A party that desperately wants to lose
“Progressive” and “Democrat” form an oxymoron
Norman Solomon writes, “[T]he [Democratic National Committee] is proceeding as if there’s nothing to be learned from the tragic debacle of 2024 that its leaders don’t already know – and they don’t need to share their purported wisdom with anyone else. . . . The draft autopsy [months ago] reportedly avoided casting blame on Biden or Harris or other Democratic leaders. But as it turned out, even such a tepid autopsy would be too hot for the DNC leadership to handle. . . . Public candor about why Democrats lost the White House is not a ‘distraction’ – it’s vital for disrupting the party’s repeated compulsion of making the same mistakes all over again.”[1]
At some point, a long, long time ago, it became apparent to me that this “repeated compulsion of making the same mistakes all over again” is no mistake. This is a party that is in fact desperate to sit in opposition where it can complain about Republicans without ever actually being expected to accomplish anything. Their bitterest critique of Donald Trump is that he is upsetting the status quo.
Solomon points to examples like “Ilhan Omar, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, Summer Lee and Ro Khanna” as “strong progressives” who would not have been elected but for the Democratic Party, but while it’s one thing for progressives to have a voice, it’s quite another for them to have an effective voice: These members of Congress mostly serve to cover the Democrats’ left flank as their party pursues reliably neoliberal policies. The more recognizable progressives in his list are generally not in fact particularly effective legislators: Omar scores 0.164 on the legislative effectiveness scale, Ocasio-Cortez scores 0.276, and Tlaib scores 0.182. Lee scores 0.768. Khanna is the only one in the green at 1.215.[2]
For the Democrats, there is indeed nothing to be learned from 2024. They wanted to lose, they deserved—with their embrace of Israeli genocide and their gaslighting on the economy—to lose, and they did lose.
[1] Norman Solomon, “Why is the Democratic party hiding its 2024 autopsy report?” Guardian, December 30, 2025, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/dec/30/democratic-party-autopsy-report-2024-election
[2] Center for Effective Lawmaking, “118th Congress > House > All Issues,” n.d., https://thelawmakers.org/find-representatives