When the Useful Idiots Are No Longer Useful
29th June 2026
History does not repeat. But it rhymes often enough that at some point you would think someone might look up from the chanting and notice.
One of the stranger political alliances of the modern West has been taking shape in plain sight. You can see it in city protests, elite universities, nonprofit coalitions and legislative chambers. On one side, the progressive left: equity, feminism, LGBTQ+ rights, anti-capitalism, decolonization, the whole familiar kit. On the other, Islamism. Not Islam as a faith. Islamism as a political project. Sharia law, religious supremacy, traditional gender hierarchy. All of it openly hostile to the liberal West.
These two movements agree on almost nothing. Not women’s rights. Not gay rights. Not free speech. Not secular government. Not the relationship between religion and the state. They agree on the enemy. America, Israel, Western (classical) liberal democracy, market capitalism, the inherited institutions of the West. Apparently, that is enough to build a coalition. Successful coalitions have been built on less.
The question nobody seems especially eager to ask is “What happens if they win?”
I don’t mean winning an election, not a campus resolution. Win in the larger sense. Assume, for the sake of argument, that the old Western order is discredited, hollowed out and finally pushed aside. The institutions go. The restraints go. The polite assumptions go. The last faction standing gets the keys.
Who is it? It’s the Islamists, and it’s not even close.
We do not need to work this out from first principles. Iran already ran the experiment.
I reject that there’s any essential distinction between Islam and “Islamism”. “Islamism” is a deliberately construction Confusion Word for people who refuse to do the work required to understand Islam in history. It is of no more significance than any attempted distinction between National Socialism and “Hitlerism”, with the former being Actually Very Nice People Once You Get to Know Them while the latter are genocidal maniacs.