Hello, my name's David Rundsenman and this is past, present, future, the History of Ideas podcast.

Today, it's the final part in our series about political conversions.

I'm talking to the political historian David Klemperer about what we think leads people

to completely change political positions.

And we're exploring what political conversion looks like in the 21st century, in the age of social media. And as you'll hear, we discuss and

disagree about whether this is now a post-ideological age. So David, this last conversation

is going to explore whether there are broader lessons to take from the stories that we've been talking about, which are very different in lots of ways, but have lots of really interesting connections.

But also, I want to go a bit further than we did in our last conversation to talk about where you think we are now in the politics of conversion,

in the politics of people shifting identities, changing allegiances.

But to start with a question, which will probably have occurred to a few people as they're

listening to this, most, not all, but most of the case studies that we've been looking at are

left to right. That is is people start off on the left

and they shed that skin and they often shed a few skins along the way and they end up on the right.

And it is sometimes said that that is just the way the human experience goes. People get more

right wing as they get older. I don't think that's true. I know

quite a lot of people who have got more left wing as they've got older. But do you think for this

particular subset of political ideas and changing identities, that is questions of conversion,

big ideological shifts, the default definitely is left to right. Can you think of

many examples of right to left? In the ones we've been talking about, maybe straight she is the

only one and I don't think even that counts. So he was with Mosley and then he became a communist

and then he ceased to be a communist. But the first of

those was from a position that was going to be identified with the right to communism. But even

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