Ideological Calvinism is slowly killing the left.
A significant portion of the American left has been consumed by a form of ideological rigidity that not only prevents us from making inroads with mainstream society and growing our numbers, but that effectively prevents us from accomplishing any actual policy goals. This way of thinking — which New York Times opinion columnist Jamelle Bouie called “secular Calvinism” on the social media platform Bluesky — can’t be allowed to fester, and its adherents must be confronted loudly, publicly, and often in order to make clear that this defeatist groupuscule mired in misery doesn’t speak for the left.
In Christian theology, the doctrine of Calvinism (invented by Protestant minister John Calvin) mainly revolves around the belief that God has only elected a certain few to receive salvation, and that there is nothing those not chosen can do to redeem themselves from eternal damnation. Of course, Calvinists represent a minority of not only Christians, but also a minority of Protestant Christians. Non-Calvinist Christians hold the more mainstream view that God’s love is unconditional, and that all of God’s children are equally capable of redemption and salvation.
Likewise, some American leftists hold rigid Calvinist beliefs that only lead to continued losses, irrelevance, and obscurity. In fact, it could be argued that Calvinist leftists are no different than fundamentalist Christians with just a few different words swapped out. The absolutist ways of thinking among the most deeply committed evangelicals, and among the most ardent members of the left, have a lot in common.
Instead of dismissing the world as inherently sinful, it’s regarded as a capitalist hellscape. All of us need only hang on until the Second Coming — or in the case of leftists, “the revolution” — when everything will be corrected in one great moment. Any attempt at marginally improving the status quo makes you a weak Christian, or a “liberal” (a derogatory term among both leftists and conservatives). Anything short of the Rapture, or “the revolution,” is considered ineffective and meaningless. And both tend to dwell on the personal lifestyle choices of others within their own movements, criticizing anything not Christian or revolutionary enough as either sinful or bourgeois.
Just as most Protestant Christians don’t let the fundamentalist sects speak for the entire faith, neither should the American left allow the strict Calvinists among us speak for our movement. It’s incumbent on all of us — particularly in a high-stakes election year like 2024 — to not be silent in public or online spaces when a political Calvinist attempts to present their unyielding intransigence as representative of the left.
Is the left motivated by political identity or harm reduction?
There are two primary motivators among leftists when making our arguments: Political identity and harm reduction. Bolstering our political identity is important when discussing what policies we want to advocate for. It’s also arguably the most important motivator when we’re electing our own leaders — either of our own organizations, or in primary elections when choosing who we want to be our standard-bearer in a general election.
At the core of the leftist political identity is a desire to uplift and protect marginalized communities, build a public sector that’s capable of safeguarding the working class and the environment from the predatory nature of the capitalist owner class, and ensuring equal rights for all people in a democratic society. Various sects of the left, like anarchists, may dispute the need for the state to protect people. And authoritarian leftists like Stalinists (derisively called “tankies”) question the need for democracy in their ideal version of an effective government. But those are three main elements generally associated with leftist political identity.
The second primary motivator for American leftists as we interact with our political system is harm reduction. As an inherently anti-capitalist, anti-colonialist, anti-war faction of society, American leftists routinely struggle with the realities of organizing in contemporary American culture. We have to live under a system in which capitalism governs of our lifestyles, be citizens of a country that is, by all accounts, the most oppressive and violent empire the world has ever seen, and we have to know that no matter which party is in charge of the federal government, the American empire will continue to march along the path of capitalism, militarism, and colonialism for the foreseeable future. So at the end of the day, we have to find ways in which we can feasibly reduce harm for as many people as possible.
While political identity battles dictate the outcome of primaries, harm reduction should be what guides the left in general elections. The work of harm reduction is seen in the daily thankless and invisible work of growing our ranks and advancing toward our goals one painful step at a time, while simultaneously finding ways to cope with realities we can’t change in the short term.
For example: Leftists would all celebrate if the United States military closed its 750 military bases occupying roughly 80 countries (and pulled our 171,000 troops out of 178 countries) and stopped propping up oppressive regimes like Israel and Saudi Arabia all for the sake of international commerce. We would be ecstatic if we were able to do away with the system of having to toil for a corporation for a third of our lives just for meager wages that help us afford basic necessities like food and shelter. And it would be perfect if we eliminated the electoral college, elected presidents by popular vote, and had nationwide ranked-choice voting so casting a ballot for candidates who are more in line with our values wouldn’t risk spoiling an election and putting a fascist in charge.
But none of those scenarios are likely anytime soon, given that the obstacles in our way were created over the course of multiple generations. This is why harm reduction in the interim is an important and powerful motivator as we commit ourselves across multiple generations to move those giant obstacles in our path.
The Calivinists are setting the left back by years
The 2024 election is a profoundly difficult one for the left. Unlike 2016 and 2020, we never got a real chance to field a candidate of our own in a competitive primary, given that an incumbent president seeking a second term usually means their renomination is inevitable.
Without having to worry about winning over the base before moving onto the general election, President Joe Biden has sought to move more toward the political middle. This means policy conversations the left was able to force in the past two elections, like pushing for universal healthcare, free public education through college, raising the federal minimum wage to a living wage (activists’ call for $15 an hour circa 2012 would be $20.75 an hour today when adjusting for inflation), and a Green New Deal, among others, didn’t get to happen this election cycle.
Without being able to have policy conversations during a primary that was effectively over before it began, since neither Rep. Dean Phillips (D-Minnesota) nor Marianne Williamson managed to win a single delegate before suspending their campaigns, the left has been relegated to the sidelines. The energy that would have went into supporting a competitive leftist primary contender has instead been channeled into pushing Biden to the left — namely, on his staunchly pro-Israel foreign policy.
However, the theory of change articulated by some of Biden’s most prominent critics like Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Michigan) is questionable. During a recent pro-Palestine conference in Detroit, the first Palestinian-American elected to Congress suggested that leftist voters in the must-win battleground state withhold their vote for Biden over his support for Israel, saying “we’re not going to forget in November.”
It’s important to note that this issue is profoundly personal for Tlaib, given that she has friends and relatives who have been deeply affected by Israel’s relentless campaign in Gaza. And if I were in her position, or in the position of the many Muslims in Michigan with personal ties to Gaza, I honestly can’t say what I would say or do if the president arming the people who murdered my friends and family continued to do so. Biden’s unflagging loyalty to the far-right Netanyahu regime — which recently dropped American-made 2,000-pound bombs on refugee tents it designated as safe zones for the displaced — rightfully stirs up anger among all those who have been affected. It is our duty to listen to them and take their concerns seriously.
But what couldn’t be clearer is how much worse Donald Trump would be for Palestinians if he won a second term. According to the Washington Post, Trump told prospective donors during a recent meeting that if he were president, he would have had foreign-born pro-Palestine campus protesters deported.
“One thing I do is, any student that protests, I throw them out of the country,” Trump said. “If you get me reelected, we’re going to set that movement back 25 or 30 years.”
The Detroit Free Press also reported that a May meeting between dozens of Arab-American leaders and Trump surrogates ended in disaster. Richard Grenell, who was Trump’s former acting Director of National Intelligence, and Trump’s son-in-law, Michael Boulos (who is married to Tiffany Trump) brushed off the concerns meeting attendees had about the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Gaza. Instead, Grenell reportedly talked about how Palestinians should “invest in Gaza,” and that the Mediterranean coast “could be a resort of sorts with all the lakefront property.” Jared Kushner, who is married to Ivanka Trump and who is involved in an eastern European real estate deal with Grenell, has said in the past that Palestinians should be “moved out” of Gaza.
By withholding their vote for Joe Biden, Michigan residents who are understandably upset about his support for Israel risk tilting their state’s Electoral College votes toward Trump, who would be demonstrably worse both on foreign and domestic policy. Only Biden and Trump have a realistic chance of winning the November election, so for residents of hotly contested states like Michigan, a vote that would have normally gone to Biden now not being cast at all gives Trump a direct advantage. Boycotting an election doesn’t make a politician or party pay more attention to the group boycotting — they’ve simply declined to add their voice to the conversation. A voter not voting might as well be invisible. The theory of change simply doesn’t make sense.
The Calvinist left doesn’t understand the most basic rule of politics
What the Calvinist left fails to understand about politics at the most fundamental level is that it’s inherently transactional. When politicians like Biden make appeals to a leftist constituency by, for example, walking a picket line with striking workers, pulling troops out of Afghanistan (at great political cost), putting trust-busters in influential positions within the Department of Justice, taking marijuana off of the list of Schedule 1 controlled substances, appointing dozens of public defenders and civil rights lawyers to lifetime positions on the federal bench, ending coal mining in the most coal-rich part of the country, capping insulin prices at $35 per vial for Americans on Medicare, canceling $153 billion in federal student loan debt, and pardoning thousands of people convicted of nonviolent, marijuana-related offenses, they expect those moves will win them more voters.
Instead, the Calvinist left has consistently taken the position that Biden is incapable of redemption due to his past. 2023 articles from Jacobin and World Socialist Web Site — two of the most prominent leftist publications — relentlessly blast him for his authoring of the 1994 crime bill and Democrats’ failure to codify Roe v. Wade into federal law, respectively. In 2022, Briahna Joy Gray, who was press secretary for Bernie Sanders’ 2020 campaign, suggested in a Current Affairs article that Biden and Democrats were cynically allowing abortion rights to be undermined in the wake of Roe’s fall so they could more effectively fundraise from their base. A 2019 article from leftist outlet Counterpunch scoffed at Biden casting himself as an ally of marginalized communities by reminding readers that Biden once worked alongside segregationists like Strom Thurmond to oppose racial integration. One writer of an April 2024 article in progressive outlet The Nation seriously posited that Biden should drop out of the race given his polling position.
Biden — a 40-year veteran of Washington — has surveyed the political landscape and made the calculation that there is no more ground to be gained by moving left. So in the final months leading up to the election, he is instead moving right by attempting to court Republican supporters of former UN ambassador Nikki Haley. Biden’s consistently poor swing state polling, combined with Haley continuing to get roughly 20% of the Republican primary vote even though she’s been out of the race for months, likely means that he sees Haley’s supporters as the most gettable bloc of voters and his key to an Electoral College majority.
This could explain how Biden went from saying he would condition further military aid to Israel earlier this month, to suddenly sending $1 billion worth of weaponry to the Netanyahu regime just a week later. The millions of traditional conservatives who make up Nikki Haley’s base — the supporters of a woman whose most recent foray into politics was in upholding jingoistic foreign policy at the United Nations — will appreciate Biden standing by Israel. Calvinists on the left will still laugh at any entreaty from “Genocide Joe” unless he makes a speech tomorrow recognizing all the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea as belonging exclusively to the State of Palestine and declares war on Israel to enforce that. And even then they might not vote for him.
What’s most difficult for the Calvinist left to admit is that progress will not come about through one great moment, but only through diligent efforts made over many years. And when attempting to right wrongs carried out over multiple decades, it will likewise take decades of organizing and steady progress to see those changes we want come to fruition. This is the underlying appeal of the Calvinist flavor of leftism: An ideology that deems any progress short of revolution as ineffective, weak, or caving is preferable to people who prefer to do nothing, and who view themselves as better than everyone else.
Just as Protestant Christians who don’t share Calvinists’ stiff viewpoints don’t want them speaking for all practitioners of Christianity, neither should the left allow ideological puritans rooted in misery be the mascots of our movement. We have a duty to the progress we’ve made and the progress we hope to still make in the future to not allow their views to go unchallenged when we see them — whether in person or online. If the left hopes to grow its ranks, power, and influence, we have to crush the Calvinists who would rather see us remain irrelevant and powerless in the name of ideological sanctity.
Carl Gibson is a journalist whose work has been published in CNN, USA TODAY, the Guardian, the Washington Post, the Houston Chronicle, Barron’s, Business Insider, the Independent, and NPR, among others. Follow him on Bluesky @crgibs.bsky.social.
