The Left Can't Conduct the Post-Mortem It Needs
The Dems Can't Debate
After any endeavor, but certainly after a failure, conducting a post-mortem, or after action review to see what lessons can be learned is a basic practice for both individuals & organizations. Given the horror with which the Left regards the re-election of Donald Trump, one would expect the Democratic party, and the Left more generally, to be eagerly engaged in mining the 2024 election for lessons learned, if only to prevent such a calamity from happening again. Many have expressed surprise that this is not the case; the DNC has commissioned an "autopsy" on the last election, but decreed at the outset that it will "steer clear of the decisions made by the Biden-turned-Harris campaign and will focus more heavily instead on actions taken by allied groups". This failure to face-up to their errors is not an isolated event.
In August, the New York Times signaled to nice liberals that it's now acceptable to notice that blue states are losing population, and hence electoral college representation: "In the next decade, the Electoral College will tilt significantly away from Democrats. Deeply conservative Texas and Florida could gain a total of five congressional seats, and the red states of Utah and Idaho are each expected to add a seat. Those gains will come at the expense of major Democratic states like New York and California". To their credit, the Times acknowledges the facts forthrightly, and the article does a good job of covering the essentials: "red states are growing fast, and blue states aren’t keeping up". That, however, is where the engagement with reality ends. The rest of the article is a call to wealthy donors to give the party more money. There's more "investment" needed, you see. At no point does the idea of making blue states more appealing places to live arise. It's essentially an advertisement for Democrat political operatives.
Even Barker makes some similar observations on a related NYT article, this one on the Democrats falling behind in terms of voter registration:
"Tory Gavito, founder of Way to Win, a progressive donor collective, tells the NYT: 'It would be naive to call 2024 anything other than a reckoning on the Democratic brand. To solve a brand problem, you need people talking about that brand – and that requires partisan dollars.'
Gavito's comments reveal much about how Democratic strategists think about voters and elections. The language she chooses, referring to the party as a 'brand', inadvertently shows her hand. Voters are viewed by orgs and strategists as a product that needs to be marketed and sold to. While there is some truth to this, I believe it highlights the inauthenticity issue the party currently faces…
The funny thing is, more money funneled to the very orgs who contributed to the current situation will make the problem worse. Their instincts are so far off base about where the average American stands. The more people find out about the progressive wing of the Democratic Party's beliefs and goals, the more turned off they are."
Eric Levitz takes a different tact in Vox: "to stop Trump from further consolidating his power over the judiciary [by this he means exercising his constitutional duty to appoint judges], Democrats will need to win a Senate majority next year. And doing that will likely require, among other things, winning statewide elections in North Carolina, Ohio, and Iowa – all states that voted for Trump three times, the latter two by double digits in 2024. Making the Democratic Party more palatable in those places plausibly requires embracing more conservative issue positions." In other words, he is in the gentlest of ways suggesting to Democrats that they might want to alter their positions on various issues of interest to the voters. Not because they're wrong in any manner, of course, but because stating them out loud hurts Democrats electorally.
Ezra Klein is trying a similar approach: "My view is that a lot of people who embrace alarm don’t embrace what I think obviously follows from that alarm, which is the willingness to make strategic and political decisions you find personally discomfiting, even though they are obviously more likely to help you win."
On the one hand, I sympathize: it must be terribly frustrating to be a sane Democrat these days. But this is never going to work: when you have a blue-haired lunatic in front of you screaming "trans women are women" (or some similar nonsense), telling them "Sssh! If you say that out loud, we'll have a harder time winning elections" is not likely to satisfy them. Nor do I think it will deceive the voters. Across the pond, Andrew Sullivan observes of the hapless Keir Starmer "What a skeptical British public hears, I suspect, is Keir’s desire to appear to have shifted on immigration, while actually still believing that removing any legal immigrants is racist and immoral." Levitz & Klein are essentially recommending this approach to Democrats here.
The deeper problem is that the Left can't perform a serious post-mortem, because they can no longer debate, even among themselves. White liberal males (like Klein & Levitz) in particular have rhetorically neutered themselves in internal debates out of fear of being thought racist or sexist; but Barker's Substack notes in passing that the self-censoring is not at all limited to that demographic: "In San Francisco, many moms (including liberal ones) quietly whisper to each other about how they aren't comfortable with their children being read books about changing their gender identity in pre-school. Yet, they remain silent, mostly out of fear of being ostracized, shunned, or worse – professionally punished."
Until the Left recommits to classically liberal values like freedom of expression & the spirit of open inquiry, they best they'll be able to do in terms of lessons learned are these sort of superficial, carefully qualified involutive constructs that will convince no one.
10/15/25 16:34