[Jim Sleeper is a lecturer in political science at Yale.]

American Jewish Stalinists of the 1930s broke with Russian Communism in lurches, as their locomotive of history kept derailing. Some were jolted off the train by Stalin's unofficially but patently anti-Semitic "purge trials" of the mid-1930s. Others, who downplayed Russian Communism's unresolved "Jewish question" out of noble or hardened faith in its professed universalism, woke up only in 1939, when Stalin signed his infamous non-aggression pact with Hitler. Still others woke up only in 1956, when the USSR rolled over the Hungarian Revolution and Nikita Khrushchev acknowledged Stalin's totalitarian crimes.

By then, most American Jewish Stalinist thinking was on its way to neo-conservatism, the inevitable haven of a mindset seeking new coordinates for its unchanging, preternatural insecurities and its over-compensatory bombast. As it migrated from left-universalist socialism to right-nationalist capitalism -- each end of the spectrum "religious" and Manichaean -- the emerging neo-conservative worldview disdained most American Jews, who'd never been Stalinists and would never be neo-cons because they had the intellectual and political maturity to become civic-republican liberals in the American way....

Because neo-cons' rickety bargain with fundamentalism, militarism, and casino capitalism is as self-destroying as was Stalin's "Socialism in One Country," they're caught, like their predecessor Communist brethren, teetering back and forth between imperial overreach and, when it fails, the scapegoating of....

The rest of the sentence is, of course, the problem, just as it was in Stalin's Moscow and Kaiser Wilhelm's Germany. And the rest of that sentence has been written this morning in the New York Times' description of Glenn Beck's recent programs on Soros....