It shouldn’t surprise anyone that intellectuals with a socialist past were among those paving the way for 2003’s Operation Iraqi Freedom. After all, political apostasy is an unremarkable occurrence. Switcheroos from the Old Left to the establishment first came to wide attention in 1917, when Socialist Party leader and author John Spargo moved steadily rightward after supporting the US entrance into World War I. Things got even worse with a mounting abandonment of Marxism by a segment of the intelligentsia in the late 1930s that soon morphed into Cold War anti-communism.

Back in the era of Harry S. Truman and Joseph McCarthy, several veterans of the Communist Party (Frank Meyer, Whittaker Chambers) and the Trotskyist movement (James Burnham, Max Eastman) came to fill influential staff positions at William F. Buckley’s conservative flagship National Review. Many others, of all political stripes, embraced the centrist liberalism of organizations such as Americans for Democratic Action and the American Committee for Cultural Freedom.

Occupationally, those fugitives from the Marxist left were by and large journalists, writers, and professors. The subsequent cohort of political activists abandoning the anti-imperialist commitments of the generation of ’68 were comparable in their occupations as professionals as well as their political destinations as they tacked toward the center and right. In both cases, most conversions were incremental, although a few were 180-degree turns, and some individuals were insistent that they were only remaining true to their values in changed circumstances.