Re: The weird men behind Bush's war

[Jim Farmelant <farmelantj@xxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, 04 Apr 2003 14:19:55 -0500 utopian <utopian@xxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:
> >


> I don't think that it is sufficient to say "Most neoconservative
> defence
> intellectuals have their roots on the left, not the right" and then
> say
> "morphed" from "the largely Jewish-American Trotskyist movement"
> into
> "neoconservative" without at least citing one individual by name.
> How does
> the "morphing" take place?

Noeconservatism as a movement did evolve out of American
Trotskyism, with James Burnham as probably one of the
earliest examples of a Trot who subsequently shifted to
the right, who was then followed by many others (i.e. Max
Eastman, Sidney Hook, Irving Kristol, Daniel Bell, Nathan
Glazer, Norman Prodhoretz, Midge Decter, Getrude
Himmelfarb, and many, many more).  However, most
of those people are either dead or in their dotage right
now.  Most of the neocons in the Bush Administration
are intellectual, and in some cases( like Bill Kristol),
biological, descendents of the original neoconservatives.

>
> I say this without contradicting the well-know fact that many early
> American
> communists from Lovestone on, including ex-Trotskyists, ex-left-wing
> socialists, and ex-Stalinists became right-wing ideologues. But
> there are
> several problems with this analysis. First, these figures seemed to
> have
> started out as right-wingers.

The present generation of neoconservatives, are largely people
who have always been rightwing, although even here, there
are some exceptions, like David Horowitz, and the recent
case of Christopher Hitchens.

Jim F.

> Utopian
>
>


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