Decolonizing Love || Just had an epiphany while replying to someone in the comments on my Facebook feed. Purity testing is one of the left’s most self-destructive habits. It breeds infighting, cancel/callout culture, and an atmosphere so toxic that people already in the movement don’t feel safe to express themselves genuinely, and people considering joining leftist movements don’t bother. And until we reckon honestly with why it keeps happening, we will keep losing.
There are so many reasons for the emergence of purity culture in the left. One is the literal legacy of Puritanism. Many early figures in American labor and proto-socialist movements came from families and regions influenced by Puritanism, even if they were no longer religious in the 17th-century sense. People who moved away from formal Puritan beliefs helped build some of the first left-leaning movements in the United States, including abolitionists such as Theodore Parker and Ralph Waldo Emerson and later progressive reformers involved in settlement-house work and labor organizing. Even as these movements became more secular, they carried forward key features of Puritan culture: strict moral discipline, communal oversight, and forms of accountability that surveilled and policed behavior.
Colonial culture itself is a coercive domination culture. Many leftists change ideologically from their families worldview but don’t unlearn how to be in relation with people.
We’ve done a great job of teaching consciousness around social inequity, but not how to be in community with each other: to tolerate difference, to disagree without annihilating. The internet amplifies discord, obscures nuance, and rewards performativity over the kind of slow, sustained work that real organizing actually requires.
But I think another reason, which I haven’t explored much until now, is how leftists define leftism.
The word left comes from the seating arrangement during the French Revolution. Those who supported popular sovereignty and social change sat to the left of the assembly; those who supported the monarchy and the old order sat to the right.
Because the French Revolution predates the Industrial Revolution by just decades, it shaped the political terrain that followed it; ‘left’ became increasingly associated with anti-capitalism as that struggle became the defining axis of modern politics.
That remains, in my view, its essential core. I define leftism at its most basic as a commitment to anti-capitalism rooted in socialist traditions since Marx (Communist Manifesto, 1848) and, drawing on Bobbio’s Left and Right, opposition to social hierarchy through greater equity. Those are political positions about how power is structured in society. That’s where I stand.
But that’s not the operating definition for everyone who calls themselves left.
For a lot of people, when you drill down, leftism isn’t primarily a political project with a singular objective aim at it’s core. It’s a moral identity. Being leftist to many means being a good person, in contrast to people on the right, who leftists tend to characterize as selfish, frightened of difference, and hungry for power. And that’s where the issue arises. Because the moment leftism equals goodness, we immediately have to answer: what does good mean? And that is deeply, irreducibly subjective.
If you think veganism is what makes someone good, then every leftist should be vegan.
If you think masking in public at all times is what makes someone good, then leftism requires masking.
If you think AI is bad, then a good leftist is categorically anti-AI.
These are real positions many puritan leftists hold, and it surprises your average person because of how extreme and rigid they can sound. But live in a progressive city like Toronto, where I live, or Portland, or spend enough time in online leftist spaces where the chronically online often flood conversations, and you’ll see these views expressed very loudly and aggressively. I don’t always mask in public, and I’ve been called a centrist because of it. When good equals left and bad equals right, disagreement turns into labeling. Instead of engaging the argument, people start assigning identities like liberal or centrist to anyone who doesn’t meet their personal standard of good.
Each of those positions might sound extreme in isolation, but they follow logically from the premise. If leftism equals goodness, then whatever you personally believe constitutes goodness, leftism must require it. The specific content shifts from person to person, and that is exactly the problem. It produces an infinite series of litmus tests, each one generated by someone’s private moral vision, each one treated as a non-negotiable condition of leftist belonging.
There’s another problem inside that logic. If leftism equals being a good person, then the reverse also starts to follow: whatever I do must be good because I am a leftist. At that point, criticism stops feeling like political disagreement and starts feeling like an attack on your identity.
That produces leftist movements full of defensive people, because there is suddenly a lot at stake in being seen as morally correct. People begin scanning each other for mistakes, not to build a stronger community, but to shift attention away from themselves. It creates a toxic echo chamber, and movements trapped in loops like that can’t grow because they’re constantly suppressing each other.
When leftism becomes a personality test instead of a political project, it stops being a vehicle for collective transformation and becomes a sorting mechanism for social belonging. The question stops being, “Are you committed to dismantling capitalism and social hierarchies?” and instead, ACAB leftists become police officers at a moral checkpoint, interrogating, “Are you being a good person?” Those are completely different questions, and they lead to completely different consequences. One builds movements. The other builds walls.
And the deepest irony is who gets hurt most by purity politics: the very people the left claims to center and care for. Poor workers, immigrants, and working class people don’t feel welcome in a movement that demands ideological fluency before it offers solidarity. When you’re more concerned with how socially conscious a struggling worker is than with the conditions they’re actually struggling under, you’ve lost the plot entirely.
A lot of this traces back to the 1990s, when identity politics began replacing class analysis rather than working alongside it. The left started speaking an exclusionary language that felt increasingly distant from the everyday material realities of working class life.
And when people feel judged rather than supported when they’re in need, they go somewhere else for help. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that some of those people found a warmer reception on the right. That’s not a failure of the working class. It’s a failure of a left so absorbed in its own internal performance that it no longer speaks to the people it’s supposedly fighting for.
I’ve spent most of my life in activist circles, and I carry no illusions that being a leftist makes someone a good person. I’ve met many leftists that I think are genuinely terrible people. I’ve worked with them anyway, because the cause is larger than my personal feelings about the individuals involved. That’s just what political organizing requires. Participating in cancel or call-out culture isn’t a substitute for organizing against institutions and structures of power. It can feel like action, but it doesn’t replace the harder work of building movements capable of changing material conditions. You build coalitions with people you wouldn’t choose as friends.
Leftism is not a badge that certifies you as a good person. It is a commitment to dismantling capitalism and social hierarchy. The conflation of those two things hasn’t made us more ethical. It has made us more fragmented, more insular, and less effective.
We are losing badly in large part because of how easily divided we are. The right is the cultural and political baseline in North America, between the Democratic Party and Republican Party in the United States, and between the Liberal Party and Conservative Party in Canada. We have alienated much of the population. And it is not just because those parties have more money or institutional power that they have pulled people to their position. It is also because a vocal part of the left treats ordinary people as if they are not politically or morally good enough to belong in the movement. The left needs to take responsibility for that.
Until we accept that all people are flawed, including leftists themselves, and that real community means building with imperfect people rather than endlessly gatekeeping who belongs or grading one another on goodness, we will remain a movement that talks about solidarity while practicing exclusion to our collective detriment.
The left shouldn’t be built on being subjectively pure and good. It should be built on political clarity about what leftism actually is, and the discipline to organize from there.
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