Hey y'all, if you're here to shit on unions, you can fuck right off. I've been a union man since I was a union boy, and I will be a union man until the day I die. If you're here to shit on the workers of the world, or to make excuses for someone who is currently doing that, go fuck yourself and don't come back.
There's a Trotskyist to Neocon pipeline for some reason. If a Neocon tells you he used to be a socialist then 90% of the time he used to be a Trot. I never managed to understand how it works.
My pet theory is that it revolves around democracy and plurality in the party. Which means that while Trotskists don't cast you out in the west, they will just not let you become a cadre if you don't repeat Trot wisdom. This means that self labeled socialists which often don't get into cadres can feel as if they are socialist, even though they have large gaps even with Trots.
Plenty ML that I know are much clearer in what can be said and what has to be understood to be part of the party (but you can always not be a member of the party but support campaigns).
So Trots will bond with you over anti Bureaucratic stuff, will say how important pluralist democracy is, that they were silence, that Stalin and the Soviet Union were bad as socialism has to mean freedom and the to be Neocons take out: Bad socialists repress people, socialism was bad and about control, but I like control and I like to not have my personal opinion repressed.
So why do anarchist groups not produce neocons? When (in the rare cases) people stop being anarchists, they usually go socdem (or very occasionally ecofash). It seems like the same pluralism is there
My hypothesis is that a lot of trots are so virulently anti-soviet that they wind up becoming pro-US and US systems. This would start in international things, but expand to domestic policy.
Christopher Hitchens