August 21, 1940: Trotsky, the James Dean Effect, Cafe Socialism and Neoconservatism. Things that make you go "mmmm?"

This interesting item appears on the blog Today In World War II History for this day:

Today in World War II History—Aug. 21, 1940 & 1945

One of the interesting things about it is the photograph of Leon Trotsky with American admirers.

Trotsky in the photo looks like an aged professor. Not like the leader of the Red Army he once was.  He doesn't look like somebody that Stalin would bother to hunt down and have assassinated.

But Stalin did just that.

Trotsky retained admirers well after his exile and indeed into this very day.  Among the hard left functuaries who obtained employment roles in FDR's New Deal Administrations, along with closet Communists, were closet Trotskyites, a species of Communist. Both were a tiny percentage of those in the alphabet administration, of course, but they were both there. The difference between the two, and it was a significant one, is that conventional Communist had somebody to report to and receive orders from, with that somebody forming a chain back to Moscow.  Trotskyites didn't, and therefore they never posed any kind of real threat to the U.S. of any kind.

Indeed, Trotskyites then, and now, can be placed into the category of Socialist Oddballs, fo which the Socialist world is jam packed.  A feature of Socialist Oddballism is adherence to a theory "that's never been tried", which gives the adherent the comfort of not having to confront failure.  Every type of Socialism every tried, anywhere, has massively failed, which is why it isn't used by any serious nations today.  

Trotskyism is no exception.  It would have failed and Trotsky's immediate goals while a figure in the Soviet Union were a failure.  We've just been reading about one of them here, his war against the Poles.  Trotsky nearly succeeded in overrunning Poland, to be sure, but in his view, the next step was Berlin.  When the war on Poland failed, and failed big, he proposed an invasion of India.

All of which was nutty, but Trotsky benefits from the James Dean Effect, just like another Communist failure, Che Guevara. Dying before nature took them out, they're preserved by what people imagine them to be, just like the young actor who frankly wasn't all that great, rather than what they really were.

American Trotskyism has an odd twist to it, however, that should be mentioned.  Quite a few young American Trotskyites evolved, oddly enough, into Neoconservatives.  Over time, they became disillusioned with the nut job aspects of Socialist theory, but they interesting didn't become disillusioned about changing the world, and changing the world through intervention.  Neoconservatives, including some former Trotskyites, rose up into administrative power in the 1980s and introduced into Conservatism the concept of nation building.

Which didn't work well.