When the Useful Idiots Are No Longer Useful

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.

In 1979, Marxists, liberals, secular radicals and left-wing intellectuals made common cause with Khomeini’s Islamist movement to overthrow the Shah. They thought they were riding the tiger. They were not. They were feeding it. Once Khomeini had what he needed, he turned on them. Not with a stern editorial. Not with social ostracism. Not with a committee process and a disapproving memo. With prisons, purges and executions.

Thousands of Iranian leftists were killed in the early years of the Islamic Republic. The Left helped hand the Islamists the keys. The Islamists started the car and ran them over.

Predictable? Entirely. Learned from? Apparently not.

The structural point is simple enough. Islamist movements are attached to institutions that run deep: mosques, clerical networks, schools, charities, family structures, tribal loyalties and neighborhood enforcement. Those networks do not require a healthy liberal state to function. In some cases, they become more powerful when the state weakens. The modern progressive left, by contrast, gets most of its actual power from the very institutions it spends its time attacking. Universities. Media companies. Foundations. HR departments. Regulatory agencies. Philanthropic money. Public bureaucracies. Remove those supports and much of the movement’s leverage disappears quickly. The hashtags do not police streets. DEI offices do not secure food supply chains. Campus committees do not command armed men.

This is not a small problem.

There is also the matter of conviction. Movements with a governing blueprint tend to outlast movements that are better at saying what they oppose than explaining what they would actually build. The radical Left is very good at demolition. Construction has always been the weaker side of the resume. Islamists have a governing model ready to install. You may not like it. I do not like it. But they have one. The groups now serving as the most visible moral symbols of the progressive coalition — LGBTQ+ activists, feminists, trans activists, secular radicals, campus atheists — would discover the problem first. They are not awkward junior partners in an Islamist political order. They are target categories.

Again, Iran provides not some obscure footnote, but a preview.

Now, a caveat. “Islamists win” assumes a relatively clean transfer of power from one ideological bloc to another. History is usually not that tidy. Civilizational breakdown more often produces fragmentation, militias, local strongmen, ethnic enclaves, gang rule and years of violence before any stable order emerges.

And “Islamists” is itself a shorthand. The Iranian model, the Ottoman memory, the Saudi model, the Muslim Brotherhood model and the Salafist model are not the same thing. Their adherents know the differences and have been arguing over them — and killing each other over them — for a very long time. A Western power vacuum would not end that argument. It would import it.

But if the question is a straight two-horse race between the Red and the Green, the Green wins: Organizational depth. Territorial discipline. Demographic confidence. Religious conviction. A theory of law. A theory of authority. A theory of the family. A willingness to govern without asking permission from the editorial board.

The Left brings institutional access, cultural influence and slogans. Those are real assets as long as the system remains intact. They are much less useful once the system they depend upon has been pulled down.

Their Islamist partners understand this perfectly well.

The Left thinks it is building a revolutionary coalition.

It may be building its own liquidation committee. Somebody tell AOC.