On a related note, I've also noticed that we basically have a Darwinian competition between different world models. Different groups of people subscribe to a particular explanation of how the world works, and that becomes their ideology. Some people go through this process consciously, but vast majority just internalize the world view from people around them as they grow up.

What's interesting is that once somebody settles on a particular world view then it's natural for them to reject conflicting views since there's no way to prove whether one view or the other is correct in most cases. And I tend to think of this in terms of thermodynamics where people have complex graphs of ideas in their heads, and when any particular idea is challenged then the whole set of ideas associated with it has to be reworked as well. It's easier to simply discard conflicting ideas than to go through the process of rethinking a bunch of things you've internalized over many years. This is why it's typically very hard to change people's ideas no matter how good your argument is. The cost of integrating this new information is just too high to bother in most cases.

What typically causes people to go through this process is when they start seeing the drift between their world model and the material reality they experience. When mainstream liberals start experiencing a continued decline in their material conditions then it becomes difficult to continue believing that everything is getting better and that they're living their best lives under the most enlightened system possible.

Hence why a lot of people started questioning things after 2008 crash, and as economic disasters continue, we see more and more people falling out of the liberal mainstream. Unfortunately, as you rightly point out, many of these people end up on the right because the right ideology is very close to liberal ideology, so it's much easier for people to internalize those ideas.

Excellent analysis. My partner started out extremely liberal but by wedging a crowbar into their cognitive dissonance every time liberalism conflicted with reality in their life I've managed to drag them leftward.

This is great I love this. It also shows why the western left has such vast issues, because most of them carry over pieces of that framework into whatever other ideology they choose. The framework still exists, they've just moved the furniture.

That's just my personal observation based on the mass migration of liberals from reddit to lemmy and how they've been reacting to the fact that their view isn't dominant. That said, I'm sure somebody has already articulated this in a better way before.