It’s no secret the token bulk of Republican support of the Obama administration’s policies originated within the neoconservative establishment. A political movement born of Democrats disenchanted with the party’s domestic and especially foreign policy, most were Zionist Jews, many of whom published articles in the political magazine in Commentary launched by the American Jewish Committee. They vigorously opposed the radical New Left under Democrats George McGovern, Eugene McCarthy, and Walter Mondale. In fact, noted Clemson University professor and CATO Institute fellow C. Bradley Thompson claims the most influential neoconservatives cite their views as primarily the intellectual offspring of Leo Strauss (1899–1973). In doing so though, Dr. Thompson asserts they may draw upon paradigms Strauss himself never personally endorsed.

Noam Chomsky expressed his observation of neoconservatism as a politics of opportunism, dissecting how one may “start off as basically a Leninist, someone who’s going to become part of what Bakunin called the ‘Red Bureaucracy,’ you see that power doesn’t lie that way, and then you very easily become an ideologist of the right, and devote your life to exposing the sins of your former comrades, who haven’t yet seen the light and shifted to where power really lies.” In the process, ‘neocons’ find that they “barely have to change at all.”

Let us be clear: the neoconservative camp is not exclusive to Jewish intellectuals — far from it, in fact. For example, senior officials like former Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, though not identified per se as neoconservatives, listened closely to ‘neocon’ advisers on foreign policy, especially in the defense of Israel, the democratization of the Middle East, and the buildup of American military forces to achieve these goals by force, if necessary. They even imprinted the Obama administration by way of Robert Kagan and Victoria Nuland, while two other well-known Democrats — Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Henry ‘Scoop’ Jackson — fashioned themselves similarly with the late Republican Sen. John McCain. Today, neoconservatism remains highly influential among both Republicans and, to an increasingly lesser degree, Democrats, particularly among the so-called ‘blue dogs’.

Neocons at one time were staunch New Deal Democrats under President Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR) who later left the Democratic Party. They advocate democracy under the guise of serving American foreign policy’s best interests, not to mention international affairs with regard to international diplomacy. Some claim their hardline ‘anti-communist’ position and disdain for political radicalism destabilizing the status quo of a nation-state’s infrastructure have transformed them into an anachronism on the global stage. Yet this claim starkly contrasts from the reality that the neocon exodus from the Democratic Party in 1973 was constructed in reference to Daniel Bell, Moynihan, and Irving Kristol (the father of the co-Editor-in-Chief of the now-defunct Weekly Standard, Bill Kristol).
In fact, Jonah Goldberg, himself a ‘neocon’, contends the term — oft applied as a pejorative by paleoconservatives, Democrats and libertarians — is an ideological criticism for former left-wing Democrats who shifted ever so slightly to the right. He wrote in 2003 piece that “The word ‘neoconservative’ was coined by Michael Harrington and the editors of Dissent to describe their old friends who’d moved to the right. It was an insult, along the lines of ‘running dog’ or ‘fellow traveler,’ or, he speculates, “… perhaps the ‘neo’ was intended to conjure ‘neo-Nazi,’ the only other political label to sport the prefix.” Regardless of the semantics, the Left viewed the neoconservatives as guilty of “intellectual betrayal, not a distinct ideology”.
NEOCONSERVATISM’S TIES TO TROTSKYISM
The first neocons were former Trotskyist college students who loitered at the U-shaped stall called Alcove #1 adjacent the cafeteria at the City College of New York during the mid-1930s. The PBS documentary Arguing the World focused on the movement’s four most renowned ideological founders: Irving Kristol (father of Bill, once investigated by the FBI under suspicion of collaborating with the Soviet Union), Nathan Glazer, Irving Howe (who recruited Irving Kristol to the Trotskyist cause), and Daniel Bell; while the far larger cadre of communist students could be located at Alcove #2, which included Julius Rosenberg, later executed following he and his wife Ethel’s conviction of espionage on behalf of the Soviet Union. The Alcove #1 comrades were anti-Stalinists. Kristol explained he learned to think and theorize from the Trotskyites primarily through the works of James Burnham, Max Schachtman and Leon Trotsky himself — and this dissident intellectualism, many claim, drove the Alcove #1 cadre rightward in subsequent years.

Trotskyism was the orthodox Marxist-Leninist model which the Bolshevik Leon Trotsky applied, grounded in the model of founding a vanguard party of the working-class driven by proletarian internationalism, and the inevitable global governance under a dictatorship of the proletariat upon working-class self-emancipation and mass democracy. Trotsky, who urged Lenin to begin the Soviet invasion of Eastern Europe following the First World War, criticized Joseph Stalin’s policy for ‘Socialism in One Country’ and the vast Soviet bureaucracy developed under his dictatorship. Trotsky, for his part, asserted that Bolshevism needed to spread globally where all proletarians could mobilize for world revolution. Yet following the revolution’s failure in post World War I Germany, Stalin declared very openly industrialization and consolidating Bolshevism in Russia would best serve the cause over time. Stalin, through intrigues and possible poisoning of Lenin who lived under his care as the party Secretary General, ultimately prevailed.
On Trotsky, Lenin wrote, “Trotsky long ago said that unification is impossible. Trotsky understood this and from that time on there has been no better Bolshevik.” Yet regarding to Stalin, Lenin’s critique was, put mildly, scathing.
Comrade Stalin, having become Secretary-General, has unlimited authority concentrated in his hands, and I am not sure whether he will always be capable of using that authority with sufficient caution Comrade Trotsky, on the other hand, as his struggle against the C.C. on the question of the People’s Commissariat of Communications has already proved, is distinguished not only by outstanding ability. He is personally perhaps the most capable man in the present C.C., but he has displayed excessive self-assurance and shown excessive preoccupation with the purely administrative side of the work.
These two qualities of the two outstanding leaders of the present C.C. can inadvertently lead to a split, and if our Party does not take steps to avert this, the split may come unexpectedly.
Stalin is too coarse and this defect, although quite tolerable in our midst and in dealing among us Communists, becomes intolerable in a Secretary-General. That is why I suggest that the comrades think about a way of removing Stalin from that post and appointing another man in his stead who in all other respects differs from Comrade Stalin in having only one advantage, namely, that of being more tolerant, more loyal, more polite and more considerate to the comrades, less capricious, etc. This circumstance may appear to be a negligible detail. But I think that from the standpoint of safeguards against a split and from the standpoint of what I wrote above about the relationship between Stalin and Trotsky it is not a [minor] detail, but it is a detail which can assume decisive importance.
Lenin was right about Stalin. Indeed the schism between the Trotskyists and Stalin camp did not conclude before Trotsky was assassinated in his Mexican villa by Stalin’s hired hitman, Ramon Mercader, in 1940.
PIECING TOGETHER THE JIGSAW PUZZLE OF MARXISM IN NEOCONSERVATISM
Leo Strauss theorized contemporary liberalism contained within it an intrinsic trend towards extreme moral relativism. In turn, this spawned two types of nihilism. The first was a ‘brutal’ form, which he traced to both the Nazis and Soviet communism. In On Tyranny, he wrote these ideologies, which are both descendants of 18th century Enlightened thought, seek to destroy all tradition through revisionist history, an amoral bend in their ethical principles and finally their moral standards. Once these are replaced by the sudden impact of force and coercion contradictory to the state of human nature and mankind, its victims thus are subjugated and conquered.
But contemporary liberalism’s second type — the ‘gentle’ nihilism which appears innocuous in Western liberal democracies — was a graduation of amoral directionlessness and a ‘hedonistic permissive egalitarianism’ through such concepts most conservatives during the 21st century might perceive as abortion, homosexuality and political correctness, which he saw as permeating the fabric of contemporary American society. Such concepts best reflect those of the Fabian Society of socialism, the Positivist philosophy of Bertrand Russell, feminism under Margaret Sanger, atheism’s revocation through the judicial process of religious freedom; and finally, Gay Pride’s putsch of gender identities and medical expertise for transgendered peoples. As a Zionist, Strauss is on record having declared the settlement of Israel as “problematic for obvious reasons.”
“But,” said Strauss, “I can never forget what it achieved as a moral force in an era of complete dissolution. It helped to stem the tide of ‘progressive’ leveling of venerable, ancestral differences; it fulfilled a conservative function.”
In Strauss’ assertion that 20th century relativism, scientism, historicism and nihilism are all responsible for the deterioration of civil society and intellectual liberty, he sought to uncover those philosophical pathways that had led to this situation. Thus in the aftermath of his studies, he advocated a tentative return to classical political philosophy as the launchpad for critiquing a political body or system. And yet, it is this very advocacy for a return to a point in history which no longer is viewed favorably by the social and political consensus that points to neoconservatism, as with communism today, is an anachronism that President Ronald Reagan might also declare to be on “the ash heap of history.”
If Edmund Burke is correct in his letter to Sir Hercules Langrishe (1792) that “We must all obey the great law of change. It is the most powerful law of nature, and the means perhaps of its conservation,” Strauss’s ideological offspring grossly miscalculated in maintaining any credible geopolitical relevance. It is simply impossible for the will of a small cabal of neoconservative Trotskyists to democratize an entire social infrastructure in a nation-state under a sudden quick change act of militancy or proxy-based coups d’etat. As Islam has never successfully achieved widespread democratization, this grotesque display of indifference by the neocons has time and again proven their downfall whenever their insatiable desire to nation-build fails.
Thus, conscientious actors are careful to observe how they achieve their ends through bloodshed. “The wisdom of our ancestors,” claimed Burke, is in the notion “custom reconciles us to everything.” This is why, for all intents and purposes, neoconservatism died with the collapse of the Soviet Union — and like any lay zombie, its disciples will be the last to realize it.

Thank you for citing my work. Trump will not be starting a ‘Patriot Party’ per se, but he may keep the point on the table as a looming albatross lurking over the GOP Establishment. But I have added much more to the topics you’ve printed in the time since:
“BUILDING A PARALLEL ECONOMY IN A POST-GOOGLE AGE: HOW BLOCKCHAIN AND CRYPTOCURRENCIES CAN FUEL A SEPARATIST MOVEMENT” (29 Jan. 2021)
URL: https://theconservativehistoricalreview.wordpress.com/2021/01/29/building-a-parallel-economy-in-a-post-google-age-how-blockchain-and-cryptocurrencies-can-fuel-a-separatist-movement/
“TRUMP’S ‘PATRIOT PARTY’ POSES A SERIOUS CHALLENGE TO THE D.C. CARTEL’S ‘UNIPARTY’.” (22 Jan. 2021)
URL: https://theconservativehistoricalreview.wordpress.com/2021/01/22/trumps-patriot-party-poses-a-serious-challenge-to-the-d-c-cartels-uniparty/
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