Irving Kristal talking about the Communist idealism of his youth.

Is it then perhaps my radical past, now so firmly disowned, that bothers me and makes CCNY unhallowed ground? I think not. I have no regret about that episode in my life. Joining a radical movement when one is young is very much like falling in love when one is young. The girl may turn out to be rotten, but the experience of love is so valuable it can never be entirely undone by the ultimate disenchantment.
It seems that the Trotskyite/Neo Con connection is rather spurious and comes from the close connection of CCNY and another group The New York Intellectuals in the post WWII period, basically debating societies of the privately schooled elite.

ESR | March 22, 2004 | Neoconservatives and Trotskyism - Page 1

A very good article on the subject and worth a read Attaboy.

For paleocon polemicists, it matters little that Kristol has spent almost his entire adult life as one of America's most prolific and high-profile intellectual proponents of democracy and capitalism.
Anyway the Memoirs of a Trotskyite was a magazine article not a manifesto and was a recollection of his youth in postwar America.

When you put it into perspective with his other publications, only the less inteligent would judge it's content at face value.

From Wiki.

Articles

  • "Men and Ideas: Niccolo Machiavelli," Encounter, Dec. 1954.
  • "American Intellectuals and Foreign Policy," Foreign Affairs, July 1967 (repr. in On the Democratic Idea in America).
  • "Memoirs of a Cold Warrior," New York Times Magazine, Feb. 11, 1968 (repr. in Reflections of a Neoconservative).
  • "When Virtue Loses All Her Loveliness," The Public Interest, Fall 1970 (repr. in On the Democratic Idea in America and Two Cheers for Capitalism).
  • "Pornography, Obscenity, and Censorship," New York Times Magazine, Mar. 28, 1971 (repr. in On the Democratic Idea in America and Reflections of a Neoconservative).
  • "Utopianism, Ancient and Modern," Imprimus, April 1973 (repr. in Two Cheers for Capitalism).
  • "Adam Smith and the Spirit of Capitalism," The Great Ideas Today, ed. Robert Hutchins and Mortimer Adler, 1976 (repr. in Reflections of a Neoconservative).
  • "Memoirs of a Trotskyist," New York Times Magazine, Jan. 23, 1977 (repr. in Reflections of a Neoconservative).
  • "The Adversary Culture of Intellectuals," Encounter, Oct. 1979 (repr. in Reflections of a Neoconservative).
Books

Also from Wiki.

In 1973 Michael Harrington coined the term "neoconservatism" to describe those liberal intellectuals and political philosophers who were disaffected with the political and cultural attitudes dominating the Democratic Party and were moving toward a new form of conservatism[4]. Intended by Harrington as a pejorative term, it was accepted by Kristol as an apt description of the ideas and policies exemplified by The Public Interest. Unlike liberals, for example, neoconservatives rejected most of the Great Society programs sponsored by Lyndon Johnson; and unlike traditional conservatives, they supported the more limited welfare state instituted by Roosevelt.
Hardly the viewpoint of a Socialist.


A quote from Kristal.

"There are different kinds of truths for different kinds of people. There are truths appropriate for children; truths that are appropriate for students; truths that are appropriate for educated adults; and truths that are appropriate for highly educated adults, and the notion that there should be one set of truths available to everyone is a modern democratic fallacy. It doesn't work."