Loving God and our neighbor means restraining evil and promoting good, not standing aside while the hammer and the scimitar take turns chipping away the Christian foundations of our society.

Tuesday night, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani saw three of his preferred congressional candidates defeat establishment-backed Democrats in New York primaries. Mamdani, who put a Muslim, democratic-socialist face on City Hall last fall, is now helping export that coalition nationally.

The episode did not happen in isolation. Across the West, socialists and Islamists have discovered they need each other, at least for now. Socialists supply organizing infrastructure and institutional access. Islamists supply numbers, as well as a disciplined voting bloc and a grievance narrative whose moral cover, “liberating marginalized voices,” is ready-made for progressive politics. Each side has concluded that the other is a useful idiot.

That phrase, “useful idiot,” arose in the Cold War, describing those who served Moscow’s purposes even as they imagined themselves as independent actors. It names a partner exploited for a season because his usefulness serves someone else’s ends, with no plan to honor any debt once that usefulness expires. In the alliance between socialists and Islamists, both are attempting to play the other side as the useful idiot.

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