How can we save America from the radicals?

America is caught in a tug-of-war that feels like it’s pulling the nation apart at the seams. On one side stands the radical left (woke left), proudly flying the banner of Marx’s vision of communism under the modern guise of “wokeness.” On the other side, a growing segment of the radical right (woke right), fed up (and hey, fair enough — their frustration with the left isn’t wrong) with the institutionalization of the Left’s agenda in our schools, media, and government, is beginning to embrace the rhetoric and logic of fascism.

What’s happening here is not new — it’s a dialectic at work. Philosophers like Hegel, and later Karl Marx, explained history as a process of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. An idea or system (the thesis) is challenged by its opposite (the antithesis), and out of that clash comes a new state of affairs (the synthesis).

In the 20th century, we watched this play out in real time. The old monarchies and empires of Europe collapsed after World War I, and into that vacuum came two radical opposites: communism and fascism. Lenin’s Bolsheviks took Russia and promised a classless utopia by abolishing private property and dissolving traditional institutions. Fascists like Mussolini in Italy and Hitler in Germany rose up as a direct reaction, promising to crush communism with nationalism, authoritarian control, and corporatist economies.

The frightening thing is that they actually needed each other. The communists pointed to fascism as proof that capitalism and liberal democracy always decay into right-wing tyranny. The fascists pointed to communism as proof that liberal democracy was too weak to hold society together, collapsing into left-wing tyranny. Each side justified its existence by agitating, via propaganda campaigns, the threat of the other. And both ended in totalitarian nightmares, trampling the common man under iron boots — just in different uniforms.

Meanwhile, the Western democracies tried their own “synthesis.” The United States under FDR and post-war Europe built welfare states and regulatory systems, hoping that a “carefully managed” capitalism would ward off both extremes. It worked for a while, but only because the moral foundations of those societies still carried vestiges of biblical order, family, and restraint. Once those foundations began to rot — see the Sexual Revolution, the rise of Feminism, and the propagation of post-modernism among other things — the door cracked open again for radical forces to exploit the vacuum.

And here we are now.

In America today, the same dialectical pattern is unfolding. The thesis — our constitutional order of classical liberalism, built on limited government, separation of powers, and inalienable rights given by God — has been under siege for decades. The woke left casts it as inherently oppressive, a rigged system designed by old white men to suppress minorities and entrench power. They see the Constitution not as a safeguard of liberty but as a blueprint for tyranny — the very tool of the “American bourgeoisie,” or cultural hegemony (white, straight, Christian men), to maintain its position at the expense of the down-and-outs (racial and sexual minorities, as they claim). It’s Antonio Gramsci’s playbook to the letter. The answer, in their mind, is to tear down those guardrails, via provoking revolution, and replace them with collectivist solutions: equity mandates, the erosion of the family unit (thus the emphasis on the LGBT agenda), cultural and economic re-engineering, government control of speech and property.

The radical right (woke right — think Tucker Carlson, Stephen Wolfe, Joel Webbon, Elijah Schaffer, Nick Fuentes, and many more) meanwhile, has grown disillusioned with the Constitution for the opposite reason. They look at how the Left has hijacked education, media, corporations, and even government bureaucracy (to which, to give the devil his due, they’re not entirely wrong about), and they conclude that the Constitution is too weak, too naïve (or, in some cases, outright responsible for the rise of the woke left), to stop Marxism from swallowing the country whole. If the rules of the game allow the enemy to weaponize free speech and democracy against the nation, then why keep playing by the rules?

Their solution is a strongman, Caesar-style politics (an “American Franco,” as Jack Posobiec, for one, openly advocates for) — sacrificing liberties for order, trampling dissent in the name of preserving the nation. This is why, for another example (and there are many), you’ll often see woke right agitators white-washing Islamism, claiming, as Tucker Carlson did on a recent podcast, that Sharia Law is better than what we have today in the United States (yes, he really said that). Or Nick Fuentes obsessively praising Adolf Hitler. This pattern of fawning over authoritarianism on the woke right is a longing for order, in response to modern leftist chaos, that misplaces where true order is found — not in top-down state power, but in the principles of liberty and self-government that safeguard this country.  

So, here’s the trap: both extremes use the other as proof of their own righteousness. The woke left points to fascist rhetoric on the right and says, “See? Liberal democracy was always unsafe for minorities. We must go further left.” The woke right points to the institutional dominance of the left and says, “See? Liberal democracy always decays into Marxism. We must go further right.” Both movements, in different ways, are united in one thing: a rejection of our founding order, embracing a critical theorist-style identity politics to mislead the population into embracing their proposed synthesis.

“Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety” (Benjamin Franklin).

But what they miss — and what too many Americans have forgotten — is that the Founders didn’t just stumble into the Constitution by political luck. They crafted it on biblical truth. They knew man is created in the image of God and therefore endowed with rights no king or government could erase. They knew man is fallen and sinful, and therefore, power must be checked, divided, and limited. They knew the law must stand higher than rulers, because God Himself is the ultimate lawgiver and judge. That “ordered liberty under God” was the thesis that gave America its stability, prosperity, and freedom. And it’s the only system that has consistently avoided both chaos and tyranny.

The danger is that if we let the extremes control the dialectic, the constitutional order gets squeezed out entirely. What replaces it will not be freedom, order, or civility. Chaos will fill the void, just as we saw play out in 20th-century Europe.

The solution isn’t another “third way” or a clever synthesis of the two extremes. The solution is revitalizing the original thesis, primarily to younger generations — a task I pray organizations like Turning Point USA engage in head-on, instead of falling prey to dangerous, reactionary woke right solutions in response to the horrible tragedy of Kirk’s passing. That means returning to the biblical principles that gave birth to our nation and re-teaching them to the next generation (as Charlie Kirk was courageously doing). It means rebuilding from the ground up, not from the top down. It means strengthening the nuclear family, because the family is the first government and the training ground for free people. It means parents teaching their children Scripture, churches preaching truth without apology, schools forming citizens instead of activists, and local communities embodying the virtues of liberty before they ever reach the ballot box.

This isn’t fast, and it won’t come through soundbites, flashy events, celebrity influencers often in it for themselves, or political shortcuts. Revivals never do. But it’s the only way to avoid becoming the very thing we claim to fight against. America doesn’t need a new Caesar. It doesn’t need a Marxist revolution. It needs a reawakening to the truth that liberty only endures when it is grounded in God’s Word. That was the secret sauce of the Founders, and it’s the only path that can secure the future for our children.