What drives leftists to forge new careers by siding with their former enemies? These apostates don’t simply retool or change course — they make an epic transformation, joining the very forces they once sought to upend. From Whittaker Chambers to David Horowitz, they customarily announce their volte face and market themselves as insiders ready to blow the whistle on their former comrades.

Often a team of elders, who already made the ideological switch, appears to bless them and ease their transition, providing new publishing outlets and career opportunities. In books, articles, and public appearances, these former reds beat a noisy retreat from their old commitments, displaying an unearned confidence in their new view of the world and a hair-on-fire intolerance for those still adhering to their prior convictions. Oddly, after convicting themselves for a long record of naiveté, ignorance, disloyalty, and worse, these born-again conservatives expect us to trust their latest political judgments.

How seriously should we take the head-spinning makeover of an upper-class philosophy professor? Shouldn’t we laugh at James Burnham, who started out lecturing Leon Trotsky on revolutionary strategy and ended up running a rogue CIA operation with mobster Frank Costello to kidnap American Communists and pump them full of sodium pentothal? (This actually happened — you couldn’t make this stuff up.)