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Sign up for your $1 a month trial at Shopify.com slash setup. Hello, my name's David Rundsman and this is past, present, future, the History of Ideas

podcast. Today, it's the third in my series of conversations with the political historian David

Klemperer about political conversions. What happens when people completely switch sides?

And today we're bringing the story much closer to the present that we're starting again in the

1930s. This is about Trotskyism. And what happens when people leave Trotskyism behind?

Where do they end up? Neoconservatism is one place,

but it's not the only place. From James Burnham to Claire Fox, where do the Trotskyists go?

David, we're going to talk about a set of intellectual political journeys today that are clearly

connected with the topics we've discussed so far.

And this story also starts in the 1930s.

But it has a different arc, a different trajectory.

And it brings us much closer to the present.

So today we're going to get well beyond the 1930s, but we're

going to start there because we're talking about journeys out of Trotskyism, basically, and into a

whole range of things that sometimes get labelled neoconservatism, but that's possibly too broad or

looser label. But we should start with Trotskyism itself. So would you be able to characterize what

made a Trotskyite mindset in the context of the stories we've been discussing so far different

...