I think all of the above and more, some of which I have commented on in one of these threads recently.
- People on the ends, especially the left end, view the ideology as a way to express anti establishment ideas far more than they are true believers in the ideology. If the landscape changes in a way that makes attacking the establishment from the right more viable then it’s pretty easy to make the switch. When it comes to people to hate, there is a lot of common ground that can be found between Nazis and communists.
- Grift is real. There aren’t THAT many prominent switchers whose platform comes from being part of the establishment. The relevance is that when you are competing in the attention economy of the new media you are very beholden to audience capture and if people see that is where the wind is blowing then they have to start moving there to keep an audience. Interestingly, I have seen a couple of MAGA accounts who started veering “left” the last 6 months in ways that are difficult to reconcile and lack any sort of “ah ha” stated epiphany. The cynical side of me views this as a bet on the anti-trump soon becoming the heterodox “independent thinker” position and so there is a small number of people jockeying to take up that space.
- If people are moving right because of audience capture we have to address the demand side of the equation - why is that more viable for people looking for attention. For that I think we have to take seriously the limitations of uniaxial left vs right distinctions. I think a significant part of the shift over the last ten years has been a growing sense that “the left” has an approved set of beliefs. Compliance with them is strictly enforced and allows for only really narrow set of behaviors and ideas. Affiliation with the right has increasingly become a way to reject that. They don’t want to disband the DoE, they just want to be able to say the word retard without being hated on. They dont even want to be able to say the word retard, they just dont want to be not be allowed to. The saying then become part of proving a point that they reject the “left’s” view.