Far-left Reps. Ro Khanna and Ilhan Omar, and right-wing firebrand Marjorie Taylor Greene are suddenly best friends.
Khanna and Greene appeared together on CNN last week, while Omar went on Pod Save America and praised Greene, along with far-right commentator Candace Owens, for breaking with President Trump. She said Democrats should “put our arms around” them.
Something important is happening here that will shape the future of the No Labels movement and our country.
On the surface, these figures on the far right and far left would appear to have nothing in common. In fact, in 2024, then-Rep. Greene tried to get Omar censured in the House and called for her deportation, accusing her of treason and disloyalty. But now the two of them have converged on a few shared obsessions. So too have other influential radical voices on the right, like Tucker Carlson, and on the left, like Hasan Piker.
No Labels
This is horseshoe theory on full display. The idea, in its shortest form, is that the political spectrum does not actually run in a straight line – it bends. At the far ends, the left and the right start to find each other.
Today, the glue that binds them most closely together is an obsessive and reflexive hatred of Israel, and a complete rejection of the idea that America should play a leadership role around the world.
On the left, the road to anti-Israel politics runs through the once obscure academic theory of “intersectionality.” It is a worldview where Israel is cast as a colonial power, Palestinians as the innocent party, and the conflict becomes a stand-in for every grievance about Western capitalism and notions of American empire – see Rep. Rashida Tlaib using that exact wording here. On the far right, the road often runs through older channels of antisemitism, like Marjorie Taylor Greene once suggesting the California wildfires were caused by space lasers connected to a Jewish banking family, or Carlson, Owens, and Piker suggesting every U.S. action is directed by Israeli or Jewish interests.
The anti-Israel obsession is just one symptom of a much deeper problem. Not long ago, political movements organized around what they wanted to build, whether that was healthcare reform, civil rights, a balanced budget, or a smaller federal government. At the political extremes today, the organizing principle is what they hate. It is why you now see radical Islamist activists marching alongside radical LGBTQ activists in American cities, despite having no shared vision of what society should look like. They are there because they agree on an enemy, which is enough.
These radical forces fundamentally see America as a malignant force in the world. I am sure everyone reading this would agree that America has made serious foreign policy mistakes in the last few decades. Today, Americans across the political spectrum have plenty of legitimate questions and concerns about the military action in Iran.
But No Labels has always believed – and always will believe – that America has been and should always aspire to be a force for good in the world.
When the extremes say they want America out of the Middle East, out of foreign entanglements, they are also saying they want America to stop being the country that organizes the democratic world. The late Sen. Joe Lieberman, No Labels’ National Chair in memoriam, used to warn about this. He spoke often about what he called an emerging alliance between the anti-war left and the isolationist right. As Sen. Lieberman put it, when America is not engaged in problems elsewhere, “the world suffers, and the American people suffer eventually.” The record, dating back to the American retreat following the First World War, tends to support him.
If America withdraws from the world today, does anyone doubt Russia or China would jump in to exploit the vacuum America left behind? Do any of us want to live in a world defined by Russian and Chinese values, and or to have global shipping and trade routes and energy supplies dictated by the whims of Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping?
This is why moments like the Greene and Khanna handshake on cable and the Omar podcast clip should concern us. They are early signs of a realignment at the fringes, organized around grievance rather than any shared idea of governing. The commonsense majority needs to stand up to this.
