Abstract

Right-wing renegades usually base their political lives on a conversion experience. In this article, I take a dual perspective on such conversions. On the one hand, I show how political conversions from ›left‹ to ›right‹ are narratively constructed in biographical retrospect and argue that an apocalyptic structure of the conversion narrative enables the political change of side. On the other hand, I analyse time-diagnostic narratives formulated by right-wing renegades and argue that the world views of renegades often feature dichotomously structured narratives of diremption and decadence that have stood the political change of sides. Identifying these narratives can prove to be a heuristic for testing the ideology of political movements for their susceptibility to conversion narratives and a potential drift to the political right.