Are Democrats poised to learn their lessons, or instead continue ignoring them?

Election analyses observing the Democratic Party’s failures tend to overlook two holes in the bucket of accountability

Last month’s election should represent a wake up call for Democrats. Having built a party based on cults of personality, long before doing everything possible to perversely put Donald Trump back in the White House, Democrats who failed to observe the rot within their party could take the opportunity to learn something from the results.

For instance, do voters prefer the Democratic Party’s ideologically incoherent and politically cynical attachment to identity politics, or do they instead respond to policies and proposals poised to improve their material conditions? Does a commitment to the careers of co-opted and corrupt leaders serve the party’s interests more than a re-dedication to the principles or policies that once distinguished the Democrats as a labor party? Could a renewed focus on the needs of struggling families breathe new life into the future of the Democratic Party?

Don’t hold your breath.

The figures who most need to wake up and smell the proverbial coffee have no reason to perceive last month’s results as a loss, while most of the voices clamoring for accountability within the party have found themselves strikingly silent in the moments when their concerns were most visibly implicated.

Lessons we might wish Democrats could learn

The 2024 election was a case study in institutional obliviousness, both on the part of Democratic Party officials and the ranks of professional journalists whose propaganda enables them.

Rather than observe the multiple compounding crises confronting Americans struggling to survive the present—let alone an increasingly untenable future—Democrats crafted a presidential campaign based on gaslighting the public.

They ran on joy, ignoring not only the economic rot that for decades has driven a perverse upward redistribution of wealth, but also an ongoing genocide that they continue to enable, ignoring the cries for help resounding from across the country and the rest of the globe.

They also ignored documented history, and the rising precarity experienced by Americans across the country who work for a living. Economic stratification and predation by elites long ago shredded the social contract on which liberal conceptions of the Republic rested, but Democrats pretended that continuity could inspire voters to, for some reason, defend a system that has been preying on working families for decades.

Source: Economic Policy Institute, available at https://www.epi.org/publication/charting-wage-stagnation

Impediments to internalizing important lessons

Of course, the disturbing reality is that by rejecting the Democratic establishment in all elected branches of the federal government, frustrated voters more or less leaped from a proverbial frying pan into the fire. Democrats may have been visibly cozy with billionaires, but the GOP follows the same pattern to an even greater degree, giving them pivotal positions while also deploying their capital in opaque ways that may have undermined the integrity of the election.

Solutions to these failures are fairly straightforward. Democrats could aggressively champion a rationalization of the federal minimum wage, which has stagnated for decades while prices (especially for healthcare and higher education) have risen through the roof.

They could propose that America join the rest of the industrialized world by finally recognizing a universal right to healthcare.

They could seek higher taxes on corporations and billionaires in order to fund social programs that have struggled for support as corporate capitalism devolves the middle class into feudal serfdom.

But at least two structural challenges impede Democrats from learning any of these lessons.

The first is that party elites don’t care. Election results matter less to them because they respond primarily to other incentives.

The second is that even insightful critics of the Democratic Party’s self-marginalizing devotion to economic elites have themselves stood on the sidelines in the moments that matter most. When contested primaries offer opportunities to advance their supposed concerns, most of those voices have revealed disturbing priorities in their silence.

I’ll write more in the coming days to explain each of those holes in the bucket of accountability. Paid subscribers can access a preview below.