The Left's Purity Politics is a Gift to The Right

How Progressive shortsightedness is threatening to repeat history once again

The Right is pushing America to the brink of theocracy—and we on the Left are helping them.

I feel like we’ve seen this movie before: the infighting, the posturing, the threats. As with the last two election cycles, we’re once again facing a movement from progressives who seem to have forgotten the lessons of last few years: when we go to war with each other, the bigots win.

With the Republican Party once again coalescing around a candidate, our collective fatal flaws have once again surfaced: we don't seem to understand how to play the long game, we don't see the bigger picture coming together, and we're willing to be momentary martyrs of our own virtue—even at the cost of losing everything.

Our politicians are woefully failing us, our checks and balances are nonfunctioning, our highest court is weaponized, and our systems of protection have been compromised. We need to stop assailing one another because that has always been the strategy of bad people with no ideas: get the good guys to turn on each other, divide and conquer, focus them on the wrong fight.

The Left has a cancel culture, purity problem and if we don't get over it soon—it's going to destroy us.

Social media is now littered daily with loud Liberal objections to President Biden, citing his perceived lack of movement on Netanyahu’s atrocities against the Palestinian people. Using intellectually dishonest titles like “Genocide Joe” and threatening to abandon the Democrats in November, it’s easy to feel a sick sense of déjà vu. This impulsive emotionality is largely how women lost the right to body autonomy and why we now have a predatory Supreme Court that is doing its level best to install a dictator by obliterating the Law and making our elections irrelevant.

We once again find ourselves violently fighting with one another with a myopia that fails to see all that hangs in the balance. As I watch gangs of deeply-entrenched progressives spar with each other, I realize we're not paying attention to our recent history at all.

Meanwhile, the other side is simply circling the wagons, making concessions, consolidating power, and gaining traction—spirituality and morality and virtue be damned. This is why we're where we are today.

For all their sermonizing and finger-wagging, Conservatives have never allowed their personal morality to get in the way of a political win. We saw this played out in the 2016 campaign. Prior to Donald Trump announcing his candidacy, any self-respecting Evangelical would have declared a three-time married serial adulterer with multiple bankruptcies and a history of racist statements and predatory business practices—the complete antithesis of Jesus. What a difference a few months made.

As Trump's political stock rose, their religious convictions began to miraculously evaporate in the light of political opportunity. Celebrity evangelists who previously claimed to abhor everything he represented, suddenly and gladly leased out their megachurch pulpits, social media platforms, and Christian University commencement stages. It turns out when the devil actually does bring you to the mountaintop and shows you what you get in exchange for your soul—your solid rock theology is a lot more like jello.

Politicians like Lindsey Graham, Ted Cruz, and Marco Rubio, who at first made vehement, impassioned assaults on Trump's character, intellect, and suitability to lead, soon found themselves falling over one another to bow at his feet and kiss his ring, willingly discarding their previous disgust and gladly auctioning off their souls for the shiny trinkets of power, position, and opportunity he gave them.

That has been the story for the past eight years here in America: millions of people on the Right trading in their personal and religious values for the coming of a kleptocratic kingdom they benefit from. They have sacrificed their individual convictions on the altar of the win—or what seems like victory in the moment. 

I'm not asking progressives and liberals and Left-leaning believers to do that.

I'm not suggesting we collectively sell our souls the way our counterparts have and I’m not advocating for shelving our morality.

We are different from our political and religious adversaries, precisely because we are more committed to our personal convictions than to purchasing influence.
We do stand for something greater than empty pulpit pounding and phony public histrionics about Christianity under attack or returning to our days of former supremacist glory.
We are driven by ethical and spiritual prompts that refuse to align with monsters or to horde a consuming power that will corrupt us.
We aren't fueled by a contempt that has no use for empathy. That empathy is our strength.

But if we can't lay down our all-or-nothing ultimatums, and "________ or Bust" political purity that will not set aside its strident virtue in order to stand shoulder-to-shoulder against this unprecedented existential threat—we're going to find ourselves looking back and wondering how we lost our nation to a sociopath.

There will be no next election fixing this mistake.
We will all be voiceless and powerless.
The options will be gone.

If Trump and the Republicans prevail in November, no one will be better off. No one.

Not Gazans or Palestinians or Muslims. Not people of color or Jews. Not women or LGBTQ people or immigrants or the poor or sick or hungry. Humanity will be universally endangered. There is no win here for anyone but the bigots and book banners and the Nazi sympathizers.

Religious Progressives and political Liberals need to understand how urgent these moments are. We need to stop killing our allies with friendly fire and we need to discard the lesser battles of the moment so that we can win the singularly vital war, so that all human beings can find rest and refuge and peace.

We need to win because when we win, disparate humanity and the planet and the future do, too.

This is a pivotal moment in history and we are here for it.

Let’s not blow it.

Let’s fight together.