History of The Socialist Movement in The United States - 1980s and 1990s

1980s and 1990s

From 1979–1989, SDUSA members like Tom Kahn organized the AFL–CIO's fundraising of 300 thousand dollars, which bought printing presses and other supplies requested by Solidarnosc (Solidarity), the independent labor-union of Poland. SDUSA members helped form a bipartisan coalition (of the Democratic and Republican Parties) to support the founding of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), whose first President was Carl Gershman. The NED publicly allocated 4 million USD of public aid to Solidarity through 1989.

Because of their service in government, Gershman and other SDUSA members were called "State Department socialists" by Massing (1987), who wrote that the foreign policy of the Reagan administration was being run by Trotskyists, a claim that was called a "myth" by Lipset (1988, p. 34). This "Trotskyist" charge has been repeated and even widened by journalist Michael Lind in 2003 to assert a takeover of the foreign policy of the George W. Bush administration by former Trotskyists; Lind's "amalgamation of the defense intellectuals with the traditions and theories of 'the largely Jewish-American Trotskyist movement' " was criticized in 2003 by University of Michigan professor Alan M. Wald, who had written a history of "the New York intellectuals" that discussed Trotskyism and neoconservatism. SDUSA and allegations that "Trotskyists" subverted the foreign policy of the G. W. Bush have been mentioned by "self-styled" paleoconservatives (conservative opponents of neoconservatism).