"Trot To Neocon Pipeline"
Is it real or just a meme?
Is there a kernel of truth to it?
What is the origin of the phrase?
Is this just about Burger Neocon New Atheists like Shistuffer Bitchens or is there more to it?
It's definitely a thing here in Britain. Tony Blair and Keir Starmer were both Trots while studying at Oxbridge alongside a bunch of other senior Labour figures. British Trots base their platform on superficially far left politics divorced from a working class base, so joining at uni is a great opportunity to feel like a radical while selling papers and giving speeches to the plebs. With no social base or meaningful working class organisation membership rarely extends beyond university, after which many graduates revert to the mean and adopt typical petty-boug political attitudes. So teenage Trots often end up middle aged neo-cons
Not only trot
But anarcho-, and leftcom as well
Just look at Moffin'. He is a raging russophobic, sinophobic pro-NATO and pro-EU nazi.
>>2597776And a pedo too! Is there anything this guy can't be?
>>2597781Oh wowowow
Now that is a heavy accusation to make
I hope you can back this by proper evidence, because I am in no mood to get banned here
I oppose Moffin's political and economic positions, but I do not know his tendencies when it comes to sexxxo stuff.
There are too many examples of trots becoming neocons. There's another pipeline of bordigists/italian leftists becoming white supremacists
>>2597247No, because members of every other tendency also end up defecting to the right as well. Maoists, anarchists, MLs, ultras, everyone.
A ton of CPUSA members gave up after the 1930s and became arch-conservatives but we never hear of the "Stalinite to Buckleyite" pipeline, do we?
>>2597789Can you give me some links (articles, videos, whatever) about the leftcom to whitesupremacy pipeline?
I have fun shitting on leftcoms
>>2597790Because Stalin is the sun and a few dark spots in no way diminishes greatness of the Sun.
>>2597772Can you please provide an example of of a leftist/communist party in a developed country that does have 'a working class base'?
>>2597883Can I give a few examples from the last century or does it have to be currently?
There’s a kernel of truth in that being a contemporary anti-AES western leftist and adopting the ideologies that broke with those that prevailed in the USSR, always had the goal of anti-Sovietism which is only a skip and a hop from being anti-Communist in general. You become a Trot, a Maoist, a Hoxaist, etc to be the good socialist while those figures are lauded by the western bourg for being principled in being anti-Soviet, but when the Cold War ended there was no need for principled “good” anti-Soviet communists and thus the good socialists became the sensible, matured and enlightened neo-con.
Smart enough in their youth to have seen the flaws of the Soviet Union unlike those primitive working class dogmatists, but wisened by shocking revelations about what they inadvertently were supporting via Trotsky, Mao, Hoxha, that Peruvian guy, etc.
What Maupin tries to push is the idea that neocons are warlike and also socially liberal, so somehow Trotskyists took over conservatism (from nice, pleasant, socially-conservative isolationist paleocons… don't mention the racism and Axis sympathies) and began wearing conservatism like a skinsuit. But I don't think that's accurate for a couple of reasons.
From what I understand about neoconservatives, they were originally more focused on domestic policy than foreign policy (which was added in a bit later), and regarded themselves as morally serious defenders of "Western civilization." It's all dour and moralfaggy with them in that way. They're skeptical if not hostile to New Left social movements. Okay, Douglas Murray is gay, but he is not supportive of "gender ideology." They believe religion has a role to play in maintaining order, which is a really intellectualizzed way to come around to a religion. Christopher Hitchens didn't like religion but he wasn't a typical neoconservative, who is more like Murray.
Also, I don't think Trotskyism was ever into this hedonistic sex-positive stuff to begin with. I mean mid-20th century Trotskyism that you'd find in the Spartacist League or some group like that. They didn't suddenly become prudes, they already were. You can find a ton of heat aimed at identity politics from Trotskyist groups. Meanwhile nobody has ever talked about an anarchist-to-neocon pipeline from anarchists who really were libertines.
Trotsky was as neocon as he was fascist
Trot to neocon
Anarchist to Maoist to Anarchist to…
Anarchist to Ultra
Nazi to rad socdem (ML)
Rad socdem to ᴉuᴉlossnW (ziggers)
Rad socdem to neolibs (deng)
It's just funnier to shit on Trotskyists
The name itself: Trotsky. It's all ridiculously soy.
>>2597907You are invariantly retarded
>>2597883Sure, there aren't many (maybe Greece?) if any currently, but there are traditional ML parties which are, at the very least, trying to organise within the working class movement. The difference with British Trots is that they don't even try
>>2597873There's also Eldridge Cleaver who was a Black Panther before becoming a Reagan Republican. Then of course there's Bella Dodd. Trots definitely don't have a monopoly on socialists becoming reactionaries.
Trots, Stalinists, Leninists, etc… will eventually get bored of worshiping corpses, and when that happens they'll either become normal socialists and communists, or they'll find another hat or corpse to worship, and neoconservativism is what you undergo that as a twitter user because the algorithm is fine tuned in favor of neoconservativism, so in the eye of a twitter user it's "trendy."
>>2597898> They believe religion has a role to play in maintaining order, which is a really intellectualizzed way to come around to a religion.This is actually a quite old way of thinking about religion. This is the explcit thinking of Machiavelli in
The Prince and probably the implicit thinking of much of the "priestly" classes throughout history. It can never really be known to what extent religious leaders are "true believers" in their own horse shit, and which are Machiavellian Manipulators and Opportunists. But I suppose the same goes for secular poltiical ideology as well.
>>2597989Right. A lot of this was revived by Leo Strauss iirc. There's also a big emphasis on "nihilism" and moral relativism and historicism being a threat to the West which is fundamentally based on trans-historical "principles."
There's a big pile of books and articles on all of this, but this Jacobin article describes a neoconservative critique of liberal centrism as being unable to justify itself against the "extremists" on left and right (which basically appear as a red-brown hydra to them). This means the centrists talk about defending "democracy" in Ukraine but they don't think about why democracy is good, rather what they call "authoritarian" is just a caricature of everything they think is bad. So what Strauss did (and by extension a lot of neoconservatives do) is to say well yeah there really is no way to say what is good anyways, since any rule is really just baseless exercise of power and enforcement of the common interests of the group (in this case the West) against the baddies (foreigners, slaves, etc.). It's totally elitist as a creed.
>He advocates a Nietzschean “will to power” that determines what is true and virtuous. The rule of law, which restricts the arbitrary exercise of power, is replaced by sovereign power, whose legitimacy is derived from itself because there is no longer any external, abstract justification for it. “The best regime” in the sense of classical political philosophy, is not that which appears “most desirable,” but that which is “feasible or . . . possible on earth” because it corresponds to “human nature,” which — according to Strauss’s negative anthropology — is characterized by an inherent striving for dominance. Insofar as it does not build castles in the sky and requires “no miraculous or nonmiraculous change in human nature,” no “abolition or eradication of evil and imperfection” for its realization, the inevitable predatory rule is just. In essence, Strauss is echoing classical nineteenth-century conservative thought, which argued that alternative societal designs of deficient sinners would outrage God and his inner-worldly ordering work.[…]
>As an elite by natural right, Strauss and his followers also claimed the right to justify mass manipulation, to keep the population in the dark about the attitudes, actions, and goals of those in power, instead of contributing to the spiritual liberation of all as critics of power, as the Enlightenment intended. For Strauss, this also includes an instrumental relationship to religion. In 1932, he wrote to one correspondent that he was “not capable of faith” and was thus “looking for a way to live without faith.” However, if atheism or agnosticism are for him an expression of a master morality reminiscent of Richard Dawkins, he also sees the promotion of religiosity as an essential anchor for the stabilization of power and mobilization for the anti-egalitarian right.https://jacobin.com/2024/10/leo-strauss-neoconservatism-plato-elitism Basically are we LE NIHILISTS???
>I do actually agree with Douglas Murray that there is such a thing as evil in the world. Where we disagree is that I think there is a germ of evil buried inside all of us, and most of the time that germ is something perfectly mundane. Georges Ruggiu just wanted to be respected: that desire is not evil in itself, but it can make you do evil things. (There’s evil in me as well. I’m no stranger to the pleasure of hating; I’m doing it right now.) I think the sadism and cruelty of October 7th—and the far greater sadism and cruelty Israel has displayed since—have their origins in entirely ordinary human frailties, the petty self-deceptions and insecurities that churn away inside everyone’s mind basically all the time. But according to Murray, people like me have been deluded in our ‘search for endless subtlety and limitless understanding,’ which is why we’re ‘missing out on one of the greatest divides of all.’ Instead of trying to understand anything, we should just accept that morality works in basically the same way that it does on Power Rangers. There are goodies and baddies. Sorry, but this is not serious. HarperCollins might as well have published a book about how when it rains, that’s God crying. To see a 46-year-old man speaking in this childish register produces a genuine shudder. The horror of the man-child, the pervert or imbecile who never managed to grow up. The political equivalent of an adult baby diaper fetishist.
>But I don’t think Murray really believes in this infantile moral universe he’s conjured. That’s for his readers. He is secretly on the side of the death cults.
>The official story is that Murray likes Israel and Israelis because they embody the same liberal values as the West. But that’s not it at all. In fact, he thinks Israel is better than the West. He keeps going into raptures over how much more mature and well-developed Israeli teenagers are than their peers in America and Europe. He meets a group of IDF conscripts, and discovers that they’re nineteen years old. ‘It nearly floored me. These girls were the same age as a student going to college in America or Britain. They were the same age as people in the West who are treated like—and act like—children. But these Israelis were not children. They were young women. And soldiers at that.’ (Big talk from a man who’s just spent a hundred pages whimpering for his lollipop, but I digress.) What, at root, is the difference between these Israeli Überfrauen and the ungrateful toddlers of London and New York? ‘Young Israelis do not have the luxury of deciding whether they like war or develop grand ideas such as “war doesn’t solve anything.”’ He’s not wrong! If you’re a young, non-Haredi Israeli Jew and you decide that your moral convictions forbid you to join the army, the state can arrest you and send you to prison. Older Israelis don’t have that luxury either; they’re routinely arrested for criticising the army or mourning its victims. I think I prefer the decadent West.
>But Murray’s hatred of the West and our liberal-democratic values doesn’t end there. He writes that after spending time in Israel, home started to feel like a strange place. ‘Whenever I made brief trips back to America or Britain, I kept noticing the way these societies far from the front lines seemed to have been driven mad by war. In Britain the euthanasia debate had come round again, and the same moral issues were being rehearsed again. Is this really the highest moment of human achievement and peace, I wondered. To decide when you might kill an old person? In all this time, the place that felt least out of joint was Israel.’ I’m not sure how this counts as being ‘driven mad by war,’ but what he says is true: the debate over assisted dying has been a significant one in Britain. It’s one I’m interested in, because I’ve been on both sides in quick succession. I thought I was implacably against until earlier this year, when I had to watch my mother slowly dying in a hospital ward, and learned first-hand what unassisted dying really means. Maybe one day I’ll write about it. But Murray has no time for our democratic attempts to balance the values of life and dignity in the difficult spaces where they conflict. He prefers Israel, where they don’t argue about that sort of thing at all, and public debate involves people who say stuff like ‘Death to the Arabs’ and ‘Gaza must be made uninhabitable’ and ‘Blot out the tribe of Amalek.’ Ah! Sanity!
>Clearly, what Murray really likes about Israel is its proximity to war. In his introduction, he writes that ‘perhaps the only force in the world even greater than evil itself is the great, collected, concentrated evil that is war.’ This is literally meaningless dreck. An example of a thing can’t be greater than the thing itself. ‘Perhaps the only lunch more satisfying than a sandwich is the great, meaty sandwich we call hamburgers.’ Murray has to talk like this because he’s trying to worm his way out of a contradiction: he knows he’s supposed to denounce war in general terms, but actually he’s not against it. His problem with Europe is that it’s no longer a martial civilisation; it’s ‘entered a postreligious era in which the very idea of fighting, killing, or dying for your faith is anathema.’ America, meanwhile, has ‘friendly countries to its north and south and ocean everywhere else.’ But Israel is a different matter. Israel is the giddy frontier, locked in a permanent demographic hyperwar against its own population, an endless struggle to kill and repress and subdue. Out of that constant struggle, you get a fierce, disciplined society. Just not a very democratic one. He likes Israel because it’s one of his death cults. I don’t think he’s ignorant about the massacres, the rape camps, the deliberate targeting of journalists. He knows, even if he pretends not to, that what Israel is carrying out in Gaza is a genocide. All the moralistic drivel in his book, the big toddler’s tantrum over goodies and baddies, is a very flimsy disguise for the pleasures of evil.https://samkriss.substack.com/p/douglas-murray-gruesome-toadyIn general, radical leftist ideology (of whatever stripe) is not a sustainable political position. Many leftists are cultural reactionaries who are more interested in living out a persecution fantasy and seeing themselves as heroic rebels resisting the man, and a lot of those types (Maupin is a good example) end up going down some weird crypto-rightist path. The other option is moving to a less firebrand and extreme left wing position (e.g. Finkelstein). The American far right has many vulgar rad leftist elements: the railing against a class of elites, the tendency to feign as working class, populist sentiment, and this paranoia that the world is against them and shadowy cabal of elites are conspiring to ruin them (e.g transgenders being shoved on 'us' by liberal elites who want to kill our kids etc). When the liberal center assimilates a handful of left wing positions, then these reactionary rad leftists go down the far right route because its a way to sustain their identity.
>>2598010I wouldn't trust anything Jacobin writes when it comes to other ideoogies and theories. They have a nasty habit of strawmanning and misrepresenting anyone who isn't a dogmatic identified Marxist and shoving false dichotomies in people's faces.
>>2597247It's jewish supremacist jumping onto a new ideological vehicle.
>>2598113Conflating /isg/ American nobodies picking at the rotten corpse of the American communist movement 30 years after the fall of the USSR and 70 years after the fall of the USSR as a force against capitalism with actual revolutionaries™ such as Lenin and Luxemburg isn't the great uncomfortable truth you think it is. We've been peddled the same "working class is actually right-wing hurhur" schtick for 100 years now from the likes of Spengler and Orwell; grifters will always latch onto the movement when it's at its weakest for their own personal gain. Just as Lenin removed fools like Kautsky and Tseretseli from the discourse, so too is it within our power to remove Maupin and Finkelstein, as long as we are constantly developing the revolutionary situation.
>>2598026Good read. Thanks for posting that. I only caught your first reply a few days back, and missed this one.
How true is the Leftcom→Nazi pipeline?
>>2602647I've witnessed this occur once
Libertarian -> Egoist -> Leftcom -> White nationalist
>>2602647That happened to some online leftcom a week ago. My brain couldn't process all the details though.
>>2602683At the very least they end up attacking leftists and splintering communist orgs which the nazis only wish they could be as effective
>>2602684was he like an aimee theresoid "frens" poster on twitter or something?
>>2602687I don't think so? They were some r/leftcom type.
I met a leftcom in the wild once. He tried to get me to read a paper he wrote about turning the DSA into an "organic centralist" organization. I glazed over it and never got back to him. An oldhead told me that leftcoms are a pathology of youth where they feel a compulsion to write pseudo grad-school essays in contrast to other people of their cohort who become anarchists who dumper dive for smashed vegan garbage cake. He said go with the cake.
>>2602685Yeah I am convinced all leftcoms are on the cluster B scale and desire control and naturally end up wignats
>>2602684do you know their twitter name or something
I wanna see the evolution of their posts
>>2602714Leftcoms also never hide their disdain for non-white people
It's real stories, but cherry-picking. It seems to me that with enough research, you can establish such a "pipeline" between any two ideologies that have seen at least a couple thousand followers. Stalinists claiming this about Trots as a general tendency are as unserious as liberals using anecdotes as "proof" of horseshoe theory.
If you want to be a bit more serious you could look for what kind of changes are going on in someone's life when he or she becomes an ex-Marxist. Whether it's Thomas Sowell, Lord Desai, and so on. One might say that, by abandoning Marxist doctrine at the particular point they abandon it, they are giving credence to it.
>>2597247Yes it's real, because the core idea of trotskyism, leftcommunism, ultraleftism, etc, is that communism is impossible in practice, but must be fought for on moral grounds
At some point something gives out and they do a 180
>>2606636Trots don't say Trot you spaz.
>>2602647Same as ML to islamist
incredible how only the mls are the god chosen ones
>>2606920mls always get hate but they atleast dont grift every five years
>>2597883There is none. The labor aristocracy has no need for communism. They need socdem welfare gibs. See usapol thread.
>>2597978Greece is imperial core PERIPHERY.
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