Socialists Invite Islamists to the Revolution—and Hand Them the Keys

Socialists Invite Islamists to the Revolution—and Hand Them the Keys

History is littered with cautionary tales of ideological bedfellows who discover, too late, that their temporary partners have very different plans for the morning after the revolution. In contemporary America, a peculiar and increasingly visible alliance has formed between far-left socialist activists and certain Islamist factions. Both groups share a visceral hatred of the traditional American order—its Constitution, its historical roots in Judeo-Christian ethics, its emphasis on individual liberty, and its capitalist economy.

What the socialists appear not to grasp is that once the shared enemy is toppled, the Islamists have no intention of building the secular, egalitarian workers’ paradise of socialist fantasy. They intend to build a caliphate—and the socialists, historically spineless when confronted with determined theocratic power, will be among the first to be swept aside or subjugated.

The convergence is not mysterious. American socialist organizations—whether formal groups like the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) or the broader constellation of campus radicals, “anti-Zionist” coalitions, and intersectional progressive networks—routinely platform, defend, or march alongside Islamist-adjacent organizations and individuals.

One need only look at the post-October 7, 2023 protest landscape: Palestinian flags wave next to red socialist banners, slogans like “From the river to the sea” are chanted in perfect harmony with calls to “globalize the intifada,” and speakers who openly praise designated terrorist organizations such as Hamas or Hezbollah are given standing ovations by crowds that include keffiyeh-wearing progressives and self-described Marxist-Leninists.

Both camps correctly identify the U.S. Constitution and America’s residual Christian cultural inheritance as the primary obstacles to their respective utopias. For the socialist, the Constitution is a “slaveowner’s document” that enshrles property rights and limits democratic (read: majoritarian) redistribution.

For the Islamist, it is an infidel contrivance that places man-made law above the law of Allah. Temporary marriage of convenience: we both want this thing dead; we’ll argue about what comes next later.

Here is where the alliance fractures on contact with reality. Socialism, particularly the Western academic variety dominant in America, is fundamentally a post-Christian secular heresy. It retains Christian moral universalism and guilt but strips away transcendence, leaving behind an emasculated ethic of perpetual apology and material redistribution. It has no antibodies against submission—literal or figurative—because its anthropology is therapeutic, not martial.

Political Islam, by contrast—especially in its revolutionary Salafist and Khomeinist forms—possesses a totalizing worldview, a willingness to employ violence, and a 1,400-year track record of conquering and converting (or subjugating) weaker civilizations. When Persian leftists helped Ayatollah Khomeini overthrow the Shah in 1979, they genuinely believed they were allies in a broader anti-imperialist project. Within two years, the same leftists were being executed in Evin Prison or fleeing into exile while the Islamic Republic consolidated power. The Iranian left was useful; then it was culpable.

The same script played out in Sudan, in Gaza (where Hamas crushed the secular-leftist factions after 2007), and in every other theater where Marxists have hitched their wagon to Islamist momentum. The pattern is so consistent that only ideological blindness or suicidal naïveté can explain its repetition.

In the United States, the process would be slower and more legalistic, but the endgame is identical. Imagine the Constitution sufficiently delegitimized—through court-packing, mass amnesty and demographic transformation, or simple cultural collapse—that political power shifts decisively to the “progressive plus Islamist” coalition.

Sharia-compliant finance is already a multi-trillion-dollar industry with footholds in Michigan and Minnesota. “Blasphemy” resolutions have been passed by local governments and condemned (however weakly) by the U.S. House.

The intellectual groundwork for parallel legal systems is being laid in university departments of “critical legal studies” and “decolonial theory.”

The socialist foot soldiers imagine they will be the junior partners in a new rainbow-colored People’s Republic. They will instead discover that their rainbow flags violate hudud punishments, that their feminist spokespeople require male guardians, and that their beloved labor unions are haram under strict interpretations of Islamic economics.

The same activists who today scream “death to America” in Arabic-accented English will not hesitate to enforce dress codes on the women who marched beside them once the power dynamic flips.

Secular leftists have collaborated with Islamists before, always believing they could control or redirect the energy. They never can. The Muslim Brotherhood was courted by Egyptian socialists and nationalists in the 1940s and 1950s; by the 2010s it had devoured the revolutionary coalition. Lebanese leftists welcomed Palestinian fedayeen in the 1960s and 1970s to help fight “reactionary” Christian militias; by the 1980s West Beirut was under Syrian and Islamist control while the left was marginalized or murdered.

America’s homegrown socialists are not the hardened Bolsheviks of 1917 who could shoot their way to dominance. They are soft, credentialed, and utterly unprepared for a genuine theocratic counter-revolution.

When—not if—the masks come off, they will be the first to kneel, convert, or disappear. The Constitution and the older American creed it embodies are not perfect, but they are the only proven bulwark against both red totalitarianism and green theocracy. Handing the country to people who explicitly reject rule of law, separation of powers, and freedom of conscience in favor of either central planning or sharia is not liberation. It is national suicide—first by the socialists who think they are using the Islamists, and then by everyone else when the Islamists reveal they were never the junior partner at all.

Beware of alliances built on shared hatred rather than shared principles. History rhymes, and the next verse is already written in Tehran, in Khartoum, in Gaza. America would do well not to provide the stage for its encore.