Neoconservatives and Trotskyism

By Bill King
web posted March 22, 2004

In one of the first in-depth studies written about neoconservatism
in the 1970s, The Neoconservatives: The Men Who Are
Changing America's Politics (1978), Peter Steinfels observed
that it is impossible to understand the neoconservatives without
understanding their history. Yet it is precisely the history of "the
neocons" that is today being systematically distorted by
paleoconservatives through the polemical campaign they are
waging against leading neoconservative intellectuals and the
foreign policy of the Bush administration.

As part of the two-decade old civil war within intellectual
conservatism, paleoconservatives have forcefully asserted that
neoconservatism is a descendant of American Trotskyism, and
that neoconservatives continue to be influenced by the ideas of
the exiled Soviet revolutionary in their view of foreign policy. In
fact, in the period since the attacks of 9/11 the isolationist
paleocons have made the "Trotskyist neocon" assertion one of
their main weapons in the ongoing feud. Web sites such as The
Center for Libertarian Studies' LewRockwell.com and
Antiwar.com, and magazines such as Pat Buchanan's American
Conservative and the Rockford Institute's Chronicles, have all
featured articles focusing on the supposed link between the
neocons and Leon Trotsky. The most extreme paleocons, who
flirt dangerously with outright anti-Semitism, claim not only that
neoconservatism is derivative of Trotskyism but that a "cabal of
Jewish neocons" is manipulating US foreign policy and actually
implementing Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution from the
White House.

While paleoconservatives usually have little impact outside of
intellectual circles, their "Trotskyist neocon" assertion has rapidly
entered mainstream political discussion. To a large degree this is
due to the efforts of anti-neocon liberal pundits, such as Michael
Lind and William Pfaff, who popularized the neoconservative-as-
Trotskyist theme both before and during the initial ground war in
Iraq. The assertion is now so widely accepted that a writer as far
removed from paleoconservatism (or anti-neocon liberalism) as
Vanity Fair's Sam Tanenhaus can claim that, "…a belated
species of Trotskyism has at last established itself in the White
House."1 Ostensibly serious discussions of neoconservative
"Trotskyism" have also appeared in mainstream newspapers
throughout the world, from Canada's National Post to Hong
Kong's Asia Times Online.2 And even as respected a foreign
policy commentator as Dimitri K. Simes, co-publisher of The
National Interest, has joined the "Trotskyist neocon" chorus,
writing recently in Foreign Affairs that the neoconservatives'
belief in "permanent worldwide revolution" owes more to the
founder of the Bolshevik Red Army than to "America's
forefathers".3

But despite its current popularity, the "Trotskyist neocon"
assertion contributes nothing to our understanding of the origins,
or nature, of neoconservatism. In fact quite the opposite. While it
is based on elements of truth, the assertion for the most part
consists of exaggerations, misrepresentations, and even outright
falsifications whose end result is a thoroughly distorted view of
the history of neoconservatism.

The "Trotskyist roots" of neoconservatism

As far back as the mid 1980s, paleoconservatives were
caustically commenting on the supposed "Trotskyist roots" of the
neoconservatives. At an infamously raucous debate between
conservatives held at the Philadelphia Society in 1986, the
paleoconservative historian Stephen J. Tonsor expressed dismay
that former Marxists had come to play such a dominant role
within conservatism, and quipped that had Trotsky not been
assassinated he would no doubt be working for the Hoover
Institute and writing articles for Commentary.4 But it was not
until the Gulf War of 1991 that the tale about neoconservatism's
"Trotskyist roots" took the form in which we know it today.
Within weeks of the war ending, Leon Hadar of the Cato
Institute laid out the now widely accepted view in an article in the
Washington Report on Middle East Affairs:

Among the major figures in the [neoconservative] movement
were former Trotskyites who studied in the '30s and '40s at the
then "poor man's Harvard," the City College of New York, a
center for socialist activism. They included Irving Kristol, who in
the 1950s launched an anti-Soviet CIA front, the International
Congress for Cultural Freedom; Norman Podhoretz, the editor
of the American Jewish Committee's monthly magazine
Commentary, which he turned into a major neoconservative
outlet; Podhoretz's wife, Midge Decter, the chairperson of the
now-defunct Committee on the Free World; sociologists Nathan
Glazer and Daniel Bell; and Democratic Party pamphleteer Ben
Wattenberg.5

The only problem with Hadar's account of neoconservatism's
origins is that it is almost completely false. A simple check of
biographical facts is enough to show that neither Norman
Podhoretz nor Midge Decter attended CCNY in the 1930s or
40s, nor were they ever Marxists, let alone Trotskyists. Nathan
Glazer and Daniel Bell did attend CCNY in the late 1930's, but
again neither was ever a Trotskyist. Glazer was a Left Socialist-
Zionist, while Bell joined first the Young People's Socialist
League (YPSL) in the early 1930s, and then the ardently anti-
communist Social Democratic Federation towards the end of the
decade. For his part, Ben Wattenberg could hardly have
attended CCNY in the 1930s or 40s since he was only born in
1933. He in fact did not attend CCNY at all, and was also never
a Trotskyist. That leaves Irving Kristol as the only
neoconservative among those mentioned by Hadar who was
actually ever associated with Trotskyism—and even that
statement requires some qualification, as we will see below.

Outright fabrications aside, part of the reason behind the
recurrent exaggeration of the "Trotskyist roots" of the
neoconservatives lies in their frequent conflation with their parent
grouping, the New York Intellectuals. As Alan Wald detailed in
the most authoritative work on the impact of Trotskyism on the
New York Intellectuals, The New York Intellectuals: The Rise
and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Left from the 1930's to the
1980's (1987), many of the latter group did indeed pass through
the different shades of Trotskyism available in the 1930s and
40s. From its different generations, one can list: Elliot Cohen,
Sidney Hook (a brief and rather hesitant fellow traveler), Herbert
Solow, Meyer Schapiro, Irving Howe, Saul Bellow, Harold
Rosenberg, Dwight McDonald, and Clement Greenberg. There
was also the infamous and fractious relationship between Trotsky
and the founding editors of Partisan Review, William Phillips and
Philip Rhav.

But the original neoconservative "brain trust" of the 1970s, as
Alexander Bloom referred to it in his Prodigal Sons (1986), did
not consist of any of the above New York intellectuals
associated with Trotskyism.6 Instead, it consisted of Kristol,
Glazer, Bell, Seymour Martin Lipset, and Norman
Podhoretz—and of this group, only two were briefly involved
with Trotskyism: Kristol and Lipset. We can even add here the
names of two less influential neoconservatives, although eminent
scholars in their own rite: the historian and wife of Irving Kristol,
Gertrude Himmelfarb, and the late political scientist Martin
Diamond. The result is a grand total of four founding
neoconservatives who passed through the ranks of Trotskyism.
If one considers the list of first generation neoconservatives
mentioned so far, which includes Bell, Glazer, Podhoretz and
Decter, none of whom were Trotskyists, and then one adds such
prominent early neoconservatives as Daniel Patrick Moynahan,
James Q. Wilson, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Michael Novak, Robert
Nisbet, Peter Berger, Hilton Kramer, and Walter Laqueur (and
indeed one could go on); in other words if one looks at the first
generation of neoconservatives as a whole, its so-called
"Trotskyist roots" are shown to be much smaller and weaker
than paleoconservatives have so insistently claimed.

More recently, as the "Trotskyist neocon" assertion has taken an
increasingly prominent place in paleoconservative polemics, the
trend has been away from inventing fictitious Trotskyist pasts for
first generation neoconservatives, and towards using insinuations
that leave the question of who was a Trotskyist deliberately
unanswered. And understandably so, as there is more mileage to
be had in implying that all of the original neoconservatives were
former Trotskyists than by continuously recycling the names of
the four that actually were.

A good example of this vagueness is provided by the prominent
paleocon historian Paul Gottfried. In 1988, Gottfried co-
authored The Conservative Movement, a serious and measured
historical study of post-war intellectual conservatism that focused
on the neo/paleo divide, and in which he made no mention of the
supposed "Trotskyist roots" of neoconservatism. Yet subsequent
to the Gulf War, Gottfried added an awkward and
unsubstantiated claim about neoconservatism's "Trotskyist
residues" to a revised 1993 edition of the book.7 Today he
polemically decries on the LewRockwell.com web site a
conspicuously unnamed "…Trotskyist ascendancy over the
conservative movement that began in the seventies and eighties"
in which neoconservatives, themselves a "leftist revolutionary
movement", have "…dragged Trotskyist themes, along with
other baggage, into the conservative movement".8 No names are
provided by Gottfried for the simple reason that it would be
impossible to "expose" the Trotskyist pasts of any original
neoconservatives other than the four mentioned above—whose
numbers hardly merit the claim of a "Trotskyist ascendancy".

The "Trotskyism" of Irving Kristol

If the "Trotskyist roots" of neoconservatism have been greatly
exaggerated, what about those of the first generation who were
involved with Trotskyism? How much of an influence did
Trotskyism have on their thinking? Presumably on this level a
more credible case could be made for a real Trotskyist influence
on neoconservatism. But it is precisely here that the complete
lack of substance of the "Trotskyist neocon" assertion emerges,
for there is nothing in any of the neoconservatives' vast political,
sociological, or cultural writings that points to the remotest
influence of Trotskyism. Instead, those propagating the assertion
have been forced to rely only on whatever anecdotal evidence is
available to make their case. Thus Irving Kristol, who wrote an
autobiographical essay entitled "Memoirs of a Trotskyist" and
has sprinkled mentions of his youthful political dalliances
throughout his writings, is more often accused of still being
influenced by Trotskyism than Seymour Martin Lipset, who was
also a Trotskyist but who has not made similar use of his own
brief radical past.

For paleocon polemicists, it matters little that Kristol has spent
almost his entire adult life as one of America's most prolific and
high-profile intellectual proponents of democracy and capitalism.
It matters little because as diligently reported by paleocon
journalist Daniel McCarthy, Kristol had the temerity to write,
and supposedly did so "with relish", that "I regard myself as
lucky to have been a young Trostkyite and I have not a single
bitter memory".9 Just as incriminating is Kristol's claim to have
learned how to construct an argument by reading Trotskyist
theoretical journals! But if the lack of seriousness in the paleocon
accusations is evident, it does raise the question of exactly how
much of a Trotskyist Irving Kristol was in his youth. And if one
takes a close look at his actual Trotskyist past, a very different
picture emerges from the one that has been conjured up by the
polemicists and to a certain extent by Kristol himself.

Kristol was involved in the late 1930s, still in his teens, in the
milieux of the young Jewish intellectuals that frequented the now-
infamous Alcove No.1 at CCNY. While there he became a
fellow traveler of the small group of Trotskyist students who
belonged to the youth wing of the Socialist Workers Party
(SWP), known as the Young People's Socialist League-Fourth
International (YPSL-FI). While steeped in the world of hyper-
intellectual debating at CCNY, Kristol was not an SWP or
YPSL-FI member—and much less a full blown Trotskyist
ideologue, as is often implied by those seeking to exaggerate his
Trotskyist credentials. Infamously, James P. Cannon, Irish-
American leader of the Trotskyists, once admonished Kristol
and his friend and fellow CCNYer Earl Raab for not joining the
SWP. From Mexico, Trotsky himself cast a wary eye on the
YPSL's and fellow travelers such as Kristol and Raab because
of their "lack of experience" and, more damningly, for their "petty
bourgeois" backgrounds.10

Despite Cannon's scoldings, Kristol never did join the "official"
Trotskyists of the SWP, but rather the heretical offshoot led by
Max Shachtman, the Workers' Party (WP), in 1940. More
importantly, Kristol belonged to a small intra-party faction inside
the WP known as the "Shermanites" which was led by future
Sociologist Philip Selznick, and also included Lipset,
Himmelfarb, and Diamond, i.e. the only other neoconservatives
to have been associated with Trotskyism. What is key here, and
what for the most part has been overlooked, is that the
Shermanites considered not only Stalinism but Bolshevism, which
in their context meant Trotskyism, to be "… bureaucratic,
totalitarian, and undemocratic".11 Decisive to Kristol and the
others' rejection of Marxism and Trotskyism was Robert
Michels' Political Parties, which was introduced to the group by
Selznick.12 This "premature" anti-communism was so anathema
to Shachtman that after Kristol and the tiny band of Shermanites
resigned from the Workers' Party in 1941, a mere one year after
they had joined, they were then retroactively expelled. The
journal that Kristol and the Shermanites briefly published after
their expulsion from the Workers Party, Enquiry, far from
providing "conventional Marxist fare" as has been claimed by
one scholar, in fact consisted mainly of substantive critiques of
Marxism, Leninism, and Trotskyism, all the more noteworthy for
the youthfulness of those making them.13

A more sober appraisal of the historical evidence shows that,
contrary to the claims of the paleocons, and even some of his
own writings, Irving Kristol's Trotskyism was far too peripheral
and brief for him to be considered a representative Trotskyist of
that era, or even much of a Trotskyist at all—something which
applies just as much if not more to the only other "Trotskyist
neocons": Lipset, Himmelfarb, and Diamond.

The question of "Shachtmanism"

While first generation neoconservatives are accused of having
been Trotskyists, second generation neocons are usually charged
with Trotskyism indirectly, by virtue of supposedly having been
"Shachtmanites". Those meriting this accusation are the small
minority of today's neconservatives who were members of the
Socialist Party-Social Democratic Federation/Young People's
Socialist League (SP-SDF/YPSL), and later the Social
Democrats USA, in the late 1960's and early 70's. The
supposed link with Trotskyism comes in the form of Max
Shachtman, the leader of the 1940 split from official Trotskyism
who would later go on to call the Socialist Party home and play a
key role in that party's right-wing from the late 1950's to his
death in 1972.

Shachtman occupies a fascinating place in the history of Marxism
in the US for having moved, over the span of 20 years, all the
way from Trotskyism to a fervently anti-communist version of
social democracy. What makes this move particularly intriguing is
that Shachtman carried it out while doggedly maintaining an
orthodox Marxist phraseology that had increasingly little
relevance to his actual politics. Since a small number of today's
neoconservatives, such as Joshua Muravchik and Carl
Gershman, played key roles in the Socialist Party, YPSL, and
Social Democrats USA during the 1960's and 70's, there is a
degree of truth to a connection between Max Shachtman and a
handful of the current generation of neocons.

But what has conveniently been forgotten by the paleocons
amidst their frantic references to Max Shachtman's "Trotskyism"
is that Shachtman broke definitively with his unique version of
that ideology in the mid 1950s, even before dissolving the
International Socialist League (ISL, successor to the Workers'
Party) and joining the Socialist Party in 1958. Even more,
abandoning Trotskyism was a precondition set by the SP
leadership for allowing Shachtman and his followers to join their
party. Once inside the party, Shachtman and the former
members of the ISL carried on squarely in the tradition of the
right-wing socialist "Old Guard" of the party that had split away
in the 1930s: staunchly anti-Communist, closely supportive of the
established trade union leaderships, orthodox Marxist in official
discourse, and crucially, oriented towards working within the
Democratic party—something even the Old Guard had not been
willing to advocate. The historian Robert J. Alexander, who was
himself active in the Socialist Party in those years, notes that after
1958 the ideological distinctions in the party between the ex-ISL
cadre and the pre-1958 socialists basically disappeared.14
While the former Shactmanites maintained close ties inside the
SP, these ties were now based on a type of social democratic
politics with deep roots in the right wing of American Socialism,
rather than on a Trotskyism that had been consciously discarded.

None of this history matters to paleoconservative polemicists
though. In modern Old Right folklore, not only does Shachtman
remain a Trotskyist beyond the late 1950s, but the Socialist
Party itself is somehow transformed into a "Trotskyite"
organization. Only by means of such blatant fabrications can
Srdja Trifkovic, writing in the on-line version of Chronicles, claim
that second generation neoconservatives, "…including Joshua
Muravchik, and Carl Gershman, came to neoconservatism
through the Socialist Party at a time when it was Trotskyite in
outlook and politics."15 In reality, the Socialist Party itself was
never "Trotskyite", nor did any Trotskyists play a role inside it
after their expulsion from the party in 1937. For Socialists,
Trotskyism was a political opponent by the time that Muravchik
and Penn Kemble (together with Michael Harrington) led the
party and its youth wing in the late 1960's. It was not even
remotely an issue by the time Carl Gershman led the successor
to the right-wing of the Socialist Party following the split in 1972,
the Social Democrats-USA.

The very labeling of the few ex-socialist neoconservatives of
today as "former Shachtmanites" is misleading, especially since
the label is used to imply that they share Max Shachtman's
historical connection to Trotskyism, which they do not. Justin
Raimondo makes the motivation behind the label clear when he
writes in Anti-War.com, that "…it was Shachtman's particular
schismatic brand of Trotskyism, as advocated by the "Yipsels,"
as Comrade Muravchik and his fellow young commies called
themselves, that over time was transmuted into a militant push for
global "democracy.""16 Raimondo's polemics on the Anti-
war.com website demonstrate that he is familiar—if perhaps
excessively preoccupied—with the history of American
Trotskyism. But the conspiratorial edge to much of his writing
often results in presenting a skewed history. His attempt to link
neoconservatives to Shachtmanism is a confused amalgam of
eras and ideologies that is way off the mark, beginning with his
curious labeling of the 1960s YPSL's as both "Shachtmanites"
and "commies" when they in fact represented a uniquely
American version of right-wing social democracy.

The main tenets of the actual "schismatic brand of Trotskyism"
that Raimondo refers to, and that Shachtman adhered to in the
1940s and early 50s, were a revolutionary opposition to
capitalism, a "third camp" orientation ("neither Washington nor
Moscow"), the theory of bureaucratic collectivism, and support
for an independent labor party in the US. It is this set of ideas
that can most accurately be referred to as "Shachtmanism".17
But not only was such Shachtmanite politics the furthest thing
from the minds of Muravchik, Gershman, and the other young
Socialists in the late 1960s and 70s—none of whom was old
enough to have belonged to the ISL, and for whom Shachtman
was merely a charismatic anti-Communist elder statesman—not
even Shachtman himself still advocated those positions, having
abandoned them more than a decade earlier.

Commenting on the all too common tendency of labeling those
on the right wing of the Socialist Party as "Shachtmanites",
Muravchik, who was National Chairman of the YPSL between
1968 and 1973, has put it succinctly: "I loved Shachtman's
lectures, but what I learned from them had nothing to do with the
Trotskyite arcana that had once been the substance of
Shachtmanism. It had everything to do with the evil nature of
communism."18 It is the inability to distinguish between right
wing social democracy and revolutionary Marxism that underlies
the confused allegations hurled at today's neoconservatives—a
small number of whom were once socialists, but whose "former
Shachtmanism" turns out to have even less basis in fact than the
"former Trotskyism" of the first generation.

"Inverted" Trotskyism

A more sophisticated version of the "Trotskyist neocon"
assertion focuses not on the pasts of individual neoconservatives
but on the impact that Trotskyism has supposedly had on
neoconservatism as a school of thought. This "neoconservatism-
as-inverted-Trotskyism" approach is best exemplified by JP
Zmyrak in his article entitled "America the Abstraction", which
appeared in Pat Buchanan's The American Conservative, as well
as in a follow up piece, "Lies, Damn Lies, and Anti-Semitism",
that was posted on the website of the America's Future
Foundation. Zmyrak maintains that the former Trotskyists who
became Cold War anti-Communists, such as Kristol, Sidney
Hook (who in fact was never a Trotskyist), and particularly
James Burnham, brought with them a "… strong tendency
towards pure abstraction, towards viewing national questions
purely in ideological terms…."19 According to Zmyrak this
abstractionism would later become a hallmark of
neoconservatism itself, and "…in some respects mirrors the
Trotskyism [the neoconservatives] once held."20

While more sophisticated than the smears of the polemicists, this
version of the assertion is perhaps even more flawed with
regards to a connection between Trotskyism and
neoconservatism. The "inverted" thesis has its roots at least in
part in the academic works on neoconservatism that appeared in
the 1990s. In particular, it can be traced back to Garry Dorrien's
The Neoconservative Mind (1993), which Zmyrak cites in his
article, and to a long book review by John B. Judis of John
Ehrman's The Rise of Neoconservatism, entitled "Trotskyism to
Anachronism: The Neoconservative Revolution" that appeared in
Foreign Affairs in 1995. In his book, Dorrien argues for the
centrality of James Burnham, who in the 1930s was a leading
intellectual and leader of the American Trotskyists, as an
ideological precursor of the neoconservatives. One of Dorrien's
main contentions—which is unfortunately not developed
systematically but instead sprinkled frustratingly throughout the
book—is that through Burnham and later Irving Kristol,
neoconservatism retained the "..rhetorical methods…" and
"…chief concepts…" of Trotskyism.21 This is evident in
Burnham and Kristol's aggressive polemics and above all in their
"contempt" for liberalism, which was brought over, according to
Dorrien, directly from Trotskyism.

In his Foreign Affairs book review, Judis uses the same
methodology as Dorrien with regards to the legacy of Trotskyism
on neoconservative thought, and is more explicit in using the term
"inverted Trotskyism". Writing specifically on the
neoconservative view of foreign policy, Judis maintains that,
"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", and
that, "… [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."
Behind this lay the fact that, "What both the older and younger
neoconservatives absorbed from their [Trotskyist] past was an
idealistic concept of internationalism."22

The main weakness of the Dorrien/Judis approach used by
Zmyrak is, ironically, its own excessive abstractionism. The
approach is based precisely on abstracting Trotskyism from the
concepts that define it as a Marxist political ideology, such as the
anti-capitalist class struggle and proletarian internationalism, and
those that define it as a specific school within Marxism, such as
the need for a Fourth International and the transitional program.
As archaic and even quixotic as those principles seem, without
them the term "Trotskyism" is reduced to a meaningless label. It
then becomes deceptively easy to refer to anything as "inverted
Trotskyism", from an aggressive polemical style and "contempt"
for liberalism as argued by Dorrien, to an "idealist" concept of
internationalism as argued by Judis. But what does that really
say? Can such commonplace characteristics and widely held
viewpoints seriously be considered in any way specific to, or
constitutive of, Trotskyism as a political ideology? This approach
focuses on elements that are at best incidental to Trotskyism, and
for that reason it implies more than it can demonstrate and
misleads more than it illuminates. This is even more the case
when we consider that very few neoconservatives were ever
Trotskyists. It perhaps goes without saying that this type of
abstractionism is disastrous as an approach to history, but is
tailor-made for making sensationalistic accusations.

Permanent Confusion

The final variation of the "Trotskyist neocon" assertion is the one
that received much attention during the debates over the war in
Iraq, and which contributed the most to the assertion's current
widespread popularity. It is also perhaps the most confused. The
contention here, as ludicrous as it may seem, is that
neoconservatives in the US Defense Department, such as
Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and former
Defense Policy Board chairman Richard Perle, are surreptitiously
implementing Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution from the
White House.23

This charge is associated primarily with the liberal pundit Michael
Lind, who in a much quoted article in the New Statesman from
April of this year wrote that, "…neoconservative defence [sic]
intellectuals…call their revolutionary ideology 'Wilsonianism'
(after President Woodrow Wilson), but it is really Trotsky's
theory of the permanent revolution mingled with the far-right
Likud strain of Zionism".24 Even before Lind, however, the
charge had already been made by Paris-based columnist William
Pfaff, who had written in the International Herald Tribune in
December of 2002 that, "The Bush administration's
determination to deal with its problems through military means
[….] seems a rightist version of Trotsky's "permanent revolution,
" destroying existing institutions and structures in the millenarian
expectation that all this violence will come to an end in a better
and happier world."25 As recently as this past August, Pfaff was
still insisting in the IHT that neoconservatives, "…are influenced
by the Trotskyist version of Marxist millenarianism that was the
intellectual seedbed of the neoconservative movement."26

Yet if anti-neocon liberals such as Lind and Pfaff—together with
an assortment of conspiracy theorists27—have done the most to
popularize the idea that neoconservatives adhere to the theory of
permanent revolution, it is again the paleoconservatives that
deserve the credit for coining the idea—or at least some of the
credit, for the actual origins are more varied than one would
imagine. Paleoconservative criticism of the aggressive
internationalism championed by some neoconservatives dates
back to the origins of their dispute in the early 1980's. But at that
time, neoconservatives were only being accused of "neo-
Wilsonianism". Explicitly equating the belief in promoting a
"global democratic revolution" with Trotsky's theory of
permanent revolution is a much more recent invention that started
during the debates over how to respond to the terrorist attacks
of 9/11—and it has some rather surprising roots.

In September of 2001, just a few weeks after the terrorist
attacks on New York and the Pentagon, the paleoconservative
author Joseph Stromberg devoted an article on the
LewRockwell.com web site to attacking a piece by
neoconservative scholar Michael Ledeen entitled "Creative
Destruction: How to wage a revolutionary war". Ledeen's main
argument was that it was "…time once again to export the
democratic revolution" as the best way to defeat the terrorists.28
Polemicizing against this view, Stromberg questioned whether
Ledeen's approach stemmed from "Schumpeter or Bakunin" and
decided it was neither. Stromberg then quoted a Yugoslav
bureaucrat from the 1960s, Edvard Kardelj, who at the height of
the Soviet-Chinese dispute sought to discredit the "Chinese line
of exporting the revolution by force" by labeling it as
"Trotskyite". Stromberg, who at least gives credit to Commissar
Kardelj, then went on to—incredibly—choose that very same
label to smear Ledeen and the neoconservatives. Given these
methods, one should perhaps refer to the paleocons as the
"inverted Titoists" of conservatism!

In reality, while Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution can be
called many things, including irrelevant, it has nothing whatsoever
to do with exporting revolution. Much less does it extol upheaval
for its own sake or the inherent virtues of violence and
destruction—something more akin to a blend of Georges Sorel
and Frantz Fanon than to Trotskyism. As defined in its final form
by Trotsky in the late 1920s, the theory of permanent revolution
held that in third world countries, attempts to carry out the tasks
of the "bourgeois-democratic" revolution, such as land reform
and "authentic" national independence, would fail unless those
attempts led to the seizure of power by the working class
through a socialist revolution.29 Rather than a theory of
"exporting revolution", Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution
is above all a theory of the possibility of socialist revolution in the
third world through combining and passing over the "historical
stage" of a "bourgeois-democratic" revolution.

The claim that neoconservatives derive their view of foreign
policy from an inversion of the American Trotskyists' call for
permanent revolution in the 1930s and 40s is thus deeply flawed
right from the start: Permanent revolution was never about using
the Red Army to spread socialism. The Trotskyist movement's
actual conceptual framework and political activity in the 1930s
and early 40s consisted of trying to bring about world-wide
revolutions "from below" as the way to break the Soviet Union
out of its isolation and achieve world socialism. Calling for the
Stalinist bureaucracy to export socialism by bayonet would not
only have had nothing to do with permanent revolution, it would
have been suicidal to boot!30 It was, after all, that same Stalinist
bureaucracy that the Trotskyists were seeking to overthrow
through "political revolution" in the USSR, and which was itself
actively strangling revolutions and annihilating Trotskyists
wherever it could, from Siberia to Spain to Vietnam.

Even if one were to accept, for the purpose of example, that
Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution was based on an
idealist internationalism that called for the military expansion of
the USSR, the anti-neocons would still be mistaken in their claim
that there is a single neoconservative approach to foreign policy
that emerged as an inversion of this theory. One need only note
that Irving Kristol, the supposed "arch-Trotskyist" according to
the paleocons, has never adhered to an internationalist or
"crusading" view of international relations. Kristol has instead
argued for a "global unilateralism", a hybrid view based on the
criteria of American national interest, something which situates
him closer to foreign policy realism than to an idealist focus on
"global democratic revolution".31 As John Judis himself pointed
out in an earlier, more measured article, even James Burnham,
often considered a forerunner to the neoconservatives, viewed
American foreign policy, "…not in terms of a Wilsonian quest for
global democracy, but in terms of American national interest."32
And Burnham was once a leader of the American Trotskyists.

On the other hand, Joshua Muravchik, one of today's leading
neoconservative foreign policy intellectuals, who does indeed
argue for a "democratic internationalism", is not now nor has he
ever been a "Trotskyite", "Shachtmanite", or a supporter of any
of Trotsky's theories—least of all his theory of third world
revolution. The same applies to all the other second generation
neoconservatives both in and out of the White House such as
Ledeen, Wolfowitz, Perle, Douglas Feith, I. Lewis "Scooter"
Libby, and former director of the CIA, James Woolsey. Beyond
just a massive misreading of Trotsky, it is simply a lack of
common sense to maintain that today's neoconservatives, all
leading figures in the most powerful capitalist democracy in the
history of the world, have been in any way influenced by a theory
whose staunchest partisans have included insurgent Bolivian
miners in the 1950s, Peruvian peasant militias in the 1960s,
urban guerrillas in Argentina and Chile in the 1970s, and which
today still has adherents among the many rabidly anti-American
academics that can be found on university campuses throughout
the world.

What paleoconservatives and anti-neocon liberals are really
referring to when they talk about "permanent revolution" is a
straw-man construct that could more accurately be labeled
"perpetual war". This construct is then attributed to
neoconservatives as "proof" that they have been influenced by
Trotskyism. And just as this construct has no similarity to either
neoconservatism or Trotskyism, one cannot help but notice the
just as obvious lack of similarity between it and the current
National Security Strategy being implemented by the Bush
administration. Claims of a "perpetual war" waged by the
Pentagon and of endless adventurism against all and sundry
courtesy of the "War Party" stand in stark contrast to the actual
course of American foreign policy since the formal end of the
war in Iraq, in which diplomacy (backed by credible examples of
force) has far outweighed military action.

Recognizing this fact does not entail glossing over the difficulties
that the Bush administration faces—and will continue to face if
re-elected—in the design and pursuit of its foreign policy
objectives. Nor does it entail ignoring the fact that, as part of the
ongoing war on terror, military force may well have to be used
again in other parts of the world. What it does entail is seeing
through the profoundly nonsensical notion that a desire to
implement Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution is motivating
US foreign policy, rather than the need for a strategic response
to a radical Islamist terrorism that has already taken the lives of
over 3 000 Americans and many others around the world. And
given this deadly menace, what further motivation could possibly
be needed?

Ultimately, regardless of what aspect of the theory one chooses
to examine, there is no real substance to the "Trotskyist neocon"
assertion. Whether the result of polemical excess or simply the
quest for spiced-up prose, the assertion is essentially a collection
of fabrications, exaggerations, and distortions. It combines the
historically inaccurate with the intellectually sloppy. Lost amidst
all the abstraction and distortion are the real, distinct, and—save
for a few tenuous connections—unrelated histories of
neoconservatism and American Trotskyism.

What makes all this so ironic is that it is the paleoconservatives
and anti-neocon liberals themselves who not so long ago
marched together with Trotskyists—the real ones that is—in
opposition to the toppling of Saddam's dictatorship in Iraq. Even
more, they have featured articles attacking US foreign policy by
prominent long-time Trotskyists on the very same web sites in
which they have accused neoconservatives and the Defense
department of… Trotskyism! Amidst the shrillness of their
accusations one thing is certain: the "Trotskyist neocon" assertion
is without a doubt one of the major oddities of recent American
intellectual life.

Bill King lives in Surrey, BC.

Footnotes:

1 Sam Tanenhaus, "Hello to All That: The irony behind the
demise of the Partisan Review", Slate, April 16, 2003,
http://slate.msn.com/id/2081610 (April 24, 2003).

2 Jeet Heer, "Trotsky's Ghost Wandering the White House",
National Post, June 7, 2003; Jim Lobe, "What is a neo-
conservative anyway?", Asia Times Online, August 13, 2003,
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/EH13Aa01.html,
(August 14, 2003).

3 Dimitri K. Simes, "America's Imperial Dilemma", Foreign
Affairs, November-December 2003, p. 95.

4 Stephen J. Tonsor, "Why I Too Am Not A Neoconservative",
National Review, June 20, 1986, p.55.
5 Leon Hadar, "The "Neocons": From the Cold War to the
"Global Intifada"", WRMEA, April 1991,
http://www.washington-
report.org/backissues/0491/9104027.htm (May 10, 2003).

6 Alexander Bloom, Prodigal Sons: The New York Intellectuals
& Their World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), p.
369.

7 See Paul Gottfried and Thomas Fleming, The Conservative
Movement, (Boston: Twaine Publishers, 1988), and Gottfried,
The Conservative Movement, Revised Edition, (New York:
Twaine Publishers, 1993), p. 161.

8 Paul Gottfried, "The Trotsky Hour", Lewrockwell.com, March
6, 2003, http://www.lewrockwell.com/gottfried/gottfried46.html,
(May 10, 2003).

9 Daniel McCarthy, "Springtime for Trotsky",
Lewrockwell.com, Nov. 6, 2001,
http://www.lewrockwell.com/dmccarthy/dmccarthy23.html,
(May 10, 2003).

10 Leon Trotsky, In Defense of Marxism. (New York:
Pathfinder, 1990), p.63.

11 Alan M. Wald, The New York Intellectuals: The Rise and
Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Left from the 1930's to the 1980's
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press), p.350.

12 Seymour Martin Lipset, "Steady Work: An Academic
Memoir", Annual Review of Sociology, Vol. 22, 1996, pp. 1-
27.

13 Gary Dorrien, The Neoconservative Mind (Philadelphia:
Temple University Press, 1993), p. 71. See Enquiry, vols. 1-2,
1942-45, particularly the articles by Philip Selznick.

14 Robert Alexander, International Trotskyism: 1929-1985
(Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), p. 812-813. See also
Eric Chester, Socialists and the Ballot Box (New York: Praeger
Publishers, 1985), pp. 135, 146.

15 Srdja Trifkovic, "Neoconservatism, Where Trotsky Meets
Stalin And Hitler", Chronicles Extra, July 23, 2003,
http:
//www.chroniclesmagazine.org/News/Trifkovic/NewsST072303
.html (July 27, 2003).

16 Justin Raimondo, "Smoking Gun", Anti-war.com, May 9,
2003, http://www.antiwar.com/justin/j050903.html, (May 10,
2003).

17 A compelling case can be made that the legacy of
Shachtmanism is found not in the right wing of social democracy,
but in the International Socialist current that split from the SP-
SDF/YPSL in the early 1960's and was led by long-time
Shachtmanite Hal Draper. See Alexander, Trotskyism, p.899,
and also Milton Fisk, Socialism from below in the United States:
The origins of the International Socialist Organization (Cleveland:
Hera Press, 1977).

18 Joshua Muravchik, "Socialists of America, Disunited", The
Weekly Standard, August 28, 2000,
http://www.aei.org/news/newsID.11887,filter./news_detail.asp,
(May 15, 2003).

19 J.P. Zmirak, "America the abstraction", The American
Conservative, January 13, 2003,
http://www.amconmag.com/01_13_03/cover7.html (July 26,
2003).

20 J.P. Zmirak, "Lies, Damned Lies, and Anti-Semitism",
America's Future Foundation, July 24, 2003,
http://www.americasfuture.org/viewBrainwash.cfm?pubid=215
(July 26, 2003).

21 Gary Dorrien, Neoconservative, pp.381, 36.

22 John B. Judis, "Trotskyism to Anachronism: The
Neoconservative Revolution", Foreign Affairs, July/August,
1995,
http:
//www.foreignaffairs.org/19950701fareviewessay5058/john-b-
judis/trotskyism-to-anachronism-the-neoconservative-
revolution.html (April 24, 2003).

23 Through an approach that resembles "six degrees of
separation" more than historical research, it has been suggested
that because Wolfowitz, Perle, and James Woolsey were
influenced by military strategist Albert Wohlstetter (who was not
a neoconservative) in the 1970's and 80's, and because
Wohlstetter had in the 1930's belonged to a breakaway
Trotskyist splinter group, that this therefore demonstrates a link
between neoconservatism and Trotskyism. See Heer, "Trotsky's
Ghost". For Wohlstetter, see Wald, Intellectuals, p. 107.
24 Michael Lind, "The Weird Men Behind George W. Bush's
War", New Statesman, April 7, 2003,
http://www.newamerica.net/index.cfm?pg=article&pubID=1189,
(April 24, 2003).

25 William Pfaff, "Al Qaeda vs. the White House", International
Herald Tribune, Dec. 28, 2002,
http://iht.com/articles/81589.html (April 24, 2003).

26 William Pfaff, "The philosophers of chaos reap a whirlwind",
International Herald Tribune, August 23, 2003,
http://www.iht.com/articles/107407.html, (August 25, 2003).

27 For a cringe-inducing article on George W. Bush's supposed
adherence to Trotskyism, see Ted Rall, "Permanent Revolution",
Progressive Populist, Feb. 19, 2003,
http://www.populist.com/02.19.rall.permawar.html, (April 24,
2003).

28 Joseph Stromberg, "Neocons and Total War",
LewRockwell.com, Sept. 27, 2001,
http://www.lewrockwell.com/stromberg/stromberg21.html (April
24, 2003); Michael Ledeen, "Creative Destruction", National
Review Online, Sept. 20, 2001,
http://www.nationalreview.com/contributors/ledeen092001.shtml
(April 24. 2003).

29 See Leon Trotsky, Permanent Revolution (New York: Merit,
1969).

30 It is true that the Trotskyists' "dual theory" of Stalinism
(opposing the bureaucracy but "defending" the nationalized
economy) led them to offer post-fact justifications for the Soviet
invasion of Finland in late 1939. However, offering justification
for an invasion is not the same as advocating that invasion, nor
does it mean that they proactively called for such invasions in
general as the way to advance world revolution. It is also worth
noting that the justifications were accompanied by warnings from
Trotsky that such "shameful" military actions on the part of the
Stalinist bureaucracy would end up harming the "degenerated
workers' state". See Leon Trotsky, Writings: 1939-40 (New
York: Pathfinder, 1973), pp.142-143.

31 See Christopher C. DeMuth (ed) The Reagan Doctrine and
Beyond (Washington DC: AEI, 1987), pp.21-30.

32 John B. Judis, "Apocalypse Now and Then", The New
Republic, August 31, 1987, p.29

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