27 May Spring 2026
The War of Ideas – And Why We’re Losing It
By Ayaan Hirsi Ali
I am in the business of analyzing ideas. And ideas, more than any army or government, shape the destiny of human beings. Some ideas liberate; others enslave. The most powerful ideas often evolve into the ideologies that shape political and social life. An ideology must meet three criteria before I decide to devote my time and energy to exploring it more deeply.
The first is adherence. An ideology must command genuine commitment — the kind of commitment in which people give their time, money, careers, and sometimes their children or their very lives. I am fascinated by the ideologies that ask people to die for them. And I am even more fascinated by the adherents who say yes.
The second is mobilization. Adherence alone is not enough. An ideology must be capable of organizing masses across borders, generations, and centuries. It does not simply mobilize a crowd today or tomorrow, but it seeks to recruit for the next generation before the current one is buried.
The third is the pursuit of state power. Not every serious ideology wants to control the machinery of the state, but I am mesmerized by ideologies that want the institutions of education and socialization to transmit their values, and legislation to enforce them.
By this measure, I have narrowed my focus to three ideologies. You need to understand all three because, whether you like it or not, they are going to define the next chapter of your life.
The first is what many today call “woke.” I call it what it is: Marxism, updated for the 21st century. Karl Marx divided the world into the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, the oppressors and the oppressed. Today’s disciples simply swap out the economic categories for racial, sexual, and gender ones. The logic is identical: Society is a power structure, and the structure is corrupt. Therefore, it is morally imperative for it to be dismantled.
Walk through any elite university faculty lounge in America and try to find someone who does not believe systemic racism is the defining feature of American life. They believe it completely, teach it daily, and make absolutely certain their children believe it too.
From there, momentum follows. Ask a committed Marxist the purpose of their life, and the response is immediate: evil oppressors, righteous oppressed, and a glorious liberation waiting on the other side of history.
What began as a theory now controls schools, newsrooms, federal agencies, and boardrooms. Marxists of the last century dreamed of this, and the progressives of this century achieved it without firing a shot. That is mobilization on a civilizational scale. And state power? Look no further than New York City, where a cardcarrying member of the Democratic Socialists of America — sworn in on the Quran, inaugurated by Bernie Sanders — now governs more than eight million people.
Do not think for a moment that New York City is an outlier. This pattern is spreading across this great nation. The ideology does not stay contained. It follows institutions, and institutions are everywhere.
The second ideology is Islamism. I want to be precise: Not all Muslims are Islamist, but all Islamists are Muslim. Islamism is the political ideology that seeks to impose Sharia Law as the governing framework for all human life by any means necessary.
Islamists place power at the center of their faith. They worship the god of a dominating, conquering power. There is no more committed class of adherents on earth. Islamists will give not only their money and their time, but they will also send their sons to die and strap explosives to their daughters. They will endure prison, exile, and torture without renouncing their cause. This is a worldview so complete that death inside it feels like victory.
Islamism has grown steadily since the 1920s, when Hassan al-Banna founded the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. Today, it operates in virtually every country on earth, including America. It has state power in Iran, governs in Gaza, and exerts significant influence in Turkey, Pakistan, parts of sub-Saharan Africa, and increasingly in Western Europe. In some neighborhoods of London, Paris, New York, and even places like Texas, Virginia, Michigan, and Minnesota, it is the dominant cultural force.
The same ideological forces are at work here. Last year in Boulder, Colorado, Mohamed Sabry Soliman launched a vicious attack on participants in a solidarity walk for hostages taken during the October 7 attacks in Israel. Armed with a flamethrower and Molotov cocktails, he attacked the crowd. At least seven people were injured, and an 82-year-old woman died weeks later from the burns she suffered. In 2023, Humzah Mashkoor — then a teenager living in Westminster — was arrested at Denver International Airport attempting to fly to the UAE en route to Afghanistan to join ISIS.
These are not distant stories. These are your neighbors. These are the products of an ideology that has found fertile ground in your backyard.
I have said I am fascinated by Marxism and Islamism; however, I am in some ways even more intrigued by their partnership. We have come to call this the “Red-Green Alliance:” Marxists and Islamists. Yet, they have nothing in common. Not theology. Not history. Not vision. Not even a shared future.
And this brings me to my third ideology: Americanism.
Sociologists and political theorists talk about an American civil religion built around propositions like equality, natural rights, popular sovereignty, and constitutionalism. This is a recognizable belief system that interprets the world and prescribes political obligations oriented around loyalty to the United States and to certain political ideals — constitutional democracy, individual rights, and rule of law.
The American creed, as articulated in the founding documents and civil religion, very clearly qualifies as an ideology within my criteria of interest. I am transfixed by it, and — compared to the other two ideologies — I find it a far superior one.
Its roots begin in Jerusalem, run through Athens, pass through Rome, survive in the Magna Carta of 1215, are refined in the English common law tradition, and arrive on American shores as a revolution in human thought: the idea that the individual is sovereign.
This is the inheritance that the other two ideologies are trying to destroy.
The American Idea has a loop — a self-correcting mechanism — that neither of its rivals possesses. Marxism promises liberation and delivers the gulag. Islamism promises moral perfection and paradise and delivers brutal theocracies where life is short and nasty. But the American Idea has built into its architecture the capacity for revision, repentance, and renewal.
The Civil War was a catastrophe, but it was also a correction. Women’s suffrage was long overdue, yet the system produced it. This feedback mechanism, rooted in the sanctity of the individual conscience before God, is the most remarkable political innovation in human history.
Remove the West and American-led moral order from the picture, and what replaces it?
You go back to subsistence. You go back to caste systems where your birth determines your ceiling.
You go back to a world where women are property and dissent is a death sentence.
The prosperity, medicine, technology, and rule of law that billions of people enjoy — or aspire to — exist because of this ideology and the civilization it generated.
America’s soft power is extraordinary. There is an appetite for what America represents, and people risk their lives crossing deserts and oceans to get here. They are not fleeing toward socialism or theocracy; they are fleeing toward this.
If the American Idea is so compelling, so proven, and so deeply desired by people who have never had it, why are we ceding the field to the radicals?
In the 20th century, a Soviet KGB defector named Anatoliy Golitsyn wrote a book called New Lies for Old. The international communist movement, he argued, had identified the West’s greatest vulnerability: its culture. Convince a people that their civilization is irredeemably corrupt, and they will dismantle it for you willingly and enthusiastically, and call it “progress.”
The Islamists read from the same playbook — different theology, identical strategy. Capture the institutions, shape the narrative, and exploit the openness of free societies to work against those very freedoms from within.
And it works, in part, because of a peculiar cultural phenomenon I think of as “Minnesota Nice.” Minnesotans are extraordinarily polite and do not want to cause offense. They will stand in the cold for 10 minutes, saying “No, after you,” before anyone gets through the door.
In a neighborhood, that is charming. As a civilizational strategy, it is an obituary waiting to be written.
Bad actors study your niceness the way a predator studies prey. They learn that if they accuse you of racism, you will apologize. If they accuse you of Islamophobia, you will retreat. If they claim offense, you will capitulate. And every capitulation teaches them to push harder.
The Reds market their ideas relentlessly. The Greens do the same. In our towns and cities, they are selling a replacement for everything we build, and we respond by apologizing for merely existing.
No country in history has been better at marketing than America. We sell blue jeans and blockbusters to people who have never met an American. We sell the dream of America to people who have never set foot on this soil. But we have stopped selling what makes America great. We have outsourced our story to people who hate it.
So, what is the product we are selling that is worth defending?
The first product is the Bible. The idea that every human being bears the image of God — imago Dei — is the most consequential idea ever introduced into human civilization. It is the idea that no ruler is above the law because God is above the ruler. It is the idea that the individual conscience matters.
The second product is America’s founding documents: The Declaration of Independence, Constitution, and Bill of Rights. Read them and let the words resonate. It is our duty to know them, defend them, and teach them to our children. This is your inheritance.
There are people in this country who want to take it from you. They want to replace it with something that has failed everywhere it has been attempted. From Cuba to China, North Korea to Cambodia, the record of Marxist rule is written in repression, famine, and tens of millions of deaths. Islamism has been tried in Iran, Afghanistan, and Gaza, and the results are the same: war, suffering, stagnation, and the attempt to eliminate everyone who dares to disagree.
Christianity produced hospitals, missionaries, the abolition movement, and the recognition of human dignity as a nonnegotiable category. America produced the highest standard of living, the greatest scientific output, and the most successful multi-ethnic democracy in human history. These are the fruits of ideas carried faithfully across generations.
I want to speak to the students for a moment, because the future will rest most heavily on your decisions. You are at a Christian college in Colorado. You wake up, look at the Rockies, and feel that something in this world is worth loving. You are right; hold onto that.
Because what I am describing — the Red alliance of neo-Marxists and the Green alliance of Islamists — is explicitly designed to tell you that everything you love about this country is a crime. The world is not Minnesota Nice; it never has been. There are people and movements animated by ideas that are totalitarian to their core — ideas that have never produced anything but misery and mass graves.
To confront them, you must understand what they believe. Know the argument you are going to face before you face it. An enemy you understand is an enemy you can defeat. But equally, you must know what you believe — not vaguely or emotionally but clearly know why the American Idea is better. You must know the argument and be able to make it clearly, calmly, and without apology.
Communism has never built anything worth celebrating. Islamism has never produced a civilization you would choose. But America has. Christianity has. And the evidence is all around you — in churches, courts, in the freedom to sit in this room and hear a woman born in Somalia tell you that your civilization is worth defending. That is not nothing; that is everything. Now go sell it.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali is the founder of Restorationbulletin.com, the founder of the AHA Foundation, a fellow at the Hoover Institute at Stanford University, a senior fellow with the Future of Diplomacy Project at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard Kennedy School, and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. She is the bestselling author of Infidel (2007) and Heretic: Why Islam Needs a Reformation Now (2015). Hirsi Ali was born in Mogadishu, Somalia, in 1969. As she grew up, she embraced Islam and strove to live as a devout Muslim. In 1992, she fled to the Netherlands to escape a forced marriage, where she was given asylum, and in time, citizenship. After quickly learning Dutch, she was able to study at the University of Leiden. From 2003 to 2006, Hirsi Ali served as an elected member of the Dutch parliament. She then moved to the United States, where she founded the AHA Foundation in 2007 to protect and defend the rights of women and girls in the U.S. from harmful traditional practices. In 2024, Hirsi Ali founded Restorationbulletin. com, where she explores the forces of subversion plaguing Western society.