America’s neoconservatives are apostates. Having done as much as anyone to bring about Donald J. Trump’s presidency, most neocons then became principled opponents of the Dear Leader. They should be wary of other apostates’ fate in history, such as Leon Trotsky’s, especially since the neocon movement has deep Trotskyite roots. As American institutions crumble, and Stalinist concepts such as “Enemy of the People” take root, the danger increases that NeverTrump former Republicans will start to be hunted down.
In 2003 I wrote a piece for The Globalist discussing the neoconservatism of one of the emerging lights of the movement, Max Boot. https://www.theglobalist.com/boot-camp-or-the-ideology-of-russian-americans/
Max and I were both born in Moscow but drew different conclusions from our Soviet experience. Max, like most Soviet emigres everywhere, veered sharply to the right. I argued that this kind of conservatism – admiration for strong, decisive leaders, love affair with the military, overwrought patriotism and aversion to all manner of protest against authority and rocking the boat – was a peculiarly Russian trait. It was as though those newly baked Americans (and newly baked Israelis and Germans, as well) simply changed the sign on their deeply rooted cultural Stalinism without altering its substance.
It was around the time of the invasion of Iraq and nothing as yet foreshadowed the rise of American fascism. Yet, all these characteristics of neoconservatism were proto-fascist in nature. Boot’s route to the neocon camp was unique, of course. The movement is an American phenomenon but it has well-known Russian roots. In the 1930s, first-generation children of Jewish immigrants attended New York’s City College, since at the time they had been excluded from the upper-class Ivy League and other private universities.
An extraordinary number of them went on to do great things in America. But they were children of shtetl Jews from Ukraine, Poland, Belarus and other parts of the Pale of Settlement in the Russian Empire. Their sympathies lay on the left, they welcomed the Bolshevik takeover in their old country and many of their kids embraced communism. At City College they split into Stalinists and Trotskyites, arguing and sharpening their polemical skills. Two of the former Trotskyites, Irving Kristol and Daniel Bell, turned right when they grew up and founded the magazine Public Interest, which became the foundation of neoconservatism.
Boot, along with most other neocons, has now turned against Trump. He has gone further then most of his erstwhile comrades, leaving the Republican Party, calling on voters to elect Democrats and writing a book detailing his new position.
Other neocons – too numerous to list – are opposing Trump but have not given up on purifying the doctrine. They want to work against Trump from within the party. In a paradoxical way they have reverted to the movement’s original Trotskyism as Trotsky never recanted his communist beliefs and was hoping that the Bolshevik Party, which had by then become as fully the party of Stalin as the GOP is now the party of Trump, would eventually see the light.
Trotsky ended badly. He was forced into exile and his family, friends and remaining supporters in the Soviet Union were killed or packed off to the GULAG. Eventually he was assassinated in Mexico on Stalin’s orders.
Such things don’t happen in America. Or at least they have not happened until now. But lots of things that were unthinkable only two years ago are now everyday reality that is no longer even worth remarking upon. This is why America’s Trotskys shouldn’t be complacent, especially if the November midterm elections show that the United States has become Trump’s Country, too.
Look at world leaders Trump admires or has become buddies with. Vladimir Putin kills his opponents at home and abroad. So does Kim Jong Un. The Saudis have just kidnapped or murdered a regime critic who was a Washington Post columnist and a permanent resident of the US – and they did it blatantly, at their embassy in Istanbul. Israelis, meanwhile, detained an American student because she was a critic Israel’s policies.
Trump seems to be just fine with all that. More than that: he has used a Stalinist term “Enemies of the People” on America’s free, First Amendment-protected press. He has falsely accused protesters of being paid agents. He has threatened his political opponents with jail. And he has done all that in front of a raging mob at his campaign rallies which are his unique riff on Stalin’s Communist Party congresses, Il Duce’s public speeches and Hitler’s Nuremberg witches sabbaths.
Small wonder his opponents get an avalanche of death threats and have to go into hiding with their families.
As Trump and his followers in the Republican Party weaken government institutions and destroy the system of checks and balances – as was on display last week when Brett Kavanaugh was rammed onto the Supreme Court shredding the reputation of the Supreme Court, the Senate and the FBI – the jailing and then even killing of opponents – including extrajudicial murders abroad – will get closer to reality.
And one more point of similarity with Trotskyism. A disproportionate number of Bolsheviks and their early supporters were Jews. Most were in it because they were true believers, not opportunists who came later. That was why they were more likely to oppose Stalin’s takeover of their party and its ideology. They were purged massively during the 1930s and then, after the creation of Israel – also built by Jewish Socialists from the former Russian Empire – Stalin turned openly anti-Semitic.
Neocons are also disproportionately Jewish – and so are, therefore, Republican NeverTrumpers. The strain of anti-Semitism among Trump supporters is all too evident. Trump has already resorted to the Nazi dog-whistling, bringing up the name of George Soros – the bete noire of Viktor Orban and his Hungarian heirs to the fascist Arrow Cross – when talking about protesters against his misrule. Accordingly, a leaflet has been making rounds on social media, the work of the white supremacists of the Daily Stormer. It describes the controversy over Kavanaugh as a yet another Jewish plot against the white race.
