[PEN-L:36289] RE: Re: Perle before Swine

["Devine, James" <jdevine@xxxxxxx>]

Title: RE: [PEN-L:36282] Re: Perle before Swine

 
I wrote:
> So Wolfowitz, Perle, and Feith were once leftists of a sort (social
dems who sided with the US in the Cold War) who worked for Scoop Jackson?<

Michael Pollack writes:>
I don't think they were ever leftists of any sort (although I'd be
interested to learn otherwise).  I think they were centrist cold war
democrats who by that time had become neoconservatives.  The majority of
neocons at that point were still Democrats.  <

it's really just a matter of opinion whether or not they were "leftists." But the left/right spectrum (which is incredibly hard to pin down) is dynamic. There are all sorts of people who slowly or quickly migrate from the left to the right. Luckily, there are those who go the other way.

the turdbuckets who gravitated to the Senator from Boeing, Henry "Scoop" Jackson, in the early 1970s included some self-styled leftists, even self-styled Marxists, who had decided that the way to promote the interests of the working class was by linking up with (and getting jobs with) the AFL-CIO leadership and the like. Some of the self-styled Marxists were followers of the late Max Schactman, a latter-day incarnation of Jay Lovestone, who went from equating the US and USSR as class evils (favoring the "third camp" instead) to siding with the former. I doubt that Perle was one of those, but these self-styled Marxists also became part of the neo-con movement that linked up with Reagan in the 1980s.

Part of the problem was that some of these folks employed a very mechanical and rigid version of Marxism that was more adapted to the ideological struggles among various sects than to trying to talk to actual workers. Some were in Albert Shanker's camp in the Teachers' Union, siding with the union against the communities in the New York Teacher's Strike. All of them suffered from the common disease of sectarianism (which afflicts the right and center, too).

Jim Devine