Justin Raimondo writes:
Back in the early 1990s, before Antiwar.com was
founded, I was a regular at a roundtable discussion group sponsored by the late
Bill
Rusher, a founding editor of National Review: these seminars were
organized by a young man associated with a prominent conservative educational
organization. Bill lent us a room at the posh Union Club,
at the top of San Francisco’s Nob Hill, where every month we would hear a
speaker give an informal talk: we would then retire to the lounge, where
refreshments and a lively discussion were enjoyed. I became friendly with the
young organizer, and we had several interesting discussions about various
matters: one day he confided to me how he had become involved conservative
politics.
He had been attending a college somewhere in the
Midwest, at which time his politics were vaguely conservative: one day he saw
an advertisement for a lecture and meeting "in solidarity with Poland’s
Solidarity" – the Polish anti-Soviet labor
group that eventually overthrew the Communist party’s dictatorship – and
decided to attend. Although he didn’t know it at the time, it was the beginning
of his ideological hegira….
The group sponsoring the meeting was Social
Democrats, USA, formerly known as the International Socialist League, a
Trotskyist group founded and led by Max Shachtman.
Shachtman had been Leon Trotsky’s chief intellectual advocate in the US until breaking
with the Red Army commander in 1938 over the issue of the class nature of the
Soviet Union. While insisting on retaining his socialist credentials, Shachtman
gradually moved away from defending the Soviet Union – a favorite pastime of
American commies and their numerous fellow travelers – and came to believe the
Kremlin represented a far more deadly threat to socialist ideals than the West.
After breaking with the orthodox Trotskyists,
Shachtman initially espoused the so-called Third Camp position, advancing the
slogan "Neither
Washington nor Moscow," and placing his hopes on an
"independent" upsurge of socialist-minded workers. When that failed
to materialize, and as the cold war got hotter, Shachtman slid further to the
right: the ISL began emphasizing its opposition to "Stalinism," and
issuing dire warnings about the alleged Soviet threat. When the Vietnam war
broke out, Shachtman took the position that the US and its Vietnamese
sock-puppets were preferable to the North Vietnamese Stalinists, and supported the war – a
position that further decimated the ranks of his minuscule group, which had by
that time dissolved itself into the Socialist Party of Norman Thomas.
Yet the Shachtmanites retained their internal
cohesiveness, eventually reemerging as Social Democrats, USA, a group which still exists, albeit only in the
formal sense. Shachtman, meanwhile, had other fish to fry: he had become an
advisor to AFL-CIO chieftain George
Meany, and a confidante of Senator
Henry "Scoop" Jackson, the warlike Democratic Senator from
Washington state whose foreign policy views often led his critics to describe
him as "the Senator from Boeing." In the late 1950s and early 1960s,
Shachtman’s followers became influential in the labor movement and in the
budding civil rights movement: Bayard
Rustin, the real organizer of Martin Luther King’s famous "March on
Washington," was a Shachtmanite, although kept out of the limelight by his
homosexuality.
It was at this point that a naïve Midwestern
college student, motivated by his anti-Communist inclinations, attended a
meeting in support of Poland’s Solidarity movement – and was introduced to the
insular and highly obscure world of the Shachtmanites. After the lecture, he
told me, he was invited to another SDUSA meeting, and found the group conducive
to his hawkish anti-Communist views, and so he joined up. However, one thing
puzzled him: at the end of the meeting, everyone rose and sang "The
Internationale," the old commie anthem! A fine way for a supposedly
anti-Communist group to operate!
Although he found this somewhat off-putting, to
say the least, my young friend attributed this to the personal and ideological
eccentricities of his new-found anti-Communist comrades. In any case, he became
an active member of the group, and from there found his way into the
conservative movement. And he wasn’t the only one: indeed, a whole generation
of leftists-turned-rightists – known as the
neoconservatives – were veterans of Shachtman’s circle: when Ronald Reagan
came to Washington a whole government agency was turned over to these
characters – the National
Endowment for Democracy, the goal of which was to combat Communist
ideological influence in the international sphere.
Weaseling their way into the US government, these
"State Department socialists" began to become a real force in
Washington. Shachtman’s cultivation of Senator Jackson paid off as several
Shachtmanites found their way to his
office and were hired as aides. Prominent neocons graduated from SDUSA and
its youth group, the Young Peoples Socialist League (known as Yipsels), to
become the War Party’s brain trust: Jeanne Kirkpatrick, James Woolsey, Carl
Gershman, Max Kampelman, Penn Kimble, and Elliott Abrams, to name just a few.
Irving Kristol, the neoconservative "godfather," wrote about his
Trotksyist youth in this brief
memoir.
While Shachtman’s tiny grouplet never had more
than a few hundred members, they had influence way out of proportion to their
numbers. Indeed, Shachtman’s reach extends even unto the present day, as we can
clearly see from this
recent op ed piece by Gabriel Schoenfeld, a senior advisor to Mitt Romney’s
presidential campaign. Entitled "Why Mitt?", this Jerusalem Post
article is subtitled: "My support for Mitt Romney has something to do with
a ship called the Serpa Pinto and with an American Marxist revolutionary."
The ship is the one his family came in on, and
the revolutionary Marxist is none other than Shachtman, whose group – then
called the Workers Party – Schoenfeld’s father joined. Schoenfeld the younger
tells us the Shachtmanites opposed entry into World War II, but then avers:
"My father sought to atone for his
youthful political delusions all his life, becoming, by the time of his death
in 1979, a fervent advocate of American principles and American power. My
mother, instead of perishing in Hitler’s gas chambers, lived to die a peaceful
death in Connecticut in 2009. Along the way, I learned some things from them,
including some things that have me hard at work at Mitt Romney’s campaign
headquarters on this very day."
Shachtman, too, sought to atone for his
anti-interventionist sins by turning his followers into cold warriors with a
red-pink tinge, and inspiring neocons through the George W.
Bush years right up to the present day. But why, one has to ask, must the
rest of us pay for those "sins" with endless wars? One of the reasons
is the enduring influence of those Trotskyites of the 1930s who went on to found
the troublesome
little sect known as the neoconservatives.
Schoenfeld is a former editor at Commentary
magazine, the great-grandaddy of the neocon publishing empire, and went on
to join the Hudson Institute, where he commingles with such neocon notables as Michael Ledeen.
His most recent book, Necessary
Secrets, makes
the case for government censorship in the name of "national
security": he infamously advocated prosecuting the New York Times
for revealing the secret warrantless surveillance of American citizens by the
National Security Agency. He has been vocal about the absolute necessity of jailing
Julian Assange, and he’s testified
before Congress as an "expert" on media-government relations –
always, of course, in favor of stricter secrecy.
However, when Steven
Rosen and Keith Weissman, two top officials of AIPAC, the pro-Israel
lobbying group, were caught red-handed stealing government secrets gleaned from
their mole in the Pentagon, Schoenfeld was outraged. If
the AIPAC Two were convicted of handing this top secret intelligence over to
Israel, he averred, then journalists and lobbyists just "doing their
job" could be targeted.
If only Assange had turned those diplomatic
cables over to Israel, instead of posting them on the Internet for all to see,
he would presumably be a hero in Schoenfeld’s book – or, at the very least, a
journalist just doing his job.
According to Schoenfeld, "the shadows of the
1930s fall all around us" – and the fact that we still have Shachtmanites
harrying us to war underscores the truth of this contention, albeit not in the
way Schoenfeld intended. To Shachtman, the cold war was a Manichean struggle
against Evil Incarnate, and Schoenfeld employs the same apocalyptic mindset to
the present day:
"The great conflagration that followed
that decade continues to define the world in which I live. That world is now
full of weapons that can kill as many people in an instant as Hitler managed to
murder over a decade. In the Middle East, a state run by Islamic fanatics is
racing to acquire such weapons.
"Under our noses, they are enriching uranium at a feverish pace and designing the implosion mechanisms for a nuclear warhead.
"Under our noses, they are enriching uranium at a feverish pace and designing the implosion mechanisms for a nuclear warhead.
"Like Hitler, they openly threaten to
annihilate the world’s largest collectivity of Jews, i.e., those living in the
State of Israel."
In NeoconWorld, it’s
always 1939. The Eternal Hitler is perpetually arising to threaten our very
existence and – needless to say – the Jews are always standing on the brink of
annihilation. Given this worldview, it’s no surprise to find Schoenfeld and his
fellow neocons flocking to Romney’s banner. They know he will almost
certainly take us to war with Iran.
I’d be very surprised to learn Max Shachtman
isn’t smiling down – or, in his case, up – at the success of his
latter-day fan club. The ideological bacillus he unleashed on the world has
infected the American body politic far beyond his wildest dreams. History takes
many strange byways, but I wonder if even old Max could have imagined
"Trotskyites for Romney."
NOTES IN THE MARGIN
When I published my first book, Reclaiming
the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement, in
1991, one of the criticisms was that I made far too much of the alleged
Shachtmanite influence on the neoconservatives. During the run up to the Iraq
war, when the neoconservatives were in the spotlight, the neocons-are-just-Trotskyists-turned-inside-out
theme gained some traction,
much to their dismay. Their response was to deny there was any such creature as
a neoconservative – Schoenfeld among
them – and they scoffed at the Shachtmanite connection: the whole thing,
they averred, was just a "conspiracy theory" with
"anti-Semitic" overtones.
I’d like to thank Schoenfeld for confirming the
thesis of my book, because I know it will just make his day.
P.S. You can follow me on Twitter here.
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