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Author Michael Lind argues that "the organization as well as the ideology of the neoconservative movement has left-liberal origins". He draws a line from the center-left anti-communist Congress for Cultural Freedom, founded in 1950, to the Committee on the Present Danger (1950-1953, then re-founded in 1976), to the Project for the New American Century (1997), and adds that "European social-democratic models inspired the quintessential neocon institution, the National Endowment for Democracy" (founded 1983).
The neoconservative desire to spread democracy abroad has been likened to the Trotskyist theory of permanent revolution. Lind argues that the neoconservatives are influenced by the thought of former Trotskyists such as James Burnham and Max Shachtman, who argued that "the United States and similar societies are dominated by a decadent, postbourgeois 'new class.'" He sees the neoconservative concept of "global democratic revolution" as deriving from the Trotskyist Fourth International's "vision of permanent revolution." He also points to what he sees as the Marxist origin of "the economic determinist idea that liberal democracy is an epiphenomenon of capitalism," which he describes as "Marxism with entrepreneurs substituted for proletarians as the heroic subjects of history." However, few leading neoconservatives cite James Burnham as a major influence.
Critics of Lind contend that there is no theoretical connection between Trotsky's permanent revolution, and that the idea of a global democratic revolution instead has Wilsonian roots. While both Wilsonianism and the theory of permanent revolution have been proposed as strategies for underdeveloped parts of the world, Wilson proposed capitalist solutions, while Trotsky advocated socialist solutions.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoconservatism
