Kemble of cancer on October 15, 2005, SDUSA lapsed into a state of organizational hiatus, with no further issues of the online newsletter produced or updates to the group's website made. Following several years of inactivity, an attempt was subsequently made to revive SDUSA. In 2008, a group composed initially mostly of Pennsylvania members of SDUSA emerged, determined to re-launch the organization. A re-founding convention of the SDUSA was held May 3, 2009, at which a National Executive Committee was elected. Owing to factional disagreements, a group based in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, and the newly elected National Executive Committee parted company, with the former styling itself as the Social Democrats, USA – Socialist Party USA and the latter as Social Democrats, USA. Two additional conventions took place since the 2009 reformation, an internet teleconference on September 1, 2010, featuring presentations by guest speakers Herb Engstrom of the California Democratic Party Executive Committee and Roger Clayman, Executive Director of the Long Island Labor Federation; and a convention held August 26–27, 2012, in Buffalo, New York, with a keynote address delivered by Richard Lipsitz, executive director of Western New York Labor Federation. Controversies Anti-communism Michael Harrington charged that its "obsessive anti-communism" rendered SDUSA politically conservative. In contrast, Harrington's DSOC and DSA criticized Marxism–Leninism, but he opposed many defense-and-diplomatic policies against the Soviet Union and its Eastern Bloc. Harrington voiced admiration for German Chancellor Willy Brandt's Ostpolitik which sought to reduce Western distrust of and hostility towards the Eastern Bloc and so entice the Soviet Union reciprocally to reduce its aggressive military posture. Max Shachtman and alleged Trotskyism SDUSA leaders have served in the administrations of Presidents since the 1980 and the service of some members in Republican administrations has been associated with controversy. SDUSA members like Gershman were called "State Department socialists" by , who wrote that the foreign policy of the Reagan administration was being run by Trotskyists, a claim that was called a "myth" by . 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 [in Lind's words]" was criticized in 2003 by University of Michigan professor Alan M. Wald, who had discussed Trotskyism in his history of "the New York