In the United States, the Democratic Party has always been the traditional defender of workers, farmers, and the poor. They have always been able to get votes based on this perception, and the idea that the Republican Party would be worse than them for regular people. The same is true of the Labor Party in the UK, and other Center-Left political parties throughout Europe.
However, over the past several years, this image has changed in the popular mind, as the Democrats, Labor, and others all moved to support the side of business; the side of employers instead of workers. No one believes them anymore, and why should they? Their policies have been disastrous for the lower and middle classes, they have made life worse for the average citizen.
This is a major part of the explanation in the rise of Trump, LePen, and the radical Right-Wing parties throughout the West. The parties that were supposed to care about the people, abandoned them, and implemented policies that harmed them. So, people abandoned those parties. They could no longer honestly say “the other party will be worse”.
Unfortunately, I am afraid that the same thing can be said about the Islamists. On one hand, you have the Ikhwan, who embrace Free Market Capitalism, Neoliberalism, and so on…policies which hurt their constituency. And on the other hand, you have the Jihadis, whose program is basically “destroy everything, and implant an Islamic state on top of the rubble”…which again, and in a much more obvious and catastrophic way, harms the constituents of Political Islam.
If I thought the Gulf states were this clever, I would think that they are funding the Jihadists specifically to discredit the concept of Islamism; because, whether it is intentional or not; that is the result. No rational citizen of Qatar or Kuwait or Saudi Arabia will look at the “liberated” areas of Syria, and say “wow, That’s great, I want to live in a place like that!” No, they are violent, divided, extremist, and there is rampant corruption and injustice, and, as one Mujahid told me, “Shari’ah is only applied on the weak”.
Just as Westerners are turning en masse away from the traditional parties that served their interests, and are embracing basically undemocratic, authoritarian-style leadership (the antithesis of what their states are supposed to believe in); so too will we see the Muslims turn away from Islamists, who they will view as either sellouts or lunatics, and they will embrace secularism (the antithesis of what they truly believe in), simply because there are no credible, and reasonable Islamic alternatives.