I'm not sure they'll try to leave the sinking ship until they're already swimming, y'know? People who learned that resistance is futile over the course of US hegemony are not going to easily unlearn it. I think it's happening among young people because they don't have as many memories of the US being unstoppable. In fact, for people born after 9/11, the US has rarely won.

But for people who remember the US winning the Cold War, it's going to take a lot more to make them unlearn their cynicism.

Irving Kristol isn't the only one? Obviously not every single Trot became a neocon, but many did, and there's a reason for it: cynicism. Further, a Trot working for the CIA itself is actually just an extension of the same cynicism. It's all growing from the same learned helplessness and lack of revolutionary optimism: if revolution is impossible, all you can do is get your bag.

This is not exclusive to Trots, of course. Plenty of young people with revolutionary optimism "grow up" to become cynical older adults, and that's not because they're chicken. They simply become convinced there's no hope.