An arresting image from the last century should haunt us in this one.
In November 1940, Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov arrived in Berlin to deepen Moscow’s pact with Nazi Germany, supposedly communism’s mortal enemy.
“The hammer and sickle on Soviet flags fluttering alongside swastika banners provided an extraordinary spectacle in the Reich’s capital,” historian Ian Kershaw later wrote.
And although the Nazi-Soviet pact collapsed months later when Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, its lesson endures: Extremists who appear to hate one another can readily make common cause against an enemy they hate even more.
Today, that enemy is America.
A new red-green-brown convergence — uniting elements of the radical left, Islamist extremism and the authoritarian far right — is taking shape around a shared hostility to the Western democratic order.
Israel is where this convergence is most visible.
Support for Hamas, hatred of Zionism and the recycling of ancient antisemitic tropes have created common ground among movements that otherwise have little in common.
But that’s only the beginning.
What ultimately binds these factions is hostility to the principles, institutions and ideals that made the United States the freest, strongest and most prosperous nation on Earth.
“Death to America,” the favored slogan of Iran’s Islamist regime, captures the nihilism at the heart of this convergence.
Its language varies depending on who is speaking.
On the far right, figures like Tucker Carlson, Nick Fuentes and Candace Owens attack a free-thinking, meritocratic America and portray US leadership of the democratic world as a conspiracy to subordinate the country to foreign interests — above all, Israel.
Their rhetoric echoes the conspiracy theories of the 1930s, when Charles Lindbergh, Father Coughlin and Henry Ford portrayed American Jews as a sinister force corrupting US politics and foreign policy.
Today’s version repackages the same poisonous idea for a new generation.
On the other side of the horseshoe, the radical left recycles Soviet-era indictments of American capitalism and power.
The Democratic Socialists of America, influencers like Hasan Piker and politicians like Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez increasingly portray fundamental American principles — individual liberty, freedom of conscience, equality before the law, open markets and open debate — not as virtues worth defending but as camouflage for systems of oppression.
Both extremes find natural partners among Islamists, for whom the liberal Western tradition — individual rights, religious pluralism, equality between men and women and an open society — represents an ideological threat.
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The contradictions are staggering.
Parts of the progressive left that ostensibly still champion gay rights now march alongside Islamists, whose ideology regards homosexuality as a manifestation of Western immorality.
Meanwhile, self-proclaimed “America First” voices on the right and “human rights” advocates on the left repeat narratives eagerly amplified by authoritarian regimes in Russia, China, Cuba, Iran, Qatar and Turkey — governments that trample human rights and whose interests are decidedly not America First.
This is not an iron-clad alliance.
It doesn’t need to be.
History teaches that revolutionary movements eventually devour their own.
Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Castro and Khomeini all purged erstwhile allies once they had served their purpose.
But Americans can’t simply wait for today’s extremists to turn on one another.
Extremist candidates and movements are gaining influence in American politics, and social media algorithms are supercharging conspiracy theories that would once have been confined to the political fringe.
These falsehoods attract audiences, shape political identities and, increasingly, drive votes.
The answer cannot be censorship or ideological conformity.
That would betray the very principles we must defend.
The response must be a confident defense of America itself.
Republicans, traditional Democrats and independents — all those who believe in the promise of America — need to draw the line clearly and reject antisemitism, political extremism, authoritarianism, communism and Islamism.
And they must confront and defeat the poisonous idea that America is fundamentally wicked and deserves to be torn down.
With the midterm elections soon approaching and another presidential election in 2028, that argument cannot wait.
The great danger is not that the red, green and brown factions will agree on everything.
They never will.
The danger is that they agree on enough.
And what they increasingly agree on is that the America we inherited — free, pluralistic, democratic and powerful — is an evil to destroy rather than a gift to defend.
Mark Dubowitz is chief executive of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, where Ben Cohen is a research fellow.
