I really think now is the time to cash in on my previous prognosis that the government would prove to be remarkably weak and potentially fragile at the first sign of a serious fight. Of course, I wasn't the only one saying this, but the reasoning has held up quite well. Yesterday, David Cameron urged British businesses to stand up against the "Trotskyites" of the Right to Work campaign. He knew this would really upset us, as only complete ignoramuses ever use that locution. But he also invited people to notice that the Labour front bench hadn't joined in the red-baiting of the opposition to workfare.

The fact that this petulant lament was followed by a backdown, in which the government was compelled to withdraw the benefit sanctions from the workfare scheme (thus de facto killing the heart of the programme) underlined the fact that the speech was a down-in-flames whimper of defeat and isolation. No one had stood up for the policy, beyond the right-wing press and a few known Tory businessmen like Sir Stuart Rose, who has also castigated the failure of the capitalist class to unite behind their government.

But the reality is that the Tories don't seem to have given business much to unite behind. Few of the participating businesses really seemed to understand the finer points of the policy, just the general idea that they were getting, en masse, millions of free man hours of labour out of the deal. This resulted in hasty, confused statements and retractions being released by companies in quick succession, and eventually the exit of a melanoma of businesses (yes, that is the real collective noun) while others urged the government just to drop the compulsory element that made it such a mouth-watering scheme to begin with. Businesses hadn't signed up for a fight, nor for the embarrassing sorts of flash-mob protest pioneered by groups like UK Uncut to great effect. 

In general, I would suggest that while they like the material benefits the government promises them very much, the capitalist class is likely to be very divided over whether the government is capable of delivering it without seeing the whole country burned down in the process, over whether it is part of a coherent growth strategy (a low-wage economy has its draw-backs for large capital), and over whether the Tories are the best party to deliver anything. For, the government are woefully inadequate to the scale of the task they have set themselves of structurally adjusting British capitalism. Their complacent mis-handling of the union negotiations shows this. Actually, so did their astonishingly inept handling of the riots, during which they signally failed to build any right-wing populist capital out of the fiasco. They haven't had a serious class fight in almost twenty years, and during most of the hiatus they have been out of office. Only the pathetic weakness of the opposition has spared them. But as the Trotskyists have shown, it doesn't necessarily take many people to put this bunch on the back foot.

To put it bluntly, this is a story of an anticommunist bullshitter sinking in his own ordure. Robert Service is someone who has set out to correct 'revisionism' about Leon Trotsky, who he claims is subject to warm, fuzzy nostalgia among the Anglophone intelligentsia that obscures his real character and impact. Yet, his own work has been exposed as sloppy, distorted revisionism in a rather unusually damning scholarly review (read it here) that's generated a bit of buzz among historians and anoraks for the fact that it completely upsets the received view of the book as a masterpiece and final rebuttal to the likes of Deutscher. The review, written by someone who appears to be no more sympathetic to Trotsky's politics than Service, corroborates the challenges raised by leftist reviewers such as Paul LeBlanc and Hillel Ticktin, and goes further. Scott McLemee, chasing up the mini-furore, seeks comment from reviewer and reviewee. Service's retort is as simple as it is unconvincing: he alleges that he is being attacked in a scurillous fashion over minor blips by Trotskyists and their fellow travellers, and that people should ignore this sort of thing. But you can check the reviews for yourself and establish that the misrepresentations and gaffes described are neither minor, nor blips in an otherwise solid narrative. Which, of course, leaves the question (hardly a question, really) as to why such a shoddy book should have been so lavishly received? It is not that one expects publishing and media industries, or the academia, to be favourable to Trotsky's reputation or legacy. But the intensity of the assault, the attempted 'second assassination of Leon Trotsky' as LeBlanc called it, and the triumphant dancing on his grave, is suggestive. Among ideologues of this cohort the shade of Trotsky, meaning (as Service has made perfectly clear) the possibility of an anti-Stalinist socialism that can't be consigned to the same historical dustheap as Stalinism, has still to be exorcised.

When neoconservatives perish, do they share the same circle of hell as Leon Trotsky, or that of Joseph de Maistre? Is their sin one of revolutionary hubris, or militant reaction? It is a staple of both liberal and right-wing critics of neoconservatism that it is a mutation of Trotskyism, a 'foreign' revolutionary doctrine overthrowing classically American conservative discourse. Justin Raimondo's informative and entertaining discussion of the late Irving Kristol is an example of such an attack from the libertarian right but, as his linkage makes clear, the analysis is broadly shared by liberals such as John Judis.

Raimondo's judgment is harsh, but unconvincing: "What the neocons did was simply switch allegiances from the old Soviet Union to the United States, taking their hotheaded Trotskyist temperament with them – and finally aspiring to lead a world revolution with the United States government at its head." This will not do, for a number of reasons. The first reason it will not do is that it implies that "the neocons" were, all of them, former Trotskyists. This happens not to be the case. The first generation of neoconservatives did include a number of people who had once been Trotskyists, including Irving Kristol, the subject of Raimondo's obituary. It also includes those who had never been anything of the sort, such as Midge Decter, Norman Podhoretz, James Q Wilson, Michael Novak, Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan. I am hardly being exhaustive here. The neoconservative pedigree includes centrist liberalism, as well as right-wing anti-communism. The idols of today's neoconservative movement are 'muscular' empire-builders such as Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, FDR and Ronald Reagan. None of today's influential neoconservatives have any grounding in Trotskyism. Wolfowitz was trained by the conservative philosopher Leo Strauss, Feith was educated by the anticommunist historian Richard Pipes, Libby was a Dukakis Democrat, Perle was a Henry Jackson Democrat, the young Abrams was a liberal anticommunist who worked with Moynihan and Perle, Robert Kagan has always been a Republican while his daddy was never more radical than the Democratic Party mainstream, and David Frum at his left-most was a young member of Canada's New Democratic Party, hardly a Trotskyist trojan horse. Even those lesser figures such as Joshua Muravchik and Carl Gershman who were influenced by the Shachtmanites tend to have come in contact with the latter as members of the Socialist Party during a period in which the latter were aligned with the right-wing leadership and propounding little but hardline anticommunism.

The second difficulty is that of those neoconservatives who had experience in the Trotskyist movement, it may be questioned just how much "allegiance" they had to the USSR to "switch". The point about Trotskyism, even in its more eccentric variants, was that it was profoundly critical of the Soviet Union in a way that neoconservatives never have been about American society. Indeed, Raimondo concedes this and tacitly confutes his own point when he argues that: "The main goal of the neoconservatives during the Cold War era was the elimination, by military means, of their old nemeses, the Stalinists." So did they switch allegiances from Stalinism, or just find a new means of belabouring their long-standing Stalinist enemies? Did they even bother, at any point following their rejection of Trotskyism, to distinguish between Stalinism and communism as such?

The third problem is that the role of the early Trotskyism of some neoconservatives is in danger of being massively over-stated. Daniel Bell joined the Young People's Socialist League (YPSL) when he was thirteen, but was not a Trotskyist for more than a few months before siding with the right-wing of the Socialists. Irving Kristol and Philip Selznick were also YPSL members and Trotskyists during their college years but had left by the end of the 1930s, and had rejected marxism entirely. By the end of WWII, neither were socialists. Gertrude Himmelfarb had been a teenage Trotskyist in the 1930s, but no longer was when she graduated from Brooklyn College and married Kristol in 1942. Jeanne Kirkpatrick joined YPSL briefly as a college freshman, but it is not clear how much sympathy she had with Trotskyism. Her later political career unfolded in the right-wing of the Democratic Party, where she described herself as a supporter of Hubert Humphrey. In those prominent cases where an involvement with Trotskyism can be established, it was brief in light of their overall career, and did not follow them into full adulthood.

Raimondo is right to emphasise divisions over World War II, and particularly the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact and what this revealed about the nature of the USSR, as one decisive factor in turning Trotskyists into ex-Trotskyists. Trotsky and his followers still maintained that the USSR was a degenerated workers' state. Others, such as Max Shachtman and his supporters, felt that the pact showed that the USSR was no kind of workers' state, but a new kind of class society that they called 'bureaucratic collectivism'. Those who went on to become neoconservatives, however, did not bother with such distinctions. The problem, Philip Selznick explained in his contribution to The Neoconservative Imagination, was that marxism and revolutionary politics itself was tainted at source. Their disillusionment did not, therefore, involve transferring 'utopianism' from one plane to another. Bell, meanwhile, rejected any form of revolutionary politics very early on, concluding from the actions of the USSR (and of Trotsky over Kronstadt) that revolution was both an impossible dream and an unliveable reality. Kristol and Selznick concluded that Stalinism was no aberration, but the result of an attempt to impose a utopian blueprint on a species unprepared for it. They went on to become Cold War liberals.

Indeed, most of the early neoconservatives had spent decades as Cold War liberals before moving to the hard right. They had learned from Reinhold Niebuhr about the propensities for evil that were present in the human make-up and the impossibility of eradicating domination and coercion from human affairs. They learned to "take evil seriously", as Selznick has it, perceiving it as a real moral force corrupting people and communities from within. This evil could not be abated by social engineering. Neoconservatism adopted this profound pessimism. Far from being hubristic or 'revolutionary', it is profoundly respectful of tradition and institutions with longevity. The neocons espoused a culturalist reading of social institutions, in which the good or bad within any society was the result of certain cultural practises acquired over centuries. They tend to invoke something they call "Judeo-Christian morality" as the name for those cultural practises. Capitalism itself has been the subject of a religious defence by the neoconservative theologian Michael Novak, though neoconservatives in general have tended to worry, just as their liberal imperialist forebears such as Tocqueville and Teddy Roosevelt did, that capitalism's onus on individualism is a potentially decadent force. Contrary to Raimondo's suggestion, it is this concern, rather than support for the "welfare-warfare state", that led Kristol to offer only Two Cheers for Capitalism (a collection of articles originally written for the Wall Street Journal). In fact, if one theme dominates Kristol's argument in the cited text, it is that he cannot abide the "welfare state".

Far from bringing a "hot-headed" "temperament" with them, the ex-Trotskyists among the neoconservatives became very traditionalist in the face of African American rebellion and student uprisings. Kristol in particular was deeply sceptical of radical challenges to American society, hated those who were "arrogant toward existing authority", and became a 'realist' as far as international relations was concerned. Influenced by Hans Morgenthau, he was open to criticisms of the war on Vietnam, but he preferred the cool power-balancing strictures of 'realism' to anti-imperialist denunciations of US power. Far from frothing about the potential for the US to democratise the world, he asserted that American domination was needed because some societies were unfit for 'decent self-government'. He asserted the need to face "the harsh and nasty imperatives of imperial power". He and his colleagues went on to defend class hierarchies, advocate traditional gender roles, and blame the poor lot of African Americans on their cultural inhibitions.

There are, to be sure, neoconservatives who speak of a "global democratic revolution", most notably Michael Ledeen. However, he has never been a Trotskyist. He was influenced by Italian fascism in his youth, which he considers to have been truly revolutionary before it took power, but he makes it clear that he considers the 'revolution' he speaks of to be a distinctly American affair, rooted in its "historic mission" and traditions of "creative destruction". And in light of America's actual history, he can hardly be called a liar. The mainstream of neoconservatism, however, has always styled itself as a counter-revolutionary movement. When they defended American support for death squads and dictatorships during the Cold War, for example, their rationale was that in supporting even imperfect authoritarian structures they would avoid the nightmare of revolutionary 'totalitarianism'.

It is, after all this, a rather surprising conclusion that militant defenders of capitalism, of religion, of 'Judeo-Christian values', and of the authority of the state, the police, the schools, and fathers, are really the unacknowledged offspring of a Russian revolutionary.