Liberty's Flame

Greetings and welcome to this 46th performance of the Carnival of Fools! I hope you’re into ghastly scenes, because it seems that this week’s episode finds us walking in on an autopsy that might just be a vivisection. Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty has nothing on the Democrats this week as they chop themselves to pieces, so let’s sit back and endure this unfortunate mess.

The Democrats’ 2024 Autopsy Is Destined to Fail
When one of our two major parties loses a presidential election — and particularly when the loss is a heartbreaking one, causing angst among both the donor and activist classes — we turn to a hallowed political tradition: the election autopsy. What went wrong? How could we have blown it so badly? Here’s an official 100-page report from the party, complete with charts and appendices, explaining exactly why we’re going to be sucking wind from an exhaust pipe for the next four years and how to prevent this from happening again.

Those of you with long memories may remember that the national GOP engaged in this very same exercise back in 2013, as it reeled from Mitt Romney’s firm rejection by the voters. The GOP, in its infinite wisdom, concluded that the Republican Party lost because Mitt Romney was too anti-immigration and that the GOP would need to support amnesty and/or a “path to citizenship” in the future to ever have a hope of assembling a winning national coalition. (Keep that thought in your back pocket.)

Now — with Donald Trump speedrunning through his second term in office like an amphetamined bull in a china shop — it’s the Democrats’ turn for official recriminations. And of course the writing of the “autopsy” itself has become a football for warring factions of Democrats to punt around. This weekend, the New York Times reported — with the sort of headline snark you would expect from me, not the Times — that the “Democrats’ 2024 Autopsy Is Described as Avoiding the Likeliest Cause of Death.”

Party officials described the draft document as focusing on the 2024 election as a whole, but not on the presidential campaign — which is something like eating at a steakhouse and then reviewing the salad.

Oh, how catty of you, New York Times! In other words, the autopsy is not expected to focus on matters such as Joe Biden’s decision to run for reelection in the first place or Kamala Harris’s inadequacies as a candidate. The Times is transparently miffed about this.

And I find myself in the curious position of taking the side of the Democratic Party in this case. Noah Rothman wrote about this story yesterday afternoon and covered many of its salient points, but I would add that “autopsy reports,” because they’re public, are inherently political documents intended not to soberly and honestly analyze what went wrong so much as to signal to interested parties a party’s proposed future course of action. What good in that case would come from an autopsy focused primarily on Biden and Harris? (“Well, I guess we learned not to do it again.”) You can’t undo the past. Furthermore, any such approach would do a disservice to Democrats by lulling them into a dangerous belief that the problem was their candidates rather than their underlying issues with the electorate.

Alas, according to the Times, it seems that the Democrats’ autopsy report is going to arrive at a laughable conclusion anyway, assigning the lion’s share of the blame to the super PACs and outsider groups that failed to get the job done for Democrats. Apparently, they failed to “change the conversation” and make the election about Trump, as it properly should have been. (Far be it from me to suggest that no national election of my lifetime, not even 1996, was more fiercely litigated on the specific ethical and political merits of one man than was 2024.)

Friends, better super PAC messaging wasn’t going to save Democrats in 2024. A Democratic Party that refuses to acknowledge that it lost because of the border, inflation, and its cultural alienation from the great mass of American voters is not a party properly reckoning with its failures. (An honest autopsy would report the cause of death as suicide.) But recall, this is not the true purpose of an “autopsy” report. The true purpose is to dictate the party’s prospective positioning. My real point is that it will probably fail there, as well.

Remember that thought I asked you to keep in your back pocket, about the GOP’s own post-2012 “autopsy” report? Well, when Trump ran for president in 2015, he basically ran against every plank of that autopsy, in deed if not by explicit word. Even more importantly, he won, and in so doing reshaped the GOP coalition. Let this be a lesson in how seriously to take autopsy reports.

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