Neoconservativism and Trotskyism

[Nikki Stone1]

This is the history of the movement we are fighting. (From Foreign Affairs)

http://www.foreignaffairs.org/19950701fareviewessay5058/john-b-judis/trotskyism-to-anachronism-the-neoconservative-revolution.html

...The other important influence on neoconservatives was the legacy of Trotksyism--a point that other historians and journalists have made about neoconservatism but that eludes Ehrman. Many of the founders of neoconservatism, including The Public Interest founder Irving Kristol and coeditor Nathan Glazer, Sidney Hook, and Albert Wohlstetter, were either members of or close to the Trotskyist left in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Younger neoconservatives, including Penn Kemble, Joshua Muravchik, and Carl Gershman, came through the Socialist Party at a time when former Trotskyist Max Schachtman was still a commanding figure. What both the older and younger neoconservatives absorbed from their socialist past was an idealistic concept of internationalism. Trotskyists believed that Stalin, in trying to build socialism in one country rather than through world revolution, had created a degenerate workers' state instead of a genuine dictatorship of the proletariat. In the framework of international communism, the Trotskyists were rabid internationalists rather than realists and nationalists. In 1939, as a result of the Nazi-Soviet pact, the Trotskyist movement split, with one faction under James Burnham and Max Schachtman declaring itself opposed equally to German Nazism and Soviet communism. Under the influence of an Italian Trotskyist, Bruno Rizzi, Burnham and Schachtman envisaged the Nazi and Soviet bureaucrats and American managers as part of a new class. While Burnham broke with the left and became an editor at National Review, Schachtman remained.

The neoconservatives who went through the Trotskyist and socialist movements came to see foreign policy as a crusade, the goal of which was first global socialism, then social democracy, and finally democratic capitalism. They never saw foreign policy in terms of national interest or balance of power. Neoconservatism was a kind of inverted Trotskyism, which sought to "export democracy," in Muravchik's words, in the same way that Trotsky originally envisaged exporting socialism. It saw its adversaries on the left as members or representatives of a public sector--based new class.

The neoconservatives also got their conception of intellectual and political work from their socialist past. They did not draw the kind of rigid distinction between theory and practice that many academics and politicians do. Instead they saw theory as a form of political combat and politics as an endeavor that should be informed by theory. They saw themselves as a cadre in a cause rather than as strictly independent intellectuals. And they were willing to use theory as a partisan weapon.

Together, the legacy of nsc68 and Trotskyism contributed to a kind of apocalyptic thinking. The constant reiteration and exaggeration of the Soviet threat was meant to dramatize and win converts, but it also reflected the doomsday revolutionary mentality that characterized the old left. Even the sober historian Walter Laqueur predicted in 1974 the imminence of a "major international upheaval such as the world has not experienced since World War II." In 1979 Eugene Rostow (who was named after socialist Eugene Debs) predicted that if salt ii were ratified, "We will be taking not a step toward peace but a leap toward the day when a president of the United States will have to choose between the surrender of vital interests and nuclear holocaust..."

[entanglement]

1. That is vile slander against Trotsky...his ideas are antithetical to those of the Neocons

And WTF is "rabid" internationalism? How can internationalist socialism, which seeks to unite the working class worldwide be "rabid"? It is nationalist chauvinism that is "rabid". It is imperialism that is "rabid".

Trotsky was right on about Stalin - the Stalinist bureaucracy, apart from its numerous atrocities against the Soviet people, betrayed the Revolution by seeking to contain it to a single state. Trotsky defended these principles to his death (indeed, they caused his death at the hands of a Stalinist agent)

The Neocons, on the other hand, are just political opportunists. They are the political equivalent of pirates. They have one principle: to acquire power and use it. The association between Trotskyism and the Neocons that is made here is DISHONEST, since they repudiated everything that Trotsky and his philosophy stood for. Their thinking affected Internationalist Socialism and Trotskyism about as much as the fleas on a dog affect its breed.

Methinks the name "Trotsky" is just used here to elicit a Pavlovian reaction. Ignorant people probably hear that name and stop thinking (rationally).

[otherlander]

2. I agree.

When it comes to the disagreements about the Kronstadt rebellion that caused Emma Goldman to turn against him, I have to side with Goldman over Trotsky, but at least I can kind of understand what motivated him, and if he had taken power instead of Stalin, the gulags wouldn't have been set up and thousands of people wouldn't have died horribly.

[Nikki Stone1]

4. It's not as much about ideas as about approach and world view

Evangelical internationalism can be attached to any form of government. What it sounds like to me is that a lot of these guys were connected to the hard left and got disillusioned. When an extreme person gets disillusioned, he usually doesn't go to the center but to the other extreme. Trotskyan becomes neocon, not middle of the road Democrat. But many of the emotional qualities and approach (like apocalyptic thinking, rabid internationalism, etc. ) were kept.

[no_hypocrisy]

3. I can't see Sidney Hook as a "founder of neoconservatism".

His writings reflected mostly humanism, freethought, and democratic principles. He did defend Trotsky's version of communisim, but that alone does not place him as a father of neoconservatism. If he had lived past 1989, he would have been incredibly outspoken about the rightwing takeover of the government and society.