As has been the case throughout history, the "powerful" friends of the Islamists will eventually learn who has really been in charge the whole time.

There is a script for what happens to a revolutionary left that decides political Islam makes a useful ally, and the American left appears determined to perform every act of it. The Democratic Socialists of America have spent 2026 becoming the most consequential force in Democratic politics, and they have done it while binding themselves, cause by cause and candidate by candidate, to an Islamist political project whose ultimate vision of society would erase the very people now lending it their energy.

The fastest way to halt the Socialist ascent is not to debate the marginal tax rate or the rent freeze. It is to make plain where the road ends for the junior partner, because the experiment has already been run, and the junior partner does not walk away from it.

The name for this arrangement is the Red-Green Alliance, and it is not a coinage of the fever swamps. Scholars at King’s College London and Bryn Mawr documented it more than a decade ago in the journal Terrorism and Political Violence, describing how radical leftists and Islamists, despite worldviews that ought to make them enemies, converge on shared frames of anti-capitalism and anti-imperialism to build a common front against the West.

Red stands for Marxist and socialist radicalism. Green stands for Islamism, the political ideology that wants Sharia to be the law of every land. To see this alliance operating in a (slightly) more advanced stage than we’re seeing in America, just look to Europe. Unless there is a massive and/or divine intervention, the continent is already captured.

Let’s cover the obligatory “not every“ caveats:

One of the most important ties that bind Marxists and Islamists is hatred for Israel, but not every critic of Israeli policy belongs to this alliance.

Not every Muslim in public life is an Islamist, though by their voting and their submissive nature they are party to the results.

Not every Marxist is blind to where the alliance will eventually lead, but those who know and still participate willingly believe they will somehow end up above the fray, perhaps rewarded by their Sharia overlords for obedience.

What Holds Opposites Together

On paper the two halves of the coalition want incompatible worlds. Marxism is materialist to its marrow, atheist by founding conviction, and carries a century of gulags, shuttered churches, and martyred believers as its record on Christianity. Islamism is theocratic, supremacist toward rival faiths wherever it has held power, and contemptuous of the secular permissiveness the modern left treats as sacred. They should repel one another.

What binds them are the enemies they share. Both regard Western constitutional order, free markets, the nation as an object of loyalty, and above all the Christian moral inheritance that underwrites Western liberty, as the structure that has to come down.

The Marxist attacks it in the vocabulary of class, colonialism, and oppression. The Islamist attacks it in the vocabulary of civilizational grievance and religious resistance. The targets line up even when the languages do not.

Hostility to Israel is the most dependable thread tying the two together, but it is the thread, not the garment. The garment is the older order itself, the one that says man answers to God and not to the state or the caliphate, and that is the thing both partners mean to unmake.

The Vehicle Arrives

A movement needs a vehicle, and the Marxists have found theirs in a Democrat Party too hollowed out to resist. The DSA crossed one hundred thousand members early this year, and the Wall Street Journal named its rise the largest political story of 2026 after the Iran War hits on Donald Trump’s own popularity. Its candidates rolled through Democrat primaries across five states in a single season with more likely coming; the organization called the result a shockwave, and the word was not entirely self-flattery. In New York, the movement now holds City Hall and controls multiple representatives on Capitol Hill.

Zohran Mamdani is the clarifying case because his public record requires no decoding. He’s the front man for the Marxists with Islamist credentials. He is fully Marxist and has welded himself to the Green agenda in full daylight.

He founded a Students for Justice in Palestine chapter in college. He calls the boycott movement against Israel “consistent with the core of my politics.” Pressed again and again to condemn “globalize the intifada,” a phrase many hear as an invitation to violence, he declined, explaining that “the role of the mayor is not to police language.”

It’s a convenient lie.

From City Hall he released a video commemorating the Nakba and skipped the Israel Day parade that mayors of both parties had walked for generations. Years earlier, speaking to a DSA panel, he located the source of American policing somewhere well beyond America.

When the boot of the NYPD is on your neck, it’s been laced by the IDF.

None of this makes him a concealed theocrat, and the argument does not need him to be one. It needs him to be exactly what he plainly is, the useful partner, the Red who carries the Green movement’s signature causes into respectable rooms and onto official letterhead.

Can Two Walk Together

The prophet Amos posed the question the entire coalition is organized to avoid.

Can two walk together, except they be agreed?

The Red and the Green are not agreed. They are not within sight of agreed. The secular left’s whole catechism, its sexual revolution, its gender ideology, its insistence on absolute personal autonomy, is precisely what political Islam exists to abolish. This is why the recurring spectacle of activists marching beneath banners reading “Queers for Palestine” is not a curiosity but a confession.

Solidarity in that coalition travels one direction only.

The progressives extend it to the Islamists; the Islamists, wherever they have actually governed, have extended the rope and the rooftop. The alliance functions only so long as no one says this aloud, which is the whole reason that saying it aloud, specifically and in the movement’s own words, is the most useful thing a serious opponent can do.

Europe Already Ran the Experiment

Americans told this is paranoid fantasy should look across the Atlantic, where the fantasy has been governing reality for a decade. In Britain, the Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn fused a Marxist leadership to a grievance-organized Muslim voting bloc, and sectarian candidates have since taken seats in Parliament by running on Gaza and little else.

In France, the Netherlands, and Sweden, Islamist-aligned parties and pressure networks now operate as decisive blocs, bending mainstream politicians on schools, speech, and foreign policy without ever passing a single statute bearing the word Sharia.

That is the mechanism worth understanding, because it is the one already arriving here. The capture does not come as legislation, which is why those who scan the law books and find nothing conclude there is nothing to find. It comes as leverage, the quiet power of a bloc that can deliver or withhold a margin, applied to curricula, to accommodations, to which candidates a party is permitted to nominate.

America has spent fifteen years passing anti-Sharia laws that address a threat shaped nothing like the real one. The real one wears a campaign button and turns out for a primary.

How the Story Ends for the Junior Partner

Then there is the ending, the part the American left has not allowed itself to picture. In 1979 the Iranian revolution against the Shah was a coalition built exactly like this one. Secular Marxists, nationalists, and Islamists marched together against a shared enemy, and the Western intelligentsia cheered them on.

Michel Foucault, the most fashionable philosopher of his generation, traveled to Iran and wrote rapturously of the political spirituality he believed he was watching come to life. Then the shared enemy fell, Khomeini’s faction consolidated power, and it turned on the people who had helped install it.

The leftists who had supplied the revolution its manpower and its moral cover were arrested, purged, and in many cases executed by the regime they had spent themselves to build.

Obadiah named the arrangement with cold precision.

The men that were at peace with thee have deceived thee, and prevailed against thee.

The confederates reach the border together, and then one of them keeps walking. This is not an accident of Persian history; it is the logic of the alliance. The Islamist partner wins the long game because it holds the one asset Marxism cannot manufacture. Marxism promises a material paradise that never arrives and asks belief in a future its own record keeps falsifying. Political Islam offers transcendence, certainty, and a totalizing loyalty that does not flinch when the five-year plan collapses.

When the common enemy is finally down and someone has to rule the ruins, conviction beats calculation every time. The Marxists imagine they are riding the tiger.

They are feeding it.

Name the End Game

So the strategy nearly writes itself. The Socialist surge will not be argued down on policy; its pull is moral and generational, and it feeds on the very confrontation its opponents are most tempted to hand it.

The vulnerability is structural. It is the fault line running clean through the coalition, the unbridgeable distance between a movement that worships autonomy and a movement that would abolish it, papered over by nothing sturdier than a shared enemy and an enforced silence. Break the silence. Show the voters, including the many devout and pluralist Muslims this alliance presumes to speak for and would discard without ceremony, what the junior partner actually purchased by lending its credibility to the senior one.

Set 1979 beside 2026 and let the two pictures do the work.

The Marxists are wagering that they are the exception, the first revolutionary left in a hundred years to board this particular vehicle and arrive somewhere they meant to go. The task of anyone who still loves this country, and the older settlement of ordered liberty and Christian faith it was raised to protect, is to make certain that as many Americans as possible understand the wager before it is placed, in full, in their name.

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