Is Anyone on the Left Pure Enough?

This is a frustrated, thinking-out-loud piece about purity testing on the left, which the author calls one of its most self-destructive habits. It breeds infighting and callout culture, makes existing members afraid to speak honestly, and quietly turns away people who might otherwise join. Her diagnosis pulls in a few threads: a lingering inheritance of Puritan moral policing, and a colonial domination culture that many leftists reject in theory without ever unlearning how it taught them to treat each other.

The sharper argument is about definitions. For her, leftism is a political project, anti-capitalism and opposition to social hierarchy. For a lot of people, though, it has quietly become a moral identity, a shorthand for being a good person. Once left equals good, you then have to define good, which is hopelessly subjective. That's how veganism, constant masking, or being anti-AI get treated as litmus tests, and how disagreement collapses into labeling someone a centrist or a lib instead of engaging what they said.

It reads less like a tidy thesis than an honest reckoning, and it's stronger for that. The point isn't that standards are bad. It's that a movement built on policing each other's goodness keeps losing.