• DOI:10.1080/1474389042000309817
• Corpus ID: 162356558

Neoconservatives and "Trotskyism"

@article{King2004NeoconservativesA,
  title={Neoconservatives and "Trotskyism"},
  author={William King},
  journal={American Communist History},
  year={2004},
  volume={3},
  pages={247 - 266}
}

• W. King
• Published 1 December 2004
• Political Science
• American Communist History

In one of the first in-depth studies on neoconservatism, 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 today, as a result of a civil war within American conservatism, it is precisely the history of “the neocons” that is being distorted through a polemical campaign aimed at prominent neoconservatives and the foreign policy of the Bush administration. Leading the campaign against the neocons are the self-styled paleoconservatives, an intellectual faction made up of libertarians, right-wing populists, and traditionalist conservatives who consider themselves the legitimate successors to the pre-Cold War Old Right. In an attempt to discredit the neocons’ conservative credentials, the “paleocons” have forcefully asserted that neoconservatism is a descendant of American Trotskyism, and that neoconservatives continue to be influenced by Leon Trotsky in their views on foreign policy. Reflecting a propensity for flirting dangerously with—when not openly embracing—anti-semitism, paleoconservatives have even charged that a “cabal of Jewish neocons” is manipulating US foreign policy and implementing Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution from the White House.