I think this is a really good example of where I genuinely believe the idea is bad and not the people who espouse it.
There seems to be a tendency to judge politicians based on individual decisions they made, which are judged as bad, rather than the totality of their careers which I find frustrating and ill-advised. This is doubly so with politicians who have very long careers.
This is normally what I mean by purity tests. I maintain no career politician can have a perfect (pure) record of progressivism and expecting them too only hurts our overall cause.
Sometimes it seems that people are asked to dismiss a history of actual actions and instead be happy with future promises and not trusting those promises is called “purity testing”. When some people talk about “purity testing” they are talking about policy and some are talking about the private lives of politicians.
Mostly it’s a vacuous expression, a blank that stands in for an insult. It essentially translates to “shut up”.
Also, particularly annoying is the super often stated super wrong idea that our side eats our own, but the other side is unified. That’s ridiculous. The right is at least as fractured as the left. The “we are eating our own” sounds just like “hey, let’s take loyalty oaths” to me.
Purity testing is pretty rare. In my experience, it’s a charge leveled at leftists who are generally quite thoughtful and open to compromise, but whose politics is not the same as the centrists, for whom the “compromise” position is not a compromise at all, it’s their preferred politics.
There’s a lot of talk about using purity testing to break apart The supposedly monolithic but let’s just go with it Left including Democrats , but in most cases it’s just people disagreeing on principled political positions because they actually don’t agree. The closer-to-the-right-wing-position people, who have more actual power, get to yell “purity test” all the time in order to obfuscate the fact that there are real political differences for which there is no solution.
The truth is, that Democrats win in this country at all is only because The (actual) Left, derided for it’s for its supposed purity testing in the same way it’s derided for it’s non-voting, is actually the group that is not only the most compromising, but also has to stray further away from its deeply held principles to do this.
In sum, overzealous purity testing can and does happen, but it’s rare. Nearly everyone in actual power The Left supports is already a massive compromise that actual dyed-in-the-wool Democrats have never had to make and might have a different take on purity testing if they did.
Refusing to engage in the argument is probably a top five message board sin, with making boring posts being number one. Dismissing concerns about a politician as a “purity test” instead of engaging makes this shit unreadable. No one wants to see two people talk past each other so you’re doing everyone a great disservice when your go to is to dismiss.