image replies omitted.>>2699619I found Bella Dodd’s great-grandniece from one of her mother’s Facebook posts where she said Bella Dodd was her great-aunt. I cyberstalked her from there and saw that her daughter is now an influencer. People need to be way more aware of how much info about themselves they put online.
>>2661687See this is what people mean, like you can support Palestine without trying to connect two radically different issues, also the Palestinian resistence blueprint has been an objective failure more or less
>>2649156>there was a trend of ex-Jacobins who flipped to the Holy Alliance against Napoleonany specific examples of books about this?
This is precisely the trap that unfolds when one's praxis remains suspended in the realm of idealist abstraction rather than grounded materialist investigation. The settler colonial apparatus doesn't merely operate through the barrel of the gun, no it reproduces itself through the very same structural frameworks we deploy to critique it. Those who haven't undertaken the difficult work of excavating the material foundations of settler sovereignty the land-as-commodity, the juridical production of the Native and Black body as modern homo sacer, and the structural necessity of elimination for capital accumulation are susceptible to reactionary tendencies or grifts . Theres no shock they become susceptible to what I term reactionary interpellation. The far right doesn't contradict settler colonialism, you understand? It intensifies it, accelerates its contradictions, defends it. Without a grounded antagonistic positionality towards this, one's "radicalism" becomes mere aesthetic posturing, which won't hold up over the years.
Don't forget the identitarians, the liberal managers of white supremacy's symptoms. They treat race as cultural rather than structural, as discourse rather than as a relation to production. Their praxis inevitably gravitates toward the petite-bourgeois horizon because they've abandoned the class analytic that would reveal how white supremacy functions as a mode of colonial governance securing surplus populations and dividing the local proletariat.
Everyone here is saying MONEY MONEY MONEY MONEY MONEY MONEY but the Occam's Razor answer is that the far right appeals, on a human level, to the same insecurities and frustrations as leftism. So, it's not weird at all to see a former anarchist become a fascist, a former Marxist-Leninist become a TradCath, you name it. I think it's weirder to see a former radical become a milquetoast liberal, like a former anarchist become a Republican.