Senior Advisor to Romney Inspired by Trotsky’s Right-hand Man

My Catbird Seat October 21, 2012 

"…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…"


by Justin Raimondo

“Trotskyites for Romney.”

William A. Rusher

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….

Max Shachtman

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. More>> Senior advisor to Romney inspired by Trotsky’s right-hand man | My Catbird Seat

Graphic Chart of the Shachtmanites & Socialist Neoconservatives