There’s an emerging alliance in American politics between the far Left and radical Islam. The only tangible thing that Marxists and Islamists have in common is their hatred for Western society. Liberalism, capitalism, and Judeo-Christian values run contrary to both groups.
Of course, the values of Islamic society are, in practice, more offensive to the Left-wing vision than those of the West. Marxists value socioeconomic equity above all else. There is no metric by which Islam is remotely conducive to this. In traditional Western society, there are different cultural expectations for men and women. In Islamic society women are treated like property. In Western society there is a mobile meritocracy (even Marx did not deny this). In Islamic society there is a rigid aristocracy. Most notably, Western society lends itself to representative government while Islamic society does not.
Yet the Left views Islam as a natural ally in its fight against Western society. The reasons for this are manifold: naivete, delusions of grandeur, suicidal empathy. Most likely, it’s as simple as the West being the currently established order, while Islam (for the time being) comes from the fringe. Everything looks harmless on the fringe.
But this delusional self-sabotage is nothing new. We saw this before in pre-revolutionary Iran.
In the late 1970s, Iran’s communist Tudeh Party joined forces with Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in his rebellion against the Shah. Both groups felt that the Shah was oppressive and wanted change. They worked together to overthrow him and install Khomeini in his place. Once Khomeini consolidated power around himself, he outlawed the Tudeh party and executed the Marxists en masse. In 1988, he issued a fatwa executing thousands of Iranian leftists, including those already imprisoned.
A common adage often applied here is, “When people tell you who they are, believe them.” This is good advice for many of the masses of mindless activists on the ground, but in the case of intellectual thought leaders, it is arrogance more than naivete that drives this mistake.
Tudeh Secretary General Nureddin Kianuri said in a 1979 interview that socialism in Iran “cannot have a Muslim content but will be achieved through the cooperation of Muslim forces.” By his own admission, he believed that he could use Islamism as a controlled weapon against the West and then simply turn it off when he was done with it. Nureddin Kianuri was arrested by Ayatollah Khomeini in 1983 and never saw freedom again.
Of course, the Marxists of today will never learn from the mistakes of the Marxists of the past. If they were capable of such a thing, they would not be Marxists in the first place.
Still, the lesson is an important one as coalition-building becomes necessary in the United States. You cannot control fundamentalist ideologies. The Marxists believed they could point jihadism at the Shah like a loaded gun. It wasn’t a gun. It was a plague. And once unleashed, it did not discriminate in who it destroyed.
When you are angry with the establishment, it can be tempting to look for support wherever you can find it. This phenomenon is not localized to the Red-Green alliance. It rears its head in every political movement that finds itself compromising with radicalism to achieve political goals.
Another group that can stand to take notes is the Left-wing establishment. The likes of Senator Chuck Schumer seem to believe that kowtowing to the socialists within his party will keep him in power. At its core, socialism is incompatible with the traditional Democratic Party. Democratic elites think they can accommodate it anyway and simply direct its radical destructionism toward their enemies.
There is no appeasing this group. First they came for the Republicans; next they’ll come for you, Chuck. You’ll be lucky if they even wait that long. It’s all the same to them. Of course, the Schumers of the world won’t wise up to this anytime soon. If they were capable of such a thing, the Democratic Socialists of America never would have made it this far in the party.
The Marxists believe they can use the Islamists just like the Democrats believed they could use the Marxists. They were wrong. The enemy of your enemy is not always your friend.
In the conservative movement, we face a similar crossroads. The growing influence of radical influencers, especially among young Republicans, shares commonalities with the socialist takeover of the Democratic Party. We mustn’t make Democrats’ mistake.
That is why there is no point in tiptoeing around conflict with the likes of Tucker Carlson. A great many on our side of the aisle have cautioned against direct conflict with them, especially as influencers such as Megyn Kelly and Piers Morgan become louder opponents of the conservative movement. We’re frequently told not to “alienate” these people. We should reject these calls.
If they end up voting the way we do, that’s great. But we cannot give an inch to ideologies that are incompatible with our values. Carlson’s anti-capitalist rhetoric, rampant antisemitism, and suggestion of a class revolution demonstrate where his values lie. If we legitimize him, even as a “calculated move” against our political adversaries, it will inevitably destroy us.
Whether it was arrogance or naivete that drove the Iranian leftists into the arms of the Ayatollah is ultimately irrelevant. We cannot afford either in the conservative movement. We must see our enemies for who they are.
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