Theses on Trotskyism and Neoconservatism

Guest Post by Jack Ross

Jack Ross is a friend of NonZionism and author of the books, The Socialist Party of America: A Complete History, The Strange Death of American Exceptionalism and, Rabbi Outcast: Elmer Berger and American Jewish Anti-Zionism. Like me, he has a complicated relationship with political extremism, in his case mostly from the Left, and has an inside view of what is wrong with anti-Zionism (he even used to write for Mondoweiss!). He is presently an editor at Sublation Media, which is … well it’s hard for me to say exactly, but it involves criticizing the Left from the left. Here he is with their guru, Chris Cutrone. As you can see below, Jack also knows a lot about history! In response to my Wikipedia-binge based article on Neoconservatism, he offered to give a more informed take.

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I more or less come down on the side of the John Judis view as you articulate it contra Yarvin, and while I came into this intervention wary of why Yarvin should be taken seriously, I realized that your complaint against him is basically the same as my own about the way most online pundits talk about “neocons” almost a generation after George W. Bush left the White House.

On Trotsky and Trotskyism, you have mainly left out critical gaps in his biography and legacy, though in fairness the first part of what follows is entirely my own original argument.

Trotsky before the Revolution: What made Trotsky distinct was his association with a revolutionary left critique of the Second International, all of whose principals among the Allies at the start of the First World War were enthusiastic and even rabid war supporters: George Plekhanov in Russia, H.M. Hyndman in Britain, Georges Sorel in France, and in Italy, you might have heard of him, Benito Mussolini. The pro-war Socialists in America were a more mixed lot, but the zeitgeist was well represented by such Progressive Era avatars as Walter Lippmann who briefly passed through the Socialist Party orbit.

Trotsky’s core conceit, most dramatically during his New York sojourn in the final weeks before the February Revolution as America was preparing to enter the war, was to maintain that critique as a war opponent. This distinguished him from the Bolsheviks, who in their Swiss exile were mostly shaped by the German antiwar left that organized Zimmerwald.

Trotskyism before the Fourth International: The key illuminating document here is Max Shachtman’s 1938 “Footnote for Historians” that begins with one of the most evergreen opening lines ever written: “We do note envy the future historian of the American revolutionary movement when he faces the problem of tracing the course of the ephemeral sects.” What it illustrates is that virtually everyone who passed through the movement in the 1930s was in a transitory phase of disillusioning with Soviet Communism – and of the few who remained on the left by the 1950s, even fewer would remain in what became the official party of the Fourth International.

Alan Wald also documents this well in The New York Intellectuals, but the most instructive artifact may be Dwight Macdonald’s Memoirs of a Revolutionist written when it was still not obvious that the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) would retain its O.G. Trotskyist status going forward – Macdonald, still sympathetic to Shachtman and his followers, very aptly describes the SWP as the political equivalent of Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Trotsky’s widow, Natalia Sedova, would renounce the Fourth International and identify with Shachtman through her last years.

In short, “Trotskyism” as understood in living memory, and particularly the British milieu as you laid it out, only really began to exist when the Fourth International consolidated after the war, which brings us to your most curious aside that is nonetheless worthy of comment.

Trotskyist critiques “form most of the basis of contemporary anti-Zionism in the Left and alt-Right today.” This is arguably true but not necessarily for the reason you think. I am indebted to Tony Michels for the knowledge that as early as the 1940s, the SWP took the position that the Arabs had “national rights” in Palestine but that the resident Jews did not – in contrast to the more principled anti-nationalist position of the rest of the anti-Communist left at the time, and in a striking very early articulation of the “third-worldism” that would define the sectarian left beginning in the Vietnam era. There is a direct organizational lineage from Sam Marcy, the True O.G. Tankie who broke from the SWP in support of the suppression of the 1956 Hungarian uprising, to Eugene Puryear, who infamously gave a speech in Times Square the afternoon of October 8, 2023 that praised the mowing down of “hipsters.”

Yet an interesting aside were the significant number of recovering Trotskyists employed by the anti-Zionist organization that was the subject of my first book, the American Council for Judaism, who as a group had been the cadre of the “Goldman-Morrow Group” that split from the SWP immediately after the war. To underscore just how different these two species of anti-Zionism were, I recently learned in discussing this with the independent researcher Cam Hardy that a key point for which the Goldman-Morrow Group were expelled was for supporting the free entry of displaced Jews into Palestine. In the early 1950s, Shachtman’s Independent Socialist League ardently supported the Yiddishist-published and Council-aligned Jewish Newsletter.

(This discussion cannot possibly be complete without reference to the extraordinary time capsule that is Shachtman on the 1929 riots, to remove any doubt of just how much separated the Old Jewish Left from contemporary anti-Zionism)

Before going through the names you list one by one, a brief summary is in order of the political history of the 1970s contained in the Wikipedia summary. Social Democrats USA was formed by a faction in the 1960s that was largely contiguous with the earlier sectarian following of Max Shachtman, who died right on the eve of its formation in 1972. Far more an organizational genius than an original thinker, in the 1950s he cobbled together the remains of the non-Communist left in Greenwich Village around a cult of his theory of “bureaucratic collectivism” – a restatement in traditional Marxist vocabulary of his former close collaborator James Burnham.

The two figures Shachtman regarded as his “children” who were at the center of the civil rights movement as aides to Bayard Rustin, Tom Kahn and Rachelle Horowitz, were never closer than arm’s length to the neoconservatives. Michael Harrington led the more conventionally left-wing split with SDUSA that would become the now-infamous Democratic Socialists of America – that whole story is far beyond the scope of our purpose here, but it is worth noting that the attribution of the naming of neoconservatism to Harrington is at best an oversimplification (Harrington included the ex-Stalinist founders of National Review under the label, and there is a record of contemporary protest against that broader application by conservative intellectuals).

To give the shortest version: the SDUSA core gathered around the presidential aspirations of Scoop Jackson in 1972; when his second campaign in 1976 proved a dead end, they then threw their energies into electing Daniel Patrick Moynihan to the Senate (see below for how that worked out), and once the Reagan administration swept into power the cadre either found jobs there and moved on and/or kept up the ghost of the organization as late as the early 2000s.

Finally, the connection the Wikipedia summary draws to the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) in the 1980s is misleading – though the two groups certainly had foreign policy hawkishness in common, the DLC represented a clean break from SDUSA and its identification with the labor movement.

Daniel Bell: I literally laughed out loud when you stated that today he would write for Compact, not because that’s necessarily wrong but because it misses everything about his immediate context. Short version, to the extent the neocons can be compared to the post-Brexit secular Jewish right in France, Bell (along with Nathan Glazer who we’ll get to) was Alain Finkielkraut to Eric Zemmour’s Norman Podhoretz. But to understand what Bell represented in his time one should watch the very flawed documentary Arguing the World (Diana Trilling plays the same redemptive role as Shelby Foote in Ken Burns’ The Civil War) in which he sets the tone as an even bigger insufferable pompous ass than Irving Kristol.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan: His celebrated pro-Israel theatrics were scripted and arranged by Norman Podhoretz to elect him Senator from New York, and once in the Senate he largely resumed his role from the Johnson and Nixon administrations as a leading prophet of American decadence – including, crucially, with respect to the national security state.

Irving Kristol: Like Shachtman before him he was the organizational genius not the original thinker, in his case on the right in the 1970s, acting as a bridge to various business lobbies and aligned foundations for the former liberals. But this is not to say his role as an ideologue was unimportant. In his last published statement before his death, he professed that his whole turn to the right began when he returned from Europe at the beginning of the 1960s fearing that the welfare state was a drain on the resources necessary for a military that could roll back Communism – we will return to the significance of this to the question of a meaningful link between neoconservatism and Trotskyism.

But in the early postwar years at Commentary, when they were still quite left-wing and as distant from Zionism as their sponsor, the American Jewish Committee, Kristol planted his flag that clearly anticipated what was to come. I will say more on this below when I get to Sidney Hook and James Burnham, as well as Leo Strauss. Yet by the 1970s, his intellectual output amounted to little more than Stewie at Woodstock.

Norman Podhoretz: Scarcely done justice by your very beside-the-point short summary, the central figure to it all from the helm of Commentary. What Shaul Magid argues Meir Kahane was to the post-1967 American Jewish establishment – the unmentionable scandalous id – Podhoretz was to the whole post-Vietnam American establishment. That is why the neocons not only matter, but are at the center of the story of post-Cold War American decadence.

Most of this belongs in my conclusion, in which I tie everything to your following piece on Netanyahu and the Rightoids, but to briefly state here: The political and cultural phenomena of stagnation and repetition that constitute the Ross Douthat “decadence” thesis first took hold with the political class in mindless nostalgia for the height of the Cold War and 1950s “battle of ideas” – as first dramatically announced by Podhoretz at the beginning of the 1970s, and by the 1980s defining both Commentary and its liberal fellow traveler The New Republic.

Jeane Kirkpatrick: I believe it’s correct that her youthful travels on the left were in the Socialist Party of Norman Thomas (which the Shachtmanites ultimately took over) and not in any Trotskyist outfit, though your statement of the relevant history is somewhat misleading if technically correct – in any case it requires some squinting. Anyway . . . she is best seen as emblematic of the tragedy of older Cold War liberals, many of whom were once Norman Thomas supporters (and a few even of the aforementioned Jewish Newsletter) whose feeling of deep personal betrayal by the New Left, particularly in connection to Hubert Humphrey’s 1968 presidential campaign, was ruthlessly manipulated by Podhoretz. Her enduring reputation for realism in some quarters can perhaps be linked to this.

Carl Gershman: Most assuredly not ever a Trotskyist – he only appeared on the scene well after 1968, as late as the first half of which it was not obvious how far the Shachtmanites were drifting out of the left. In short, he was almost certainly in some capacity an Israeli agent tasked with steering them toward their 1970s political jobs. Yet his appointment as the founding chair of the National Endowment for Democracy brings us back to my general qualification of your overall treatment, to which our next two subjects are especially relevant.

Penn Kemble: That he was never a Trotskyist is both true and misleading. His first appearance on the scene was analogous to Gershman but nearly a decade earlier, as a recruit from the University of Colorado by his professor Alex Garber, who had been a member of one of the ephemeral splinters detailed in the “Footnote for Historians” who by all appearances was acting on behalf the CIA through the National Students Association. A very disproportionate number of high Cold War operators came out of that sectarian world along with Garber – most notably the 1950s defense intellectual Albert Wohlstetter, closely associated with the Straussians to be discussed below. Another was the figure on your list probably least worthy of discussion, Seymour Martin Lipset, though he was in a sect that only split from Shachtman right after America entered the war which Irving Kristol also very briefly passed through. All of this being relevant background to Kemble as the person who was most invested in maintaining SDUSA as a going concern, particularly in the years just before his untimely death in 2005.

Joshua Muravchik: Also both true and misleading, if in his case less the latter than Kemble. Muravchik’s singular importance was as the chief ideologue of “global democratic revolution” from the Reagan-era founding of the National Endowment for Democracy on through the George W. Bush years – as articulated in Bush’s 2003 speech on the occasion of the Endowment’s 20^th anniversary and then a little over a year later in his infamous Second Inaugural that unironically invoked The Possessed. How the Trotskyist lineage and indisputable revolutionary utopian tone should be understood will be addressed below, suffice it here to say that within the first year of the Obama administration, whatever else the future of American foreign policy held, there was no going back to the post-9/11 fire in the minds of men.

Bayard Rustin: To identify Bayard Rustin’s association with the American Left in his brief membership in the Young Communist League (not ever the Party itself) is extremely misleading, though this meme sometimes circulates on the left and largely takes its cue from J. Edgar Hoover, who really did have some rather strange ideas about Communism. (Nor is it all that extraordinary that he was a conscientious objector, which only underscores the point). Though Rustin was never formally a member of Max Shachtman’s Independent Socialist League in the 1950s, he was extremely close to it and, as earlier noted, most of his young white recruits into the civil rights movement were drawn from it.

I will take this opportunity to state my central objection to both the pro-Nixon revisionism by Rightoids and the Sailer-Hanania indictment of the Civil Rights Act: Most of the corruption of civil rights law that Hanania identifies as “the origin of woke” happened on Nixon’s watch, and if any major political force could have halted it then, it would have been the American labor movement when it still mattered and under the guidance of Bayard Rustin. A very big reason they did not was their distraction in the 1970s by the foreign policy preoccupations of Norman Podhoretz and the cadre gathered around him at Commentary.

Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, and Doug Feith: Lyndon Johnson is reported to have lashed out at national security advisor McGeorge Bundy that no one would remember his name as one of the true architects of the Vietnam disaster – such are these three to the Iraq War. Wolfowitz was indeed a Straussian and never a leftist, though both he and Perle were present right at the beginning of the formative period with SDUSA around Scoop Jackson. What Midge Decter was to the early years of Commentary – the only one whose personal background was as a partisan Zionist rather than any variety of socialist – appears to have been true of Richard Perle in that original neocon core. Feith was a Straussian like Wolfowitz but was too young to have been part of the core; though he dropped off the face of the earth around the same time as Perle and Wolfowitz, his close associate David Wurmser can still be seen pontificating on JNS.

So who exactly were Leo Strauss and the Straussians? I must limit myself to the absolute bare minimum, if that, in explaining any esoteric Straussian doctrine. Strauss himself was a generally apolitical classicist and a refugee German Zionist of the Max Nordau school; whether he was a Revisionist in any meaningful sense is unclear and not particularly relevant, the right-wing affiliations of his later followers speaks for itself.

His central teaching was the veneration of a particular method of court intellectualism, to extract passages of text and completely divorce them from any historical or other context whatsoever into an abstract argument of principle to be upheld as the hidden true meaning of the text. The clearest practical application in post-Vietnam American politics is in how Republicans have historically talked about Martin Luther King and his legacy. Closely related to that phenomenon is the “West Coast Straussian” school whose principal guru was Harry Jaffa, whose esoteric ideas about American history and the Constitution are behind the gibberish of a succession of figures from Alan Keyes to Glenn Beck to Jonah Goldberg to the Claremont Institute. The most symptomatic and foundational idea in this is to identify America’s fall from Eden with the rise of the administrative state under Woodrow Wilson – while completely embracing his substantive legacy of a world order based on American predestination and anti-civil libertarian militarism.

The Bush-era neocons who could be distinctly identified as Straussians, including Wolfowitz, Feith, and the bulk of writers for The Weekly Standard, were mostly of the more sober “East Coast” school whose principal guru was the Harvard professor Harvey Mansfield, his disciples ranging from Bill Kristol (as John Roche, a rare O.G. Cold War liberal among the 70s neocons once said, absolute powerlessness corrupts absolutely) to perhaps the leading post-10/7 gentile avatar of retarded hasbara, Hugh Hewitt.

Nathan Glazer: Emblematic of the association of neoconservatism in the 1970s with the domestic policy critique of liberalism represented by Daniel Patrick Moynihan (along with Daniel Bell and to a lesser extent, however duplicitously, Irving Kristol), and equally of the older Cold War liberals who grew very bitterly disillusioned with Norman Podhoretz. He is worth this mention all his own for being the ultimate illustration of how far removed this period could be from the definition of “neocon” by the preceding subjects – he was the rare figure to transfer the binationalist sympathies of most of the founding core at Commentary into outspoken support for the post-1967 peace camp. (In fact, the cultural Zionist youth group he had belonged to, Avukah, in the 1930s was aligned with the same vaguely territorialist current as Wililam Zukerman, the man later behind the aforementioned Jewish Newsletter).

Sidney Hook: An excellent point of departure for bringing all of the theses together. It is incorrect that he was associated with (though he might have briefly passed through) the Socialist Party in the 1920s, but the rest of your summary is correct. It’s briefly worth mentioning that though he was independent of them, he was closely associated with the “Menorah Group” that in splitting off from the subject of the book I’m currently at work on – Menorah Journal – at the very beginning of the 1930s was the genesis of the so-called “New York Intellectuals,” from whom neoconservatism was ultimately spawned.

(A sidebar on the “Group” figure closest to Trotsky personally, Herbert Solow, whose damning report from Mandate Palestine in the aftermath of the 1929 riots was central to the split. I mention it here to underscore once again how the case can be made for the Trotskyist roots of two very different anti-Zionisms).

You are quite correct that Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution was the opposite of perpetual military expansion of Communism which came much closer to the actual record of Stalin. But what makes this not the last word on whether “neoconservatism is Trotskyism” is the French Turn: the doctrine first arrived at in the early 1930s and applied in France, before the founding of the Fourth International, that the social democratic parties could be taken over and transformed into a force of global revolution.

This was the central idea behind the short-lived American Workers Party which you very astutely note was the culmination of a larger pre-Popular Front disillusioning of pro-Soviet intellectuals, of which the “Menorah Group” was at the center, by the cynicism and duplicity of the Stalinist response to the rise of the Nazis. Sidney Hook was very much the intellectual leader of this entire tendency, of what he himself described looking back on it from the 1980s as a kind of premature Reform Communism.

This included the young Socialist Party “Militants” of the 1930s who became the founders of Cold War liberalism (it was precisely due to their reverence for Reinhold Niebuhr and general application of his realism to Vietnam that very few of them became neocons). By the end of the decade Hook was generally aligned with what remained of the non-Communist left after the Militants became New Dealers. From there, he and James Burnham traveled the same path together toward championing the global military rollback of Communism: The conflation thereof with any sort of belief in social democracy is what can arguably and justly be seen as a legacy of the French Turn and of Trotskyism.

The ideal that Sidney Hook symbolized, of social democracy as the agent of the Burnham doctrine of the military rollback of Communism, was given its pure uncut expression by Irwin Suall, who is best remembered for his controversial tenure running the Anti-Defamation League in the 1980s. (I have no doubt that Suall would prove an excellent case study in the pioneering of retarded hasbara, but that is secondary to both his own significance and the larger point about the latter below). Suall rather than Shachtman, in short, was the true ideologue behind the Shachtmanite legacy in 1970s neoconservatism – the essential artifact is Suall’s early 1960s pamphlet “The American Ultras” that in its striking anticipation of paranoid resistance liberalism illuminates just how much of a homecoming the Lincoln Project and The Bulwark were for so many neocons.

James Burnham presents a more complex case, given the paleocon affinities you noted along with his own detachment that left his true views on the phenomena he described open to question. On the former, I definitely feel that leaving aside Burnham’s own politics, it is fairly indisputable that the managerial revolution he described is in fact what wound up succeeding historical capitalism as described by Marx; if he failed to anticipate the New Class or much at all beyond the high industrial managerialism of the early postwar era that’s only of a piece with how Marx failed to anticipate all that Bernstein and Kautsky had to correct for. And it is certainly uncanny how much Sam Francis mirrored Marx, with Burnham as his Hegel and the failure of the 1970s “new right” his failure of the 1848 revolutions; vulgar personal racism should no more disqualify what is useful from Francis than from Marx.

The analogy to Hegel may in fact be more broadly applicable, as suggested by this excellent recent article on just how late Burnham’s right turn actually was, and a forthcoming major new study also seems promising. In short, when Burnham broke with Trotsky and Shachtman on the eve of publishing The Managerial Revolution, with James Cannon and the SWP well on their way to inventing the “Orthodox” Trotskyism of the postwar Fourth International, he was bringing Trotskyism full circle back to its pre-Bolshevik roots. This was most clearly revealed by the inclusion of Georges Sorel, avatar of the pro-war far left in France before following a parallel trajectory with Mussolini, as one of the four subjects of The Machiavellians. Burnham completed the circle back to the zeitgeist exemplified by the pro-war socialists in Europe and by the Progressive Era in America.

So too did Leo Strauss as a product of Jung Juda in that same era, and it was Irving Kristol who synthesized them in the distinct position he staked out in the early years of Commentary. This was part of the general effort by American Jewish Committee staff to steer them both away from their non-Zionist inclinations: Kristol’s wife, Gertrude Himmelfarb, was a student of Strauss at the University of Chicago when they were first married right after the war, and her brother, Milton Himmelfarb, was a key member of that staff junta. Kristol’s most infamous early essay for Commentary, his qualified defense of Joe McCarthy in 1952, should be seen as in large measure reflecting a shrewd recognition that McCarthy had the same enemies in the State Department as the new State of Israel, and thus was mobilizing a large section of the American public against them.

Years earlier, he was just as deftly pushing hard to the same end against the main religious voice at the magazine. If I may be permitted an indulgence of my ongoing work on Menorah Journal, Kristol represented a distinct coming full circle of his own, not unlike Burnham, back to Strauss’ American Zionist contemporary Horace Kallen, who two generations before Kristol among the founders of Commentary just as vigorously dissented from the founders of Menorah Journal in rejecting the animating idea behind historic liberal Judaism, the Mission of Israel.

So who was Horace Kallen, and just what then was Kristol circling back to? He was the Progressive Era avatar who pioneered the concept of “cultural pluralism” that is not only very arguably the true origin of woke, but had the specific function of transforming Zionism from a conventional European nationalism into the pioneer of the politics of self-esteem that we have come to know as “identity politics.” Irving Kristol was too much a reactionary at heart to have become associated with this in all its ramifications, but if his synthesis was premature, it achieved full flower by 1970 in Norman Podhoretz.

Which brings us at last to your central purpose on Substack. When you write, as you did in your essay on the Rightoids, that “instead of ditching the whiney, histrionic paranoia characteristic of Jewish liberals, they turn it up to 11,” all this is what we are talking about. Podhoretz and Commentary, the core neoconservative doctrine of a shared sacred story of Jewish and American nationalism at the core of a global democratic revolution (the latter part’s debt to Trotsky, I hope I have done a decent job illustrating, is certainly not what groypers might imagine but isn’t chopped liver):

THIS is what shaped Benjamin Netanyahu into the most American of Israeli leaders, and while a deeper historical inquest is certainly important, THIS is the ideology that animates retarded hasbara – the tone-deaf repetition of bizarre “war on terror”-era premises and vocabulary, Netanyahu’s extremely dated and Trumpian ideas about America that led him to give a speech to Congress that was all Fox News preoccupations, and the stubborn belief that the person Israel has to win over is a median College Democrat in the 1990s. It was also, as you laid out in your piece, at the center of the disastrous Bush presidency and all that it wrought in shaping our present era.

My own view has long been, recalling as few still do that Bush was rather cool toward Israel for the first year after 9/11 and at the peak of the Second Intifada, that the deal that must have been struck was that in exchange for Israel lobby support for invading Iraq the administration would thenceforth adopt the preferred Israeli narrative about 9/11 – in short, the Podhoretz “World War IV” narrative. But reading your description of Netanyahu’s personal role in Washington in the fall of 2002 was chilling – how an era may well prove to have been bookended by the disaster into which he led America and the disaster into which these last 15 months he has led Israel.