Neoconservatism Prefigured: The Social Democratic League of America and the Anticommunists of the Anglo-American Right, 1917–21

Abstract

Far from being limited to conspiracist McCarthyism, American anticommunism always spanned the entire ideological spectrum. Recognizing this, in his classic studies of the initial Western reception of Bolshevism, Arno J. Mayer divided early anticommunists into mutually antagonistic “parties of order” and “parties of movement” and claimed that these two fought each other almost as much as they combatted the Bolsheviks themselves. Mayer's conceptualization spoke to a profoundly important dimension in Western anticommunism, both before and during the Cold War, in that it exposed a sort of civil war between Western liberals, conservatives and socialists in which each of these groups tended to define their ideological rivals as the allies, unconscious tools or prototypes of Soviet Bolshevism.