Neo-Conservatism is Trotskyism
"Neo-Conservatism is Trotskyism" names the genealogical claim — popularized by Michael Lind, developed by paleoconservatives like Paul Gottfried, and used polemically by Infrared — that neoconservatism is the continuation of Trotskyist politics by other means.
The genealogy
- Irving Kristol, James Burnham, Max Shachtman: the Trotskyist or Shachtmanite left of the 1930s-40s became the Cold War right of the 1950s-70s ("Shachtmanites staffed the neocon infrastructure").
- Continuities claimed: permanent revolution becomes global democratic crusade; the world-historical vanguard party becomes the ideological network (Commentary, Public Interest, AEI); the proletariat is replaced by "democracy" as the universal subject; enemies are counter-revolutionaries to be smashed without limits.
- The foreign-policy record: Iraq war architects (Wolfowitz, Feith, Perle) applying "democratic revolution" doctrine with Bolshevik means.
Infrared usage
Haz wields the equation as a weapon against liberalism's right wing: the ideology of endless war is a secular eschatology — revolution without the people, universalism without the class. It also serves the deeper point: ideologies migrate across nominal labels while their structure persists, so judging movements by their actual social content — not their vocabulary — is the only serious method (see Anglo Box, Woodrow Wilson).