While The Right is Devouring America, The Left is Eating Its Own

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

This should have been easy.

A decade ago, we endured the most corrupt, inept, and relentlessly predatory presidential administration in our nation’s history.

We witnessed a willfully and tragically mismanaged public health crisis and a live-streamed, coordinated insurrection designed to overturn an election and install a despot.

We watched an extremist minority commandeer the highest court in our nation and mount an unprecedented repeal of the rights of women, of environmental protections, of voting rights.

The election should have been the slam dunk of the century, but it wasn’t.
We should have easily coalesced around our collective values, but we didn’t.
We should now be rising together to eradicate this fascism en masse—but we're not.

That's because the Left has a purity problem, and if we don't get over it, it's going to destroy us.

Republican leadership across this country is declaring open war on diversity, on education, on the legitimacy of our elections. Our checks and balances are non-functioning, our systems of protection have been compromised, and we are warring with one another.

Our daily newsfeeds are littered with knee-jerk Liberal objections to mainstream candidates: questionable past behavior, one-time verbal gaffes, or previous political positions that we've decided are certain deal-breakers. We immediately disqualify potential allies in the name of our personal values or religious beliefs, allowing no gray space for compromise, no personal evolution for people, and no possibility of future alignment with them. We passionately partner in the work of our adversaries.

Worse, we easily find ourselves violently fighting with one another over matters that are, in fact, trivial when compared with all that hangs in the balance. As I watch tribes of deeply entrenched advocates of candidates warring with other Democrats over semantics and minutia, I realize we're still not paying attention to our recent history at all.

Meanwhile, the other side, as always, 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 Presidential Campaign. As Trump's political stock rose, 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—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 a space in the bed of a powerful man who they are willing to sleep with for the shiny trinkets of power, position, and opportunity he gives them.

Evangelical leaders’ religious convictions miraculously also evaporated in the light of political opportunity, with celebrity evangelists who previously claimed to abhor everything he represented suddenly leasing out their megachurch pulpits, social media platforms, and Christian University commencement stages.

And Professed Christian voters who've spent their entire lives loudly brandishing their family values, devotion to God, and steadfast commitment to the ways of Jesus, proved themselves able to shove all that in a closet and to vote for a vile, felonious predator.

That has been the story for the past decade of our American story: millions of people on the Right trading in their personal and religious values for the coming of a kleptocratic kingdom they will all benefit from. They have sacrificed their individual convictions on the altar of the bigger win—or at least, what seems like victory in the moment.

I'm not asking moderates, progressives, liberals, and left-leaning believers to do that. I'm not suggesting we collectively sell our souls the way our counterparts have.

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 moral and spiritual prompts that refuse to align with monsters or horde a consuming power that will corrupt us.
We aren't fueled by a contempt that would snap its finger and wipe out everyone else.

But if we can't lay down our all-or-nothing litmus tests and set aside our strident virtue, in order to stand shoulder-to-shoulder against a formidable threat, we're soon going to find ourselves with no voice whatsoever.

Rank-and-File Democrats, this is bigger than you.
Frustrated Progressives, this is bigger than you.
Defiant Third Party holdouts, this is bigger than you.
Exhausted abstainers, this is bigger than you.
Ambivalent moderates of all parties, this is bigger than you.

We all need to understand how urgent these moments are. We need to stop killing our allies with friendly fire, and we need to discard the inconsequential battles of preference so that we can win the singularly vital war of which we all will prosper.

When our republic is secured and our essential liberties are restored, then we can go about the necessary and very attainable work of navigating our differences to renovate America into something we all can take pride in.

But if we fail to confront this existential threat because we are distracted and divided by moral litmus tests, lazy squabbling, and performative purity politics, we will have all squandered the moment in front of us.

We need to win together because when we win, life and the planet, and the future does too.

It's time we on the Left pulled ourselves together.