The Movement James Burnham Began

James Burnham, who lived from 1905 to 1987, began his intellectual career as a disciple of Leon Trotsky and ended it as William F. Buckley’s mentor at National Review. He influenced figures from George Orwell to President Ronald Reagan, from C. Wright Mills to Senator Barry Goldwater. More recently, Burnham has been called an embryonic neoconservative and a proto-Trumpist. Both assessments are correct.

Burnham’s intellectual odyssey began during the Great Depression, when he became a trusted follower of Leon Trotsky. In dozens of articles for socialist newspapers, he demanded the overthrow of the "imperialist" government of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, insisting that it merely advanced the interests of the economic elite. Burnham believed justice could only be brought to America through a revolution that displaced its ruling class.

Burnham began questioning Marxism in the late 1930s in the wake of Joseph Stalin’s purges. The Nazi-Soviet Pact and the Soviet invasion of Poland further eroded his faith. He pivoted by challenging Trotsky’s assumption that the Soviet Union was a state for the working class and openly disavowed Marxist concepts like the dialectic, the unity of opposites, and the inevitable victory of the proletariat. Stalin was not the problem in the Soviet Union, he wrote. Marxism was. 

Trotsky fired back. Consistent with ideas he had presented in his classic 1937 work The Revolution Betrayed, Trotsky refused to fault Marxism. The revolutionary declared that Stalin and his bureaucratic clique had perverted the revolution. Not persuaded, Burnham left the Marxist movement in May of 1940.