"McCarthyism" is now the magic word by which those same leftists can rewrite their own history, a nearly unbroken sympathy with communist movements around the world that began with mainstream politics in the '30s and '40s and lasted at the far Left end of the scale until the fall of the Soviet Union. It still persists in many circles with Castro and Chavez.

What about the Trots though? You can't accuse them of that - at least until the 80s. After that they seemed to have understood their irrelevance, dropped their separatist ideology, and merged with the general far left. Before that though they were major irritants to 'mainstream communism', for instance extremely pro-Solidarnosc, from Gdansk onwards. Suppose the Poles then choosing capitalism over 'genuine democratic workers state' envisaged by the Trots, followed by the entire Eastern bloc, was the main blow to their ideology. These days they're probably just a bunch of Pilgeresque Fiskers