I have been hearing a lot of American political chatter about how the Islamists and the communists are going to gang up and take away my freedom. This appears to be the new phantom of convenience deployed by to spook American citizens by combining the anxieties of the Cold War with the Global War on Terror.

A cursory glance at this concept shows the two ideologies devour one another rather than creating a super-predator. Let's take a walk through history:

This is not fringe talk. Ted Cruz went on Fox News on August 4 and described Abdul El-Sayed and Zohran Mamdani as a "green-red convergence, where the communists and the Islamists, they want Sharia law," adding that "all of this is coming together in a way that is really a toxic, toxic stew."

In April, Rep. Chip Roy introduced H.R. 8387, which would expand ideological grounds for deportation and bar naturalization for adherents of "socialism, communism, Marxism and Islamic fundamentalism." Its formal name is the Measures Against Marxism's Dangerous Adherents and Noxious Islamists Act. The acronym is MAMDANI. Roy described the target as a "Red-Green Alliance."

Nancy Mace posted that "every single Muslim holding public office in America is a trojan horse." The president called El-Sayed "a Communist loser who hates Jews and Israel" and posted a side-by-side of the two couples captioned "Two VERY DIFFERENT Americas."

On Tuesday El-Sayed won Michigan by about five and a half points and will be the first Muslim in the United States Senate. Mamdani runs New York City. We're going to hear more of this nonsense. Here is why it is wrong.

Islamism and communism do not play well together. They are both total systems, and a state can only have one of those. By Islamism I mean state-based Islamic theocracy, the belief that the state should be governed by religious law. Marxism pitches itself as a complete account of how life should be organized, with an end goal of a stateless union of all working people. That claim bleeds straight into the metaphysical territory which religion occupies.

This is why totalitarian communist states have struggled with religion so consistently, and why the most autocratic of them end up turning the state itself into a religion. I am writing this from Albania, which in 1967 declared itself the first atheist state in the world.

By May of that year all 2,169 religious buildings in the country had been nationalized and many converted into cultural centers. Public worship was banned until December 1990. When the state doesn't permit the people to have their own religious expression it must fill the ‘god-shaped hole itself.' Look at the fervor North Koreans are required to show the Kim dynasty. This is liturgy as statecraft.

There's a big reason for that:

Marxism leaves little room for a more powerful governing philosophy, and Islamism is exactly that. Essentially, god doesn't seem to care too much about the struggle for global liberation of the working class. (I didn't interview god for this piece.)

The United States spent the Cold War betting on Islam against communism, precisely because the two were enemies. Supporting the Afghan mujahideen against the Soviets is the famous case. Encouraging Saudi Arabia to export the radical and often violent read of Islam Wahhabism as an ideological firewall is the less famous one. We saw the policy in Egypt, Indonesia and Pakistan.

Better support a religious autocrat over a class-warrior.

If you have ever wondered why Islamic fundamentalism became a political and military force in the 1990s and 2000s, thats because the US invested in it from the 50s to the 80s. This history on this is clear and conveniently forgotten in contemporary public discussions of foreign policy.

The clearest document is from 1957.

During the Syrian crisis that August, Eisenhower feared Damascus was about to fall to Moscow. He wanted King Saud, as keeper of the holy places, to denounce the Syrian regime, and he wrote that Washington should do "everything possible to stress the 'holy war' aspect by enlisting Saud." The Dulles brothers, who ran the State Department and the CIA and treated regime change as a hobby, were onboard.

Saud declined, partly because the US had just backed Israel in the Gulf of Aqaba dispute, and the whole episode is remembered as a failure of the Eisenhower Doctrine. The point is that the American government's working assumption, when it mattered, was that political Islam was a weapon against communism, not its partner.

The red-green alliance assumes ideological homogeneity on both sides. If you have ever been in a coffee shop in Portland you know there are many kinds of communists, and they do not see eye to eye.

There are somewhere between 15 and 20 communist parties in the United States with conflicting views on what Marxism even is let alone how it should be implemented. While some might believe in working with the electoral system to bring about slow change others might embrace a grassroots cooperative movement which rejects federal and state governments entirely. Some prefer musing on how the concepts can be included into a mainstream party while others are filling up molotov cocktails.

The thing about small internally divided groups is, they're not good at getting things done.

In political movements, the title is usually the least important part. You and I might declare ourselves communists or capitalists but have entirely different definitions of what those things mean. Prioritizing goals and establishing a strategy to meet those goals is where things fall apart. When ideology becomes action the fractures appear.

The same is true of theocratic Islamic autocracy. The reality that pundits on the right would like everyone to overlook is the fact that there is no "Islamism." This would imply that every muslim is the same ideologically and politically.

This is far from the truth.

A Twelver Shia from Karbala Iraq and a Wahhabi from Aceh Indonesia do not see eye to eye. One would call the other a heretic and not consider them a Muslim at all. The Islamic world is an enormous tent of beliefs and political ideologies, far larger than everything contained in the global communist movement. Coordinating with one another along a single set of goals is as impossible as it is laughable.

This is not to say Islamic communists do not exist. They do. Holding both beliefs requires enormous trade-offs, and when a government tries it, the government fails.

Siad Barre in Somalia built something he called scientific socialism and insisted it was compatible with Islam. "There is no chapter, not even a single word, in our Koran that opposes scientific socialism," he told the New York Times in 1977. "The contradiction was created by man only." In January 1975 his government executed ten clerics in Mogadishu for preaching against a family law that gave daughters equal inheritance with sons.

A Western diplomat at the time described Somalia as a country of three M's: Marx, Mohammed and the Mad Mullah. Soviet diplomats privately doubted the socialism went deeper than the surface. The Soviets dropped him over the Ogaden war in 1977, the ideology cross-pollinated with clan rivalries, and the state collapsed into the civil war that has not really ended.

Gaddafi belongs in the same camp. His Third Universal Theory, laid out in the Green Book, claimed to be based on the Quran, anti-capitalist and anti-Marxist (while looking strangely communist) at the same time. It produced a cult of personality and a state that fell apart within weeks of his death.

Then there is the case of Mojahedin-e-Khalq (MEK). These were the Marxists who opposed the rise of the Supreme Leader in the Iranian Revolution. While they were a part of the movement which deposed the Shah they rejected the Ayatollah's approach to hierarchical religious jurisprudence.

They rejected the theocracy with such passion that it sent them into the arms of another autocrat leveraging religion to his advantage: Saddam Hussein. MEK fought against the Supreme Leader in favor of their own blend of Shia Islam, Marxism and cult of personality.

(They currently live in exile in Albania.

When a nation state tries to serve two ideological masters, its internal logic falls apart. This is also why theocracy slides so easily into monarchy. It needs a king, or a queen, because the ruler has to be divinely appointed. Communism needs the opposite. You cannot have both.

The phrase does not need to be true to be useful. It lets a speaker attach the oldest American political fear (communism) to the newest one (Islam) and aim both at a specific person with a specific name. The senate campaign arm ran ads using El-Sayed's full name, Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed, for exactly that reason. His response was the right one: "My name is not raising your gas prices."

Bottom line: I am not worried about the Islamic Marxists taking over America. Islamism and Marxism have historically fought each other for ideological authority, the United States spent forty years arming one against the other, and every attempt to fuse them at the level of a state has ended in a cult or a collapse. What is left is a slogan. Slogans win elections sometimes. They do not describe the world.