>>2886732>Why does Caleb believe Trotsky was a “Jewish supremacist” exactly?This is just polemical stuff. They don't really believe it, it's an old far-right trope going back aways. The neocons-as-Trotskyists line also emerged as part of a civil war within American conservatism. An interesting thing is that Maupin really tries to connect Max Shachtman to neoconservatism.
There's an interesting article I just looked up that attacks this.
https://www.scribd.com/document/613414672/William-F-King-Neoconservatives-and-TrotskyismReading through it. Key points:
(1) The successors to pre-Cold War Old Right wanted to discredit the neocons as truly conservative by asserting that they are descended from Trotskyists.
(2) This was also flirting with antisemitism because Trotsky like many neocons were Jews so therefore the neocons were engaging in Permanent Revolution from the White House or somehow applying the methods of it.
(3) This started in the 1980s when neocons began attaining influence in the Reagan administration and conservative think tanks, and picked up more energy in the 1990s and after 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq.
(4) Irving Kristol was one of the few of the original neoconservative brain trust who really was a self-described Trot at one point. There was also Seymour Martin Lipset, and Kistol's wife. And a political scientist named Martin Diamond. But a lot of others who gained prominence on the right were either never on the left at all, or if they were, they were either liberals or left-social democrats who were opposed to Leninism. This was also mostly when they were either teenagers or in their early twenties.
(5) The extent of the Trotskyism of these four people is greatly exaggerated. Because again, they were kids. Kristol was also never a member of any explicitly Trot group. He was briefly a member of the Workers Party of Max Schachtman in 1940. Actually these people were part of a small faction in it called the "Shermanites" which was anti-Bolshevik (so therefore anti-Trotskyist) which caused Schactman to kick them out, and very quickly they began publishing a journal (called "Enquiry") that was criticizing Marxism, Leninism, and Trotskyism.
(6) Irving then joined the Army during WWII and at this point no longer considered himself to be a socialist of any stripe. That pretty much goes for all four of these people from what I can tell.
(7) Schachtman was an associate of Trotsky but broke with him, later moved to an anti-communist form of social democracy over the following decades and joined the old Socialist Party but Trotskyists got expelled from that in the late 1930s. There were some later neocons who were followers of Schachtman in the late 1960s. This was on the right-wing of the Socialist Party.
(8) Irving who was the most Trot of them, unlike other neocons, was not particularly enthusiastic about American military force in the same way that others in the Bush administration were. He was more of a realist in the sense that he thought American policy should behave unilaterally yes, but the "crusade for democracy" stuff isn't something he believed in.
(9) Other neocons who did call for spreading a "democratic revolution" like Michael Leeden and Joshua Muravchik were not Trots. Muravchik had been a young socialist. This guy Leeden has a pretty wild biography:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Ledeen(10) The idea that these people are doing permanent revolution is basically ignorant or lying about Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution. It wasn't just "do militarized socialism and invade everyone." It was about how attempts to carry out a bourgeois-democratic revolution that would do land reform and achieve national independence in third-world countries would fail unless it was led by the working class in a socialist revolution that would combine and pass over a specific historical stage. That's what that actually was.