The Islamic States of America?

How Progressive Idealism Opened the Gates to Political Islam

Where the gates opened

Most Americans don’t spend their evenings reading policy briefs about Islamist movements, and they shouldn’t have to. Yet the confusion they feel when they hear “From the river to the sea” chants echo through campuses and city streets isn’t imaginary. Something fundamental has shifted. Politics that once spoke the language of civil rights now carries a tone suspiciously anti‑Western, and increasingly anti‑Jewish.

For roughly sixty years, progressive politics in the United States has measured virtue by who is “oppressed.” In that formula, the West, and by extension the United States, ends up cast as the villain almost by default. The habit grew out of the 1960s rebellions, when race, class, and empire were folded into one sweeping narrative of guilt. That moral reflex, redeeming the self through siding with the “oppressed,” has since hardened into orthodoxy. When Western liberals went searching for the next cause to redeem, they found it in the Palestinian flag and, behind that, a romanticized view of Islam as the voice of the downtrodden.

Palestine became the perfect metaphor: brown versus white, colonized versus colonizer, faith versus materialism. It fit neatly inside a worldview shaped by post‑colonial literature and grievance politics. Within a few decades, banners that once read Peace Now were replaced by calls to intifada, revolution dressed up as humanitarian concern.

The irony is that the world they idealize bears little resemblance to the freedoms they claim to champion. Under Islamist regimes women cannot speak or dress freely; gay Palestinians flee to Israel for safety. Iran’s morality police enforce public flogging for acts Western activists call personal expression. Yet those realities are dismissed as “cultural differences.” Once a narrative becomes sacred, facts are sacrilege.

The data tell another story. Pew Research surveys show that majorities, 84 % in Pakistan, 74 % in Egypt, 71 % in Jordan, favor making Sharia official state law, while fewer than 15 % of Muslims globally say violence is acceptable in defense of faith. Sharia is not advisory; it is a binding legal code. Political Islam has long declared its goal: a state where divine law supersedes human law. The founders of liberal democracy spent centuries building systems to prevent precisely that.

When Americans watch student unions and NGOs waving the same slogans as Sunni fundamentalists, they’re witnessing two belief systems, one secular, one religious, meeting on the field of moral absolutism. The progressive Left gained power through moral language; Islamist movements speak in the same register, but with divine certainty. Different sources, same result: politics as salvation.

The consequence is not America’s “Islamization” but the erosion of boundaries between belief and law. Well‑meaning citizens, mistaking sentiment for discernment, have opened the gates slowly, forgetting that good intentions are no substitute for hard thinking. History rarely punishes arrogance all at once; it rewards it just enough to keep us convinced of our own virtue.

The 1960s Origin Story

Every movement that rewrites history starts by rewriting morality. The 1960s did that for America. The old moral vocabulary of duty and discipline gave way to one built on emotion and absolution. Real injustices, such as Jim Crow, segregation, and Vietnam’s draft, were confronted, but reform soon turned into religion. In that new faith, the West itself became the original sin.

The formula was irresistible: oppression conferred holiness, power implied guilt. Once that idea took hold, it defined cultural virtue for the next half century. What began as moral protest turned into a reflex of self‑blame dressed up as idealism. By the late seventies, Western intellectuals were romanticizing revolutions they would never survive. The Third World had become the new Bethlehem.

That moral reflex still shapes Western diplomacy. Writer Michael Snyder recently noted how France, the nation of Voltaire and laïcité, is volunteering to help the Palestinian Authority draft its constitution. It sounds noble, but look closely: the heirs of the Enlightenment are scripting the legal framework for an organization whose charter still denies Israel’s right to exist. The same pattern: virtue earned through empowering the supposedly powerless.

The cultural heirs of the New Left swapped blue‑collar revolution for academic theory, but the hierarchy of virtue stayed fixed. By the end of the Cold War, the Left had lost its working‑class audience but kept its sermon: blame the West, praise its adversaries, and call it empathy. That theology explains why movements preaching “diversity” now excuse governments that stone women and persecute gays. Compassion decoupled from judgment becomes indulgence. A civilization unwilling to defend its principles will surrender them, one humanitarian gesture at a time.

The flower children matured into policymakers, and their children staff the NGOs and editorial boards that now shape opinion. What began as conscience has congealed into bureaucracy. The moral theater of the 1960s lives on, less romantic, more administrative, but driven by the same need to purchase redemption through guilt.

Islam and the Secular West: A Structural Clash

Modern Westerners speak about religion as something optional, like a subscription you can cancel at any time. That assumption owes more to Jefferson and Locke than to Moses or Muhammad. The Judeo‑Christian world learned the hard way that the key to peace was separating the priest from the palace. Centuries of religious wars eventually produced a compromise: believe what you like, but the law belongs to everyone. That settlement is what we call secularism, and without it there would be no liberal democracy to argue about.

Islam’s origins were different. Muhammad was not simply a preacher; he was a statesman, a legislator, and a commander. The Quran doesn’t divide moral life from public life, so Islamic civilization never developed that internal firewall between creed and code. Wherever Islam became dominant, the political order generally claimed divine authority. In early Medina and later through the caliphates, religious scholars produced legal rulings that doubled as government policy. Sharia,  the body of law derived from scripture and tradition, became as all‑encompassing as canon law and parliament combined.

For many ordinary Muslims, this has been more historical backdrop than marching orders. Millions live productively and peacefully within secular states. But the ideology known as political Islam insists that true faith is incomplete without state power. Its goal is not coexistence but completeness. The Muslim Brotherhood’s motto still reads, “The Quran is our law; jihad is our way.” That doesn’t mean its members are plotting coups in every Western city, yet it does mean their endgame is theocratic: a world administered, not merely inspired, by religious law.

That theological premise sits directly across the table from the American one. Ours begins with “We the People”; theirs begins with “God commands.” In a republic, sovereignty resides with citizens and can be changed through consent. In Islamist thought, sovereignty descends from God and cannot change at all. The conflict is not primarily cultural or ethnic; it’s constitutional. You can negotiate borders; you can’t negotiate who gets the final word in law.

This distinction matters because political Islam doesn’t conquer today by armies. It works through ideas and institutions, slowly and patiently, confident that the West’s moral confusion is its best weapon. In Europe, open discussion of Islamic separatism is already treated as bigotry. Britain’s domestic intelligence service spent years investigating extremist networks embedded within “charitable” organizations while politicians congratulated themselves on multicultural harmony. France, once a militantly secular nation, now debates whether its own Enlightenment ideals are compatible with the faith of millions of new citizens. The tension is not about skin color or cuisine; it’s about authority.

The United States has been spared Europe’s immediacy largely due to geography and demographics, but the ideological challenge has arrived on our campuses and city councils. In the fashionable vocabulary of “intersectionality,” religious absolutism can masquerade as a form of cultural expression. When progressive politicians defend Islamist movements as victims of Western oppression, they confuse tolerance with surrender. People who no longer know why they separated church and state won’t notice when others decide to reunite them.

What makes this clash especially dangerous is the asymmetry of conviction. Secular society treats compromise as virtue; religious revolutionaries call it disbelief. Liberal democracies survive by persuasion; theocrats thrive on certainty. Against such confidence, mere civility is not enough. A civilization that shrugs off its own principles can lose them without ever being invaded.

Political Islam doesn’t need majorities. It only needs Western guilt to keep its opponents silent. Once an ideology that fuses religion and government enters a culture that separates them, someone’s premise has to yield. The question is whether the yielding will come from reason or from fear.

Black Identity and the Romance with Islam

When ideas lose their theological foundation, they look for a new one. After the civil‑rights era, many young Black Americans saw Christianity as the religion of parents who forgave too easily. Into that vacuum stepped a faith promising dignity through discipline and pride through defiance.

The Nation of Islam offered hierarchy where chaos reigned, purpose where poverty mocked the dream. Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm X didn’t win through doctrine but through presentation: suits, diets, rules, each a declaration of independence from white America’s morality. In the 1960s, polls showed about 15 % of Black college students viewing Islam as “the religion of Black self‑respect.” It was never a majority, but it supplied a symbol.

Symbols outlast sermons. When Malcolm X returned from Mecca embracing orthodox Islam, popular culture kept only the defiant half of his story. Hip‑hop artists later revived fragments of that imagery, the crescent moon chains, the Five‑Percent­‑Nation slogans. For millions of listeners, Islam became shorthand for clarity, strength, rebellion. A 1993 Brookings study found nearly 40 % of converts citing “discipline” and “structure” as motives. It wasn’t theology; it was order without condescension.

That romance still resonates. On social media, Malcolm X clips loop under soundtracks of righteous anger. Robes and Arabic calligraphy are often used as fashion statements. What once demanded faith now signals authenticity. Younger activists inherit Islamic motifs as cultural heritage rather than creed. Their chants for Palestine or against “colonialism” echo an aesthetic of resistance more than a theology of belief.

Christianity preaches patience; militant Islam demands action. One sanctifies forgiveness, the other valorizes defiance. In a culture exhausted by grievance, the latter feels cleaner. That’s why Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X now appear side by side online, as if they preached the same gospel. They did not. King appealed to universal conscience; Malcolm to divine justice against a corrupt world. Today’s campus activism follows Malcolm’s path of moral power through perpetual offense.

Progressive universities that mock Christianity’s patriarchy often post Quranic verses as art. Feminism poses beside Islamic symbolism in a kind of ideological cosplay. It’s theater, not theology, the image of purity opposing Western “corruption.” Few notice that the Middle East’s freest Muslims live under secular constitutions, the sort progressives dismiss as “colonial.”

Earlier Black leaders, such as Douglass, Washington, and Bethune, found dignity by embracing Western ideals and compelling America to honor them. Their heirs are told instead to find dignity by denouncing the civilization that made liberty possible. That inversion didn’t come from the mosque; it came from the academy. The Left’s template, oppressed versus oppressor, made the romance with Islam inevitable. Once “resistance” became a civic virtue, any doctrine opposing America earned automatic sainthood.

Most Black Muslims in the U.S. wanted structure and meaning when other institutions failed them. But elites quickly commodified that sincerity. The disciplined believer became branded for “authenticity.” Corporations monetized it as diversity, universities as decolonial chic, politicians as vote‑bank politics. Genuine faith turned into moral theater. What began as self‑respect risks ending as self‑parody.

The Elite Conversion of Idealism into Management

Every revolution eventually hires accountants. Once moral passion proves useful, someone finds a way to invoice it. Protest becomes industry, guilt becomes currency. The story of Western sympathy for political Islam followed a similar arc. What began as compassion for the “oppressed” matured into a professional enterprise run by people who never miss catered lunches.

Yesterday’s radicals run today’s foundations. Rage, when translated into grant proposals, suddenly pays. By the mid-2010s, the number of registered U.S. nonprofits devoted to “equity and justice” had tripled in a decade, generating more than $10 billion annually. Much of that came not from small donors but from corporations purchasing moral insurance. Every PR department now has a “diversity partner,” fluent in moral theater but mute on results. Success isn’t measured by outcomes but by outrage.

Corporate sponsorship turned the Palestinian cause into the perfect stage set. The image of boys with stones facing tanks is ready‑made moral drama. Social media amplified it with racial and colonial guilt, letting Western activists import Middle‑Eastern conflict as part of their own redemption story. During the Gaza crises of 2021 and 2024, dozens of corporations issued near‑identical solidarity statements while maintaining factories in countries that flog dissidents. Data from OpenSecrets showed corporate contributions to “justice” nonprofits surging by 42 % during that window. Guilt pays dividends.

Universities built the ideological scaffolding. Decades of post‑colonial theory had prepared students to see the West as oppressor and every rival culture as victim. Islam became “anti‑imperialist spirituality.” Professors didn’t need to preach jihad, only to grade as if Western civilization spoke with a guilty accent. Diversity offices turned grievance into payroll. When Islam acquired the status of “oppressed faith,” it supplied infinite content for the bureaucracy of empathy.

Governments joined by outsourcing conscience. Funding “faith‑based dialogue” costs less than confronting extremism and yields better photographs. European‑Union grants for “intercultural understanding” funneled tens of millions of euros into NGOs linked to Islamist advocacy, many openly skeptical of secular democracy. Bureaucrats call it inclusion; recipients call it dawah.

This is virtue as management science. Activists gain salary; institutions rent moral legitimacy. Together they transmute guilt into a renewable resource. The more outrage burns below, the thicker comfort grows above. The perfection of the system is its aimlessness: no one inside wants results, only funding. Moral passion becomes administrative routine.

What was once idealism now functions as supply chain. The same machinery that claims to fight oppression depends on its perpetual existence. Bureaucracies cannot repent; they can only rebrand. When every “Equity Office” survives by discovering new sins, freedom becomes over‑managed remorse. Guilt is no longer a feeling; it’s an industry standard.

The Trojan Horse in Practice

Every ideology must act, and political Islam acts through institutions. No siege engines, no armies, just slogans, committees, and paperwork. Infiltration now arrives through moral language.

Coalition capture is the first tactic. Broad activist movements open with universal goals, peace, equality, and human rights, but are gradually repurposed for narrower agendas. Once Islamist‑aligned groups adopt the same slogans, they’re treated as allies. Within a few years, leadership shifts even as supporters imagine the mission unchanged. Europe’s “Stop the War” coalitions of the early 2000s began as anti-imperialist; they ended up condemning Western secularism itself.

Financial diversion follows. In 2024, Britain’s Charity Commission uncovered millions of pounds redirected from humanitarian accounts to Islamist advocacy networks. Donors thought they were feeding children; they were financing clerics. Similar patterns appear wherever oversight fears “Islamophobia” more than fraud.

Media repetition locks the illusion in place. Reporting privileges emotion over accuracy because outrage sells. During the 2025 Gaza conflict, major Western outlets repeated figures from Hamas’s information office as verified data. Few retractions followed. The result was not overt lying but selective truth, a fog in which sentiment becomes policy.

Algorithmic amplification finishes the job. Social‑media design rewards indignation, short, moralistic bursts that spread faster than analysis. Political Islam gains digital allies who have never opened a Quran but who chant the same hashtags. Informational laundering converts borrowed moral energy into political leverage.

Bureaucratic cementing gives the final payoff. Once slogans become common language, politicians adopt them to demonstrate awareness; bureaucrats convert rhetoric into regulation. Votes follow sympathy; funding follows votes. By the time anyone notices ideology inside the system, it appears as standard procedure, diversity training, cultural partnerships, and “inclusive language” mandates. The Trojan Horse has parked itself inside the castle with a grant number stenciled on the side.

The pattern feeds on fatigue. Idealists believe they advance justice; managers know they advance budgets. Liberty erodes quietly as compassion’s paperwork expands.

Consequences

Ideas have consequences, and so does delusion. A culture that rewards performance virtue instead of principle decays by degrees. The erosion is visible everywhere: in campuses where antisemitism parades as conscience, in media that mistake fairness for fear, in governments apologizing for their own foundations.

After recent Middle‑East wars, student groups chanted slogans that plainly endorse Israel’s eradication while demanding “safe spaces” for themselves. Administrators issue statements against “all hate” but avoid naming the hate in front of them. Surveys at elite universities show nearly half of Jewish students afraid to speak openly. Their grandparents faced burning crosses; they face polite ostracism. The form differs, the cowardice stays.

Editorial boards once proud of free thought now practice moral censorship. Criticize Islamist ideology and you’re branded phobic; denounce Western civilization and you’re booked for Sunday talk shows. The result is anesthesia disguised as tolerance.

Education reflects the same rot. The university that once taught logic now teaches grievance. Hundreds of courses across major schools frame Western civilization solely as oppression. An education built on selective outrage cannot produce citizens, only spectators of decline. Lawmakers mirror the disease: they trade justice and duty for emotion and identity. Once law bends to tribe, it ceases to be law at all.

Foreign policy decays with equal hypocrisy. Governments that sermonize about rights sign energy contracts with the regimes that flog women. Cultural “sensitivity” becomes moral surrender. Guilt, outsourced as diplomacy, replaces strength with supplication.

The deeper damage is psychological. Generations raised on systemic guilt inherit cynicism, not reform. They demolish what they no longer believe worth saving. A culture convinced of its own corruption cannot defend itself; it mistakes exhaustion for wisdom. Authoritarian states notice. Russia, China, Iran hold conferences on Western hypocrisy, and the West nods along, mistaking shame for honesty.

Religious institutions mirror the confusion, staging interfaith panels with clerics who oppose interfaith freedom itself. Families and communities fracture as ideology replaces kinship. Identity becomes franchise. The state grows while the citizen shrinks. Managing grievance is the new prosperity engine, even as real wealth and trust decline.

Civilizations don’t collapse from invasion; they hollow from within. The lights stay on long after the meaning goes dark.

The Way Back

Recovery starts with honesty. After half a century of ritual apology, the West doesn’t need new slogans; it needs nerve. The first step is to restore universal law: one standard for believers and skeptics, the majority and the minority. No sacred exemptions. When theology redraws legality, voters become subjects. The same applies to secular dogmas enforced as creed.

Next comes distinction: Muslim faith versus Islamist politics. The first is private devotion, the second political absolutism. Confusing them betrays both. The devout Muslim who seeks liberty shares more with the Western liberal than with the theocrat who seeks power. Protect worship; resist rule by revelation.

Then audit the machinery of influence. Universities, NGOs, and grant systems shaping policy must disclose funding and ideological links. Oversight is not prejudice; it’s hygiene. Taxpayers deserve to know when “dialogue” doubles as propaganda.

Education must return to reason, logic, and civic philosophy. Teach how to argue before teaching whom to pity. A society fluent only in accusation will soon forget deliberation.

Moral courage follows: guilt is easy, gratitude takes discipline. Freedom without effort breeds contempt. National service, community labor, and shared projects rebuild mutual trust. Patriotism is not arrogance but maintenance.

Speech must be untouchable. Offense is not harm, and censorship is not care. Once emotion licenses silencing, truth dies by etiquette.

Foreign policy must regain moral clarity. Alliances should rest on governance, not guilt. Religious dictatorships are not moral creditors. Saying no is sometimes the highest form of respect.

Finally, revive cultural imagination. Tell stories of mastery, sacrifice, integrity. Heroes can defend civilization without apology. When every rebel fights the West, the West forgets why it’s worth defending.

Freedom does not need reinvention; it needs maintenance. The trowel and hammer of reason, discipline, and gratitude still hang ready. Pick them up.

Crossroads

Every civilization arrives eventually at a moment when it must decide what it believes about itself. Some choose rediscovery, others choose fatigue. America stands at that moment now. The battle is not between faiths or parties but between remembering and forgetting. A people can survive disagreement, but not the loss of conviction that any truth is worth defending.

The United States is not yet an Islamic state, nor is it immune to the quiet corrosion that makes such fantasies plausible. Each time progressivism grants theological movements political immunity, the boundary between belief and law thins. Freedom erodes not through conquest but through permission. We invite decay under the name of tolerance.

The irony is that the American experiment began with the hardest kind of tolerance, one disciplined by truth. The founders knew that liberty without virtue collapses into license, and virtue without liberty turns into tyranny. Their solution was the civic covenant: law independent of creed, conscience independent of state. That principle allowed religions to flourish while keeping them from ruling. It also allowed skeptics to speak without fear. We forget that simple architecture at our peril.

The new generation is told that Western ideals are hypocritical relics. Yet those ideals gave the world its longest period of expanding freedom. The same society that once abolished slavery, enfranchised women, and built constitutional rights for minorities now apologizes for existing. That reversal is not progress. It is moral exhaustion disguised as empathy.

History offers clues to what happens next. Civilizations that abandon confidence do not vanish all at once. They drift. Education fills with slogans. Art worships rebellion instead of beauty. Faith becomes self‑help. Law bends to emotion. By the time anyone asks how things reached that point, the answer is already history.

America does not have to drift. The machinery of self‑correction still works if we choose to use it. Truth has never needed majorities, only people willing to defend it. The courage of a few citizens who understand their inheritance has always outweighed the noise of crowds repeating approved feelings. The republic was built on argument, not whispers of guilt.

To recover that spirit is to reclaim adulthood. The task ahead is not to purge religion or idealism but to restore proportion. Belief must remain private and voluntary. Law must remain common and secular. Compassion must be tempered by discernment, and justice must again mean equality under rules, not privilege under slogans.

If these things sound old‑fashioned, that is because they have stood the test that most new theories fail. Freedom does not need reinvention; it needs maintenance. The hammer and trowel of reason, discipline, and courage still hang on the wall. The question is whether anyone will pick them up.

The title of this essay asked a question: The Islamic States of America? The mark at the end matters. It is a question only while doubt endures. If we continue to treat our principles as relics and our hesitation as wisdom, the mark will change. History will erase the question and leave only the answer, the one we were too sophisticated to believe could happen here.

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