The Red and the Green

Coalitions don't require ideological uniformity while there's an opponent left to beat. 

Luis Gonzalez | September 8, 2026

Sun Tzu made an observation, some 2,500 years ago, that modern coalition politics seems to have taken to heart, though no one credits him for it. Paraphrased loosely: an army does not need every soldier to want the same outcome. It needs them moving in the same direction until the battle is won.

The Red and the Green appear to have absorbed the lesson without ever reading the book. Almost nobody asks what happens once the battle ends and there's no shared enemy left to hold the army together.

The Red is the socialist left. The Green is political Islam. Different histories, different ambitions, different visions of the society each ultimately wants to build; on paper, that gap should make an alliance implausible. In practice, it hasn't stopped one from forming. Coalitions never require their members to agree about the final destination, only about what stands in the way of reaching one, and for now, the Democratic Party's own establishment: its incumbents, its machine, its money, its voters, serves that purpose well enough.

History has already run this experiment. Revolutionary Cuba built its coalition against Batista out of men who agreed on almost nothing beyond wanting him gone. Fidel Castro, his brother Raul, Camilo Cienfuegos, and Ernesto "Che" Guevara fought side by side, but Che was already a committed Marxist, Raul stood further left than Fidel, and Camilo's own movement had promised a return to constitutional government once Batista fell. That promise did not survive him. Once the enemy was gone, the question became who got to decide what came next, and the coalition answered by leaving almost no one standing who might contest it. Camilo died in what the official record calls an accident, a plane that was never recovered. Che was "reassigned" to Bolivia and executed there. Raul remained, entrenched in a state bearing little........

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