There's a little about this in Sudhir Venkatesh's sociology of street gangs, and it also reminds me of Calvinism, and of certain strains of "environmentalism" right about now. In all three cases, the following beliefs are strongly held:
a) bad things will happen to most people (making almost no money and dying violently, going to Hell, suffering the effects of global climate change)
b) "I" am not like most people (I am a particularly bad-ass drug dealer, I am elect, I recycle)
c) because I am special, bad things will only happen to others (I will be promoted to the upper ranks, I will go to Heaven, global climate change will somehow only strike the people who don't recycle).
In the case of people who act politically against their own interests, it sounds like they identify not with their identity group but with people in power, whoever that may be, and believe themselves to be insulated from bad things happening to them on the grounds of their specialness—their wealth, their political clout, their usefulness to the people in power, etc. On rare occasions this works, and we hear about it, but the vast majority of the time it doesn't work, and we tend not to hear about that.