Marxists and Islamists Are Bound by What They Hate... for Now

The Red-Green Alliance has been scoring victories despite their opposing views. They have a common enemy, but when that changes there will be a very deep betrayal.

Strip the red-green alliance down to its frame and a strange thing becomes visible. There is nothing inside it. No shared vision, no common blueprint for the world the two partners want to build together, because the worlds they want are mutually exclusive and each knows it.

The secular Marxist wants a godless, classless order in which religion has been abolished. The Islamist wants a world placed wholly under religious rule in which the secular is treated as rebellion against heaven.

These are not adjustable preferences. They are opposite ends of the universe. And yet the alliance holds, year after year, which forces an uncomfortable conclusion. What binds these two movements is not anything they love. It is everything they hate.

I talk about this and more on today’s episode of The JD Rucker Show, live at Noon Pacific.

A Coalition Defined by Its Enemies

Consider how the partnership describes itself, because the description is almost entirely negative. Anti-imperialist. Anti-colonial. Anti-capitalist. Anti-Zionist. Anti-Western. Anti-Christian.

The vocabulary is a wall of negations, and that is not an accident of rhetoric. It is the actual structure of the thing. A coalition that agreed on a destination would talk about the destination. This coalition can only talk about what it wants torn down, because demolition is the one project both partners can sign without lying.

Three targets recur, and they are worth naming plainly. The first is the individual, the irreducible human person with a conscience answerable to God rather than to the collective or the caliphate. Marxism dissolves that person into a class. Islamism dissolves him into submission. Neither can tolerate the stubborn Western conviction that a single soul has rights no state and no clergy may override.

The second target is Israel, the small and inconvenient nation whose mere existence refutes both the colonial narrative and the eliminationist one.

The third is the broader Judeo-Christian inheritance of the West itself, the source, as one writer put it, of the individual rights, freedom, and liberty that neither movement can abide.

The Symmetry Beneath the Hatred

For two movements so opposed, the resemblance in method is uncanny. Both deal in total, enforced dogma. Both divide humanity into the saved and the damned, whether the category is class consciousness or correct belief. Both teach that history is moving inevitably toward their victory, the one toward the end of history and the workers’ paradise, the other toward a world brought under submission.

Observers who have studied both note the same mirror-image quality, the way two systems with opposite content can share an identical shape. Each is a counterfeit religion that demands everything, forgives nothing outside the fold, and treats dissent as heresy to be crushed rather than argument to be answered.

That shared shape is the secret of the alliance. The partners do not need to agree on God to agree on the posture of total war against the existing order. Hatred, unlike love, asks for no shared vision. It asks only for a shared enemy, and the West has obligingly been cast as that enemy by both.

Why the Heathen Rage

Scripture saw this kind of coalition long before there was a name for it, and it located the real object of the rage with precision.

Why do the heathen rage, and the people imagine a vain thing? The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers take counsel together, against the LORD, and against his anointed.

Read that as a description of a negative coalition and it snaps into focus. Disparate powers, with nothing in common but their opposition, take counsel together. Their alignment is real, their fury is real, and the psalm calls the underlying project a vain thing, not because it is harmless but because it is ultimately set against an authority it cannot overthrow.

The deepest target of the red-green alliance was never merely capitalism or merely Israel or merely the American experiment. Beneath all of those lies the moral order those things imperfectly reflect, the conviction that there is a Lord above the state and the clergy alike to whom every person answers, and it’s neither Karl Marx nor Allah. That is the conviction both movements exist to abolish, and that is why their counsel, however energetic, is finally described as imagining a vain thing.

What a Negative Coalition Cannot Do

There is a hard limit built into an alliance of pure negation, and it is the source of whatever hope this analysis allows. A coalition held together only by hatred can demolish, but it cannot build. The moment the shared enemy is gone, the partners have nothing left to share, which is exactly why every historical instance of this alliance ends in the partners turning on one another.

The hatred that unites them is also the thing that guarantees they cannot govern together once they win.

Those who would oppose the alliance should take the lesson from its own structure. You do not defeat a coalition of negation with a louder negation of your own. You defeat it with the thing it cannot counterfeit, an actual positive vision, a civilization confident in the worth of the individual soul, the rule of law over the rule of the mob or the cleric, and the moral inheritance that produced both.

The red and the green agree on what they want to destroy. They have never agreed on what they want to build, because neither can build the thing the West already has. That is the whole of their weakness, and it is hiding in plain sight inside the wall of everything they claim to be against.