Are Neocons Trotskyites?

The short answer is no, the long answer is below

Everyone has their own little list of tedious duties they have to perform periodically to keep up appearances. Curtis Yarvin’s is taking a big dump over everyone’s vibe whenever the Right appear to have, to the untutored eye, scored some kind of victory or other. After Trump’s election win he did the necessary here. I could make fun of it - and, to be clear, there is an age at which erection references become undignified - but it would be unfair. It isn’t easy, actually, to keep writing the same thing over and over. The article does what it needs to do: Carlyle quote ✅; WW1 revisionism that just completely ignores more than a 100 years of scholarship and points you to a book written before the most important documents came to light ✅; monarchy is the only solution ✅. Yarvin has written enough that you could get an LLM to do this by now. That he hasn’t (we assume) given into temptation is to his credit. The only reason I’m bringing it up at all is because the one thing I’m good at is picking up on asides in articles and banging the keys of my keyboard until I have explained why it’s wrong. The aside in question is here.

Because—for example—well before the 72 hours is out, Trump has (informed sources tell us) selected one Brian Hook to lead his State Department transition team. Hook is a former aide of Mike Pompeo, Trump’s Secretary of State. These people are, of course, neoconservatives—the descendants of the old American Trotskyists. (It’s been a long time since we had a choice besides American Trotskyists vs. American Stalinists.)

The purpose of this article is to analyze this claim, but, before we start, we need to observe that Yarvin makes two different claims. The first, which comes with a reference that we shall return to in due course, is that neoconservatives descend from Trotskyites, the second is that neoconservatives are Trotskyites. Yarvin repeats the second version of the claim a bit further down:

He could hire a rocketship pilot. If he had a rocketship. Does he have a rocketship? No. He has a helicopter. So he needs to hire a helicopter pilot. That’s how it is. He doesn’t make the rules. There are two kinds of helicopter pilots he could hire: red helicopter pilots, and blue helicopter pilots. He is red, so he needs red pilots. All the red pilots are neoconservatives, that is, Trotskyists. So more Ukraine war it is.

In treating these two claims as synonymous, Yarvin is repeating the same basic logic that lay behind the ‘Puritan hypothesis’ that was so important for early- to middle-Unqualified Reservations. While this element of Moldbuggism has attracted opprobrium from ignoramuses who see it as a clumsy attempt to absolve Jews of responsibility, the general claim that leftism evolved out of Protestantism is not really historically controversial, though it is more complex than depicted by Moldbug. In Anglo-American history there are at least three substantially independent vectors of this phenomenon: (1) the Whigs, whose relationship with religious factions is a little complex, but who were closely linked from 1688 to the vaguely Socinian-leaning ‘latitudinarian’ episcopal establishment; (2) the labour movement, rooted in Dissenting churches and Methodism (the latter originally supporting the Tories) and (3) the American Progressive movement developing out of New England Puritanism. What was original about Moldbug’s take was that he argued that, in becoming what it is today, Leftism never ceased to be a variety of Protestantism.

This isn’t a claim that is susceptible to empirical verification; it’s a way of thinking about the world. We are raised to assume that there is one group of belief systems we call ‘religions’ and another we call ‘ideologies’, that these are inherently different things, and we can tell which is which by whether they make claims about God or gods. Sometimes people will blur this line by saying wokism is a religion, or Trumpism is a cult (note that, almost always, to accuse an ideology of being like a religion is to criticise it), but what if the distinction itself is meaningless to begin with, something that privileges or penalizes certain belief systems while obscuring our view of social reality?

As to how useful this mental trick is, your mileage may vary. In earlier parts of Unqualified Reservations, Moldbug seems to believe that exposing Leftism’s origins as ‘Ultra-Calvinism’ helps expose and debunk its truth claims, but, as he matured and refined his theory of the Cathedral, the Puritan hypothesis became less and less important. If ideas are optimized for power in a given institutional framework, then the political formula of a country will eventually arrive in more or less the same place regardless of where it started out. Both the Amish and elite Boston liberalism can be traced back ultimately to the same milieu that produced the Munster rebellion, and that explains certain quirks and apparent coincidences, but that’s about it. On the other hand, with the general decline of his thought in the Gray Mirror years, Yarvin has reverted back to saying things like this that imply Protestantism has an essential ‘Protestant’ quality that remains always present, perhaps becoming more virulent, as it evolves:

Peter Singer advises you to expand your “circle of concern” till it includes not just the people who are viscerally close to you, but ascribes equal moral value to everyone on earth—and even to all neurological activity, eg, the marine Auschwitz of krill every time a whale eats lunch.

…

The problem is not Professor Singer, of course—who is just the reductio ad absurdum of the dominant principle of Anglo-American theological thought (purportedly now “secular,” but come on) over the last quarter-millennium. Singerism is Quakerism. It is utilitarianism. Ultimately, it is even Puritanism, a branch of Protestant Christianity. As a hardcore atheist: you may not be interested in God, but God is interested in you. “Rationalism,” for instance, is a profoundly Protestant phenomenon.

It’s hard to conceive of a sentence that is more grandiloquent and yet meaningless than the last one, but that’s what happens when you stop letting people comment below the article. Anyway, let’s get back to the point.

What is Trotskyism?

Trotsky was a slippery fish. When the Russian Social Democratic party split into Menshevik and Bolshevik factions in 1903, Trotsky sided with the orthodox Marxist Menshevik faction against the revolutionary vanguard theory of Lenin. However, he soon declared himself non-aligned and constantly worked, unsuccessfully, to unify Russian Marxists in one organization. After the February revolution, he initially maintained his non-aligned position, joining an intermediary organization focused on ending Russian participation in WW1, but ultimately sided with Lenin and was instrumental in making sure that the Petrograd Soviet, the single most important center of socialist power, put its resources behind the October Revolution. Subsequently, Trotsky led the Red Army to victory in the Russian Civil War, displaying abilities in military command that were not only surprising for a Jew nerd, but also exceeded those of just about anyone in modern Russian history. He was responsible for war crimes that were in the same general order of magnitude as those committed by the other side, probably somewhat worse, but also rather more connected to plausible military goals.

After the revolution was secured, Trotsky became leader of the Left faction of the Communist Party, opposed to the kind of compromises the Bolshevik regime needed to make with reality. In this task, he drew on the concept he had already developed of ‘permanent revolution intended to block the rise of a Napoleon or Cromwell figure who would use the forces of revolution to erect a version of the old regime, only more brutal and focused. But theory is one thing and reality another, and Trotsky found himself first kicked out of the party, then exiled, and eventually assassinated. Many of the policies that Stalin adopted after seizing full control of the Communist Party were precisely those Trotsky had already advocated, in particular the suspension of the market-socialist hybrid New Economic Policy, and the collectivization of agriculture.

All of the above shaped the development of the distinct Trotskyite version of revolutionary Marxism which has two basic pillars: (1) the Bolshevik revolution was good and (2) Stalin was bad. Since Trotsky did not actually oppose many of Stalin’s worst policies, he had a job on his hands to explain what was going on, but he was more than up to the task and developed the concept of a ‘Degenerated Workers State’, which means a Communist country that started off well, but then went of the rails because [reasons].

Trotskyism found its first real institutional expression in the 4th International of 1938, formed by groups expelled from the 3rd International run by Stalin. The ideological glue of 4th International was the need for an anti-Fascist alliance, something that became even more salient after the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, and the extraordinary measures European Communist parties took in actively assisting the Nazi conquests of their countries. However, the 4th International quickly fell apart and Trotskyism dissolved into numerous splinter groups.

Most people have probably heard of the ‘Judean People’s Front’ stereotype of arcane leftist infighting, but are less conscious that this was specifically inspired by Trotskyite machinations, which were particularly prominent when the members of Monty Python were at university. Trotskyism in Britain has an interesting history. The ‘Militant Tendency’, based in Liverpool, mounted a decent attempt to take over the Labour Party in the 1980s, though their war on the conservative trade unionists ultimately only cleared the path for New Labour. After the expulsion of most Trots from Labour, the largest Trotskyite party, the SWP, subsequently formed the ‘Stop the War Coalition’ which organized the largest demonstration in British history in 2003, and then formed the kernel of the ‘Momentum’ movement that partially ran the Labour party under Jeremy Corbyn. As that might indicate, one of the most characteristic features of Trotskyism as a movement has been fanatical anti-Zionism, which drew on the special hatred that Trotsky and other Jewish Communists had for Zionists poaching potential recruits. Whereas the Stalinist tradition saw nationalisms in almost purely pragmatic terms, grading them as progressive or fascist based solely on the immediate foreign policy goals of the Soviet Union, Trotskyites portrayed Zionism as a uniquely evil ideology, and their criticisms form most of the basis of contemporary anti-Zionism in the Left and alt-Right today.

However, with so many splinter groups and factions, it is genuinely hard to give a coherent description of Trotskyism as a whole. Another British Group, the Revolutionary Communist Party (not to be confused with the Revolutionary Communist Party of Britain), insisted on an anti-reformist position, according to which all attempts to improve the lot of workers within capitalist society only delayed the workers revolution. Eventually, they kind of forgot why they were opposed to the welfare state and became edgy libertarians, now mostly working for Spiked, best known for Brendan O’Neill, who would really like you to know that effete liberals who drink cappuccino and eat biscotti just don’t understand the revolutionary and democratic potential of Brexit.

Who were the neoconservatives?

Here, I’ll think I’ll start by quoting Wikipedia.¹

The term neoconservative was popularized in the United States during 1973 by the socialist leader Michael Harrington, who used the term to define Daniel Bell, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and Irving Kristol, whose ideologies differed from Harrington's. …

The neoconservative label was adopted by Irving Kristol in his 1979 article "Confessions of a True, Self-Confessed 'Neoconservative'". His ideas have been influential since the 1950s, when he co-founded and edited the magazine Encounter.

Another source was Norman Podhoretz, editor of the magazine Commentary, from 1960 to 1995. By 1982, Podhoretz was terming himself a neoconservative in The New York Times Magazine article titled "The Neoconservative Anguish over Reagan's Foreign Policy"…

Some early neoconservative political figures were disillusioned Democratic politicians and intellectuals, such as Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who served in the Nixon and Ford administrations, and Jeane Kirkpatrick, who served as United States Ambassador to the United Nations in the Reagan administration.

A substantial number of neoconservatives were originally moderate socialists who were originally associated with the moderate wing of the Socialist Party of America (SP) and its successor party, the Social Democrats, USA (SDUSA). Max Shachtman, a former Trotskyist theorist who developed strong feelings of antipathy towards the New Left, had numerous devotees in the SDUSA with strong links to George Meany's AFL-CIO. Following Shachtman and Meany, this faction led the SP to oppose immediate withdrawal from the Vietnam War and oppose George McGovern in the Democratic primary race and, to some extent, the general election. They also chose to cease their own party-building and concentrated on working within the Democratic Party, eventually influencing it through the Democratic Leadership Council.^[21] Thus the Socialist Party dissolved in 1972, and the SDUSA emerged that year. (Most of the left-wing of the party, led by Michael Harrington, immediately abandoned the SDUSA.)^[22][23] SDUSA leaders associated with neoconservatism include Carl Gershman, Penn Kemble, Joshua Muravchik and Bayard Rustin. …

The neoconservatives rejected the countercultural New Left and what they considered anti-Americanism in the non-interventionism of the activism against the Vietnam War. After the anti-war faction took control of the party during 1972 and nominated George McGovern, the Democrats among the neoconservatives endorsed Washington Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson for his unsuccessful 1972 and 1976 campaigns for president. Among those who worked for Jackson were the incipient neoconservatives Paul Wolfowitz, Doug Feith, and Richard Perle.

Let’s go through the names one by one:

(((Daniel Bell))) was, by his own description, ‘socialist in economics, a liberal in politics, and a conservative in culture’. Today he would probably write for Compact Magazine. He was never a Trotskyite, though he was never really a conservative either.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan was one of the first liberals to figure out the the welfare state was not going so well and published the Moynihan Report in 1965, which is the source for conservative fretting over black single-motherhood for the past 50 years. He served under Democrat and Republican administrations, but became a Democrat senator. He was known for his relatively conservative views and support of Israel. He was never a Trotskyite, or any kind of socialist.

(((Irving Kristol))) was the ‘godfather of neoconservatism’ and was maybe the first to accept the label. He wrote ‘Two Cheers for Capitalism’, which rehearses a number of criticisms now common on the Dissident Right, but without all the retardation and larping. He was a Trotskyite at university, during which time he met his wife Gertrude Himmelfarb, and also a member of the Young People’s Socialist Movement, which we’ll soon see coming up a lot. He then became an anti-communist liberal, before eventually becoming a neoconservative.

(((Norman Podhoretz))) came from a Leftist background, but never affiliated with a Marxist faction himself, rather going straight into liberalism before becoming drifting rightwards as the 1960s progressed. Probably his best piece, about his youth being terrorized by blacks, he wrote while still a liberal.

Jeane Kirkpatrick became a member of the Young People’s Socialist Movement in 1945. The YPSL was not Trotskyite, but had had a Trotskyite group trying to to take it over until they were expelled in 1937. She was closely associated with Henry Jackson and started her drift rightwards after McGovern won the nomination for the 1972 election.

(((Carl Gershman))) was vice-Chairman, then Chairman of the YPSL, during which time he argued against capitulation in Vietnam and and for continuing the boycott of Cuba until it became less repressive. He drifted further right, and was eventually appointed by Reagan as head of the National Endowment for Democracy. He was never a Trotskyite.

Penn Kemble was executive chairman of YPSL from 1968-70. He was opposed to the Vietnam war, but was also concerned about far Left infiltration and opposed the McGovern candidacy. He was not a Trotskyite.

(((Joshua Muravchik))) was national chairman of the YPSL, 1968-73. His drift to the Right started later than the other YPSL members, and substantially concerned Israel and Middle East policy. He was never a Trotskyite.

Bayard Rustin was a member of the CPUSA and (incredibly enough) left when the CPUSA reversed its position on American entry into WW2 after operation Barbarossa. His turn towards conservatism started with antipathy to Black nationalism in the late 1960s, though he never stopped being a socialist. He had been a Stalinist not a Trotskyite.

(((Paul Wolfowitz))) studied under Leo Strauss then became an aide to Henry Jackson. He has had a long career in foreign policy and was probably the main theorist behind the idea of invading Iraq in order to democratize the Middle East. He was never a Trotskyite.

(((Douglas Feith))) grew up in a Right-Wing Zionist family, and then became an aide to Henry Jackson. He was architect of the War on Terror and, unlike Wolfowitz, his interest in Middle East policy appears to be mostly about benefitting Israel. He was never a Trotskyite.

(((Richard Perle))) was also a staffer in Henry Jackson’s office 1969-80, subsequently drifting towards the Republicans and was involved in forming a network of interventionist think tanks that in due course provided the theoretical basis for the Iraq war. He was never a Trotskyite.

So far, that’s 1 out of 12 for Trotskyism, but perhaps this is an unfair sample, so I’ll add some more people labelled neoconservatives who were fellow members of Irving' Kristol’s group known as the New York Intellectuals.

(((Seymour Martin Lipset))) was more of a scholar than the figures so far mentioned. He is responsible for the ‘Lipset hypothesis’, which is, basically, that economic development leads to democratic political structures. He left the Socialist Party of America in 1950 and drifted rightwards. He never used the term neoconservative about himself and remained a Democrat. He wasn’t very interested in foreign policy. Most of his obituaries say he was a Trotskyite until 1940, so I’ll assume that’s true though I haven’t found a source for it.²

(((Nathan Glazer))), like the others, started out as an anti-Stalinist leftist, then became more sympathetic to U.S. capitalism in the light of WW2, the Cold War, and the post-war economic prosperity. He wrote about the problems of ethnic minorities on welfare ruining urban spaces, but remained a Democrat. He was also not very interested in foreign policy. Again, a lot of obituaries say he was a Trotskyite at some point, though I can’t see direct evidence of this.

(((Sidney Hook))) was older than all the other people on the list and supported the Socialist Party of America before Trotskyism was even a thing. He became a professor of philosophy in 1926 and was an enthusiastic supporter of the Soviet Union, but got sick of the way Stalin shamelessly used international Communism for Soviet short-term interests, and, in particular, the way German Communists had ceaselessly worked to undermine the Weimar Republic all the way up to 1933. He helped organize, along with James Burnham, the American Workers Party, which was Trotskyite adjacent, and subsequently merged with the Trotskyite Communist League of America. By 1939, he decided he was off Communism altogether, identifying as a democratic socialist. After the war, he helped found the CIA-backed Congress for Cultural Freedom, which was intended to persuade young lefties not to be communists and spent a lot of his time promoting the exclusion of communists and the New Left from universities and public life. He drifted vaguely rightwards until he ended up at the Hoover Institute.

So what can we conclude from this internet-binge pseudo prosopography? Obviously, a characteristic feature of neoconservatives is that they started on the Left, but that is a literally trivial observation since this is the definition of neoconservative in the first place. Trotskyism doesn’t seem particularly important, far less so than Henry Jackson’s office (or the CIA). Of those who were Trotskyites, in most cases, it was more a phase they passed through than a fixed identity they had before becoming neoconservatives. Further - and the significance of this will become clearer in due course - the ones who did have a Trotskyite background were generally more interested in domestic than foreign policy.

Reading an article

As I mentioned, Yarvin sources his claim that neocons are descended from Trotskyites with this article. It’s quite interesting; read it. The author is John Judis (the parentheses key on my keyboard is in danger of wearing out here), who is a smart guy despite (because of?) being a very stereotypical Cathedral avatar. He’s reviewing a book by John Ehrmann (not the Pitt biographer) who portrayed neoconservatism as a revival of the anti-communist Cold War liberalism exemplified by Alfred Schlesinger which by the 1970s was due a comeback. Judis disagrees, and thinks the neoconservatives represented something more specific, a resurrection of militarist views of Paul Nitze, author of NSC 68, combined with an ‘inverted Trotskyism’. Judis writes:

Together, the legacy of nsc-68 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 dooms day 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 11 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”.

What is the contribution of neoconservatism to American foreign policy? In the early 1970s, it was clearly a corrective to the illusions about the Soviet Union and Third World revolution that the new left had promulgated and that some liberals had accepted. (As a former member of Students for a Democratic Society, I can personally attest to this point.) But neoconservative foreign policy rested on illusions of its own about the imminent Soviet threat and the window of vulnerability that would open if the United States did not rapidly accel erate its strategic weapons development. Neoconservatives may also have played a role in postponing rather than accelerating the end of the Cold War, which is not to be confused with the end of the Soviet Union itself.

In describing the neoconservatives of the 1970s, Ehrman focuses on their opposition to Senator George McGovern and Carter but largely ignores their opposition to Kissinger, which was just as important to their development as a political faction and their impact on American foreign policy. Neoconservatives scored their first important triumph challenging Nixon and Kissinger's real ism. The Nixon-Kissinger strategy was aimed at drawing the Soviet Union into a new "structure of peace" through the balance of power with China and exchanging trade for diplomatic and military cooperation. In 1973 Jackson and the neo conservatives who worked with him, including Wohlstetter protege Richard Perle, began a campaign to link trade concessions to the Soviet Union to explicit Soviet concessions on Jewish emigration. Jackson, Perle, and other neoconservatives were concerned about Jewish emigration, but they were equally, if not more, determined to derail detente, which they thought was based on a false picture of the world and the Soviet Union. They rejected Kissinger's realism in the same spirit that Trotskyists had earlier rejected Stalin's nationalism. In response, the Soviets offered private con cessions, but Jackson and the neoconservatives insisted on passing Jackson-Vanik. The Soviets then balked at complying with its terms, and detente, from that moment, was dead. The United States could seek agreements with the Soviet Union based on mutual interest, but it could not pursue a general strategy aimed at ending the Cold War.

Central to Judis’ argument is that neoconservatism is not coterminous with a non-isolationist Republican policy in general, but a distinct movement. He goes on:

I would draw a distinction between the dominant idealistic strain of neoconservatism, expressed by Podhoretz and Rostow in the 1970s, and a less visible realist strain that appeared, but did not necessarily predominate, in essays by Kristol and Jeane Kirkpatrick. In "Dictatorship and Double Standards," which appeared in Commentary in January 1979, Kirkpatrick is remembered for arguing that capitalist autocracies were more likely to evolve into democracies than were communist dictatorships. But in that essay, she also made the Niebuhrian point that Ameri can foreign policy should not be based on the difficult promise of an imminent democratic transformation, whether in Nicaragua or Chile. This latter point was ignored in the formulation of policy and in public debate. But by the mid-1980s, the latent realism that it represented asserted itself in the thinking of Kristol, Kirkpatrick, and several other neoconservatives, allowing them to appreciate that the Cold War was ending and that a new foreign policy was necessary …

Did Kristol and Harries create a new neoconservatism? I don't think so. It is more accurate to say that many neoconservatives, among others Kirkpatrick, Chalmers Johnson, and Edward N. Luttwak, have become realists. They have allied themselves with other refugees from liberalism and conservatism who think that post-Cold War American foreign policy has to be grounded in the venerable concepts of national interest, balance of power, and economic as well as military advantage. They no longer define their foreign policy primarily in opposition to a liberal or left-wing alter native, but to an idealism that has no particular political label. Some younger neoconservatives like Krauthammer initially seemed engaged in updating neo conservatism, replacing the Soviet threat with that of Iraq-style "aggressive nationalisms", but they also seem to have gravitated to a new realism…

John Ehrman wants to maintain that neoconservatism is still thriving, only with the names and publications changed. That is not an absurd proposition, but it sacrifices what was unique about neocon servatism in order to preserve a sense of historical continuity between the Cold War and its aftermath. He would have done better to frame his book not as a study of the rise of neoconservatism, but of its rise and inevitable fall.

Judis wrote this in 1994, nine years before the Iraq war, so his analysis of neoconservatism proved to be, shall we say, not entirely consonant with reality,³ which, in turn, perhaps draws into question how heavily we should lean on it. But let us take Judis at his word as Yarvin would have us do. Judis argues that neoconservatism is not identifiable with Republican foreign policy elites in general, and has a special character forged by its relation to Trotskyism. What Yarvin says is the precise opposite:

He could hire a rocketship pilot. If he had a rocketship. Does he have a rocketship? No. He has a helicopter. So he needs to hire a helicopter pilot. That’s how it is. He doesn’t make the rules. There are two kinds of helicopter pilots he could hire: red helicopter pilots, and blue helicopter pilots. He is red, so he needs red pilots. All the red pilots are neoconservatives, that is, Trotskyists.

No doubt this will provoke allegations of pedantry and pilpul, but you can’t cite an article in support of a given claim if the article says the opposite! Sorry!

The search for a charitable interpretation

The truth is that neoconservative is a term used for multiple, often contradictory purposes ranging from denoting the kind of conservative a liberal could have a civil conversation with to the type of conservative a liberal could under absolutely no circumstances have a conversation with.⁴ It can mean a ‘liberal who has been mugged by reality’ or a fanatic who wants to mug reality. Curtis Yarvin identifies neoconservatives as Trotskyites. What does he mean by this?

One explanation is that he is using the term as he uses the term ‘Menshevik’ and ‘Bolshevik’ in this article. Here Mensheviks are anti-woke liberals who write for Persuasion, and Bolsheviks are people who read Gray Mirror. Leaving aside the obvious (bro…), it’s not hard to parse this: it’s an analogy. No-one is claiming that the Mensheviks morphed into Mascha Younk, still less that the Bolsheviks became Gray Mirror paypigs. But that is clearly not what is going on with Yarvin’s comments on neocons, since then it would be irrelevant to link to Judis.

Interpretation number 2 takes us back to the good days of Unqualified Reservations and this article:

68 wasn’t a “trauma.” It was a coup. It was a classic chimp throwdown in which, using tactics that were as violent as necessary, the New Left displaced the Old Left from the positions of power. “Up against the wall, motherfucker, this is a stickup.” Truer words were never spoken. The victory of Obama, a Movement man to the core, represents the final defeat of the Stalinist wing of the American left by its Maoist wing. (By “Stalinist” and “Maoist,” all I mean is that the New Deal was allied with Stalin and the SDS was aligned with Mao. These are not controversial assertions.)

This is a bit imprecise (Maoist are Stalinists), but the point is valid and well-defined. However, it’s obviously not true that neoconservatives, by any definition, were allied with Trotskyites.

The third option is to go back to the beginning: neoconservatives are Trotskyites, in the same sense that liberals are Ultra-Calvinists, but unfortunately, the timing here doesn’t work. Yarvin writes:

Show me the American isolationist foreign-policy professionals. Since America has not had an isolationist foreign policy since my grandfather was a baby, filling these hires literally requires us to raid the tomb. Never underestimate the power of Trump magic, but necromancy is a little much to expect.

This is true enough, but this happened before neoconservatism came into existence. The Trotskyite origins of neoconservatism have been drastically overstated, but, be that as it may, that has nothing to do with the end of the isolationist foreign policy tradition, which had already happened decades before neoconservatism. As Judis points out, neocons had a big problem with Kissinger, but they didn’t have a problem with isolationists, because there weren’t any isolationists around to have a problem with. Thus, the alleged Trotskyite origins of the redgov foreign policy establishment simply fails the test of chronology.

Yarvin dubs neocons ‘the descendants of the old American Trotskyists’, but the truth is that America doesn’t really have an old Trotskyist tradition. The characteristic principle of American communism (however broadly one defines it) during the Red Decade was very simple: The Soviet Union is Hella Cool! The characteristic principle of Trotskyism is The Soviet Union Sucks! Thus, pre-war American Trotskyism was an extremely marginal phenomenon, and it only really took off (though not nearly to the same extent as in Britain) many decades later. It is possible to describe all American factions today as offshoots of the movement (which one can label communist) that took over America in 1932, but Trotskyism just wasn’t part of that. Indeed, invoking the name fundamentally contradicts one of the core tenets of authentic Moldbug thought, namely that ‘communism’ is not a foreign import to America, but the legitimate expression of the mainstream American political tradition.

The final interpretation, which I think is the correct one, of Yarvin’s statement is that it doesn’t mean anything at all. It sounds cool: America is a communist country, so its two teams are really just Stalinists and Trotskyites. 🤯 and, I’ll add for good measure, 😱.

The problem is we had our minds blown already. I first binged on Moldbug in 2016. 2016 is a long time ago, but the first adopters were already there having their brains exploded in 2007. Eventually, your brain is sufficiently hollowed out of lies and propaganda that it’s time to fill it up again. Someone has to do it though, and it won’t (or, at any rate, shouldn’t) be the Social Media Right turd factory. After every conceptual advance in the human sciences, there is a necessary period of hard work and patient scholarship to turn it into a real discipline. We know what to do, more or less. Curtis Yarvin has enough money to do what he wants with his time. Maybe he should lead the way?

An amusing postscript

When you try to put any real interpretive weight upon it, the unmasking of the neocons as Trotskyites doesn’t stand up, but there is one major democracy-boosting⁵ warmonger who really was once a bigshot Trotskyite, and really was central to shaping the character of the post-war American Right: James Burnham. Readers of Unqualified Reservations will, of course, know that Moldbug acknowledges him as a central influence; hell, on one occasion he sat down and literally just typed out an essay of his as a post. Burnham is influential on the Dissident Right in general, providing the conceptual basis of Samuel Francis’ Leviathan and its Enemies. Every time you read someone banging on about foxes and lions, you can thank Burnham. If you are a massive retard, you can pay Academic Agent £350 to learn all about it.

If Brian Hook is a neocon because he is a military adventurist (I’ll assume he is, did anyone bother to check?) who worked for someone who worked for someone who knew someone whose third cousin once went on a date with a Trotskyite, then one would think that a military adventurist who absolutely was a Trotskyite should count too. You could argue the timing precludes calling Burnham a neocon, but Sidney Hook was three years older and followed roughly the same trajectory. The closest thing to a principled reason for not identifying Burnham as such is that he wasn’t Jewish and wrote a few bitchy things about Israel for National Review. However, not everyone is so superficial, and here’s an article identifying James Burnham as the ur-neoconservative using morphological classification. The author, Binoy Kampmark, is senior lecturer at the ‘School of Global, Urban and Social Studies’ in a penal colony University and, as you might expect, the article is barely literate, consisting of imperfectly understood humanities phrases, rammed together by force of will and leftoidism,⁶ but, if you slog through, there are some interesting bits of info - there always are - and he makes his point with a great deal more force than your average goyslop blog. So, bad news, Dissident Right, but the Matrix is harder to escape than you thought, and it turns out you are Trotskyite neocons too. Pwned.

1. After writing all this, I found this good article, linked to by Ron Unz of all people, which makes the point rather better than me.

2. The closest thing is his membership of the YPSL, from which, as mentioned above, the Trotskyites were expelled from in 1937, and which didn’t come under significant Trotskyite influence again until 1964.

3. Funnily enough, in the second edition in 1995, Ehrmann accepted this criticism: ‘Several reviewers of the cloth edition of The Rise of Neoconservatism argued— correctly, as it as it turned out—that my closing prediction for a renewal of neoconservative foreign policy thinking would prove to be wrong. Instead, the merger of neoconservatism with the broader American conservative movement, another trend that I noted, has accelerated, and the neoconservatives have virtually disappeared as an independent group’

4. People forget this, but, in the Bush era, Pat Buchanan had a regular slot on MSBNC where he was encouraged to attack neoconservatism as the voice of sane conservatism.

5. Some readers will object to this on the grounds that Burnham’s goal in many of his writings was to cut through the cant and delusions of modern democratic politics, but they should really pay attention to what they read in Part VII:2 of Defenders of Freedom where he plainly argues that democracy, meaning the political system of ‘the United States and England’, is the only desirable form of government. Hell, they could just pay attention to the name of the book.

6. I liked this sentence: ‘It would not be an exaggeration to suggest that Burnham is, in fact, underemphasised as a formative influence in the movement.’