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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   31279 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 17, 2022

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I'm going to doubt that claim. A while back I looked into the backgrounds of neoconservatives - a group probably likeliest to be associated with being former Trots - and far fewer of them had Trotskyist roots than I had assumed. Sure, there were some examples of this - Irving Kristol the most notable one - but the former-leftist neocons seemed more likely to have been social democrats or cold-war liberals than Trotskyites or other sorts of commies.

Up for debate unless we do a headcount, however, neocons absolutely absorbed the hubristic revolutionary zeal of the trotskyists.

Starting during the 1980s, disputes concerning Israel and public policy contributed to a conflict with paleoconservatives. Pat Buchanan terms neoconservatism "a globalist, interventionist, open borders ideology".[110] Paul Gottfried has written that the neocons' call for "permanent revolution" exists independently of their beliefs about Israel,[111] characterizing the neoconservatives as "ranters out of a Dostoyevskian novel, who are out to practice permanent revolution courtesy of the U.S. government" and questioning how anyone could mistake them for conservatives.[112]

What make neocons most dangerous are not their isolated ghetto hang-ups, like hating Germans and Southern whites and calling everyone and his cousin an anti-Semite, but the leftist revolutionary fury they express.[112]

He has also argued that domestic equality and the exportability of democracy are points of contention between them

What was it, seven countries in five years following 9/11?

Buchanan and Gottfried made their statements explicitly in the context of an internal power struggle about the future of the conservative movement, where it was prurient for them to concentrate on the leftist roots of (many) neoconservatives and exagerrate them, ie. portray the comparatively low number of former Trotskyites among them as a formative part of the movement. There's no particular need for finding Trotsky at the bottom of what, in the end, has been a quest for global extension of American power; the paleocons who think otherwise were always fighting a losing game based on an idealistic view of some non-interventionist, "non-imperial" American past that arguably never existed.

What was it, seven countries in five years following 9/11?

Clark mentions two figures here, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz. Neither was a Trotskyite; Rumsfeld was a lifelong basic Republican, Wolfowitz had by all accounts I've seen been a cold war Scoop Jackson liberal before moving to the GOP side.

Good points.

So, you are essentially claiming the rabid neocon interventionism is not derived from Trotskyist intellectual influences, but rather a case of common ideological descent from the frog headchoppers of 1790s ?

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