The party that installed its presidential candidate without a primary vote now blames its 2024 loss on everything except its own contempt for its base and allegiance to neo-liberal policies.
“Now me donkey gone mad they say, Don't tie me donkey down there, 'Cause his eye on a bale o' hay, Don't tie me donkey down there. Jackass will jump and bray, let him bray, let him bray, Jackass will jump and bray, let him bray, let him bray.” - Harry Belafonte - The Jack-Ass Song
The Democrat Party’s donkey logo traces its roots back to the 1828 campaign of white supremacist and eventual president, Andrew Jackson, whose opponents referred to him as a “jackass” due to his populist campaign (by the people, for the people) that utilized the slogan, “Let the People Rule.” Jackson, amused by the jackass moniker, actually embraced the symbolism that depicted his stubbornness and utilized it on his campaign posters. The jackass has remained the party’s logo since.. It’s ironic, yet fitting that the Democrat party’s logo is the result of a combination of satire and intransigence as both aptly describe the current state of a political party that currently has a lower favorability rating than President Trump. This at a time when the current administration has drawn the nation in a feckless war of choice and aggression with no end in sight against the Islamic Republic of Iran, and the economy, in large part due to the war, continues to squeeze and strangle poor and working class people while pushing them to the margins of deeper penury.
Making matters even worse for the Democrats is that not only is the party trailing Trump, it’s also trailing the Republicans as a whole in total party approval at a rate that is lower than it was at this time last year according to a poll taken by CNN last month. And it’s not as if there’s some superior MAGA outreach and propaganda campaign that’s souring public opinion of the Democrat Party; actually, as it turns out, the people taking the most umbrage with the party are those who identify as Democrats. Based on a recent poll, a plurality of “potential Democratic supporters” and “Dem-leaning Independents” are dissatisfied with the Democrat party at 53% and 65% respectively This dissatisfaction is being expressed by numerous demographics within the party including, but not limited to, young, white, Black, and college educated voters. Moreover, Democrat and Democrat-leaning voters are expressing what has been described as a combative, anti-establishment mood, which they don’t see the party embracing - and this has led to massive fractures within the party that are surfacing and becoming more profound as the U.S. prepares for the 2026 Midterm elections.
The Democrats are helping themselves less than they do poor and working class people, and this was put on full display last week when the Democratic National Committee (DNC) released its autopsy report, meant to provide explanations for why Kamala Harris and other Democrats experienced an electoral shellacking in 2024. The timing of the release is curious given that DNC Chairman Ken Martin previously refused to do so citing “a need to focus on this year’s midterm elections and avoid re-opening old wounds.” Martin, last week, reversed his stance and ultimately released the report that was prepared by a colleague of his, Paul Rivera, who is also a Democrat Party consultant. The release was less than ebullient with Martin asserting that he was “not proud” of the report while also adding that the report would, “not meet your standards” as part of a statement he provided following its release. Additionally, the top of each page of the 192 page report includes the message, “Disclaimer: This document reflects the views of the author, not the DNC. The DNC was not provided with the underlying sourcing, interviews, or supporting data for many of the assertions contained herein and therefore cannot independently verify the claims presented.” Martin claims that he ultimately acquiesced and released the report due to the public’s need, “to trust the Democratic Party.” But this reasoning holds less weight than the Democrat Party’s reasoning for not including a pledge to disavow the foreign agent lobby group American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) as part of its party platform.
Let’s return to the issue of the need for people to trust the Democrat party. The word “trust,” according to Psychology Today, is characterized as, “the belief that someone or something can be relied on to do what they say they will—[trust] is a key element of social relationships and a foundation for cooperation.” The publication adds, “It is critical for romantic relationships, friendships, interactions between strangers, and social groups on a large scale, and a lack of trust in such scenarios can come with serious consequences. Indeed, society as a whole would likely fail to function in the absence of trust.” An examination of what is contained and omitted from the autopsy report, as well as the reason for why Martin actually released the report reveals that the Democrat Party has a worse relationship with trust and an understanding of it than Drake does with Kendrick Lamar.
First, the reasoning that Martin gave for releasing the report holds less water than a colander. It’s clear that he released the report because he learned that the bourgeois press outlet CNN obtained “extensive details about its content,” that apparently included slides, generated by Artificial Intelligence, that were prepared for a donors meeting. And, according to CNN, many DNC staffers, until very recently, had even seen parts of the autopsy report. This, on top of the fact that Martin broke numerous promises to DNC members that he would release the report. The Democrats are asking people to “trust the party” when the party doesn’t even trust itself. And there may be a reason for that as CNN speculates, “Each delay [of the report’s release] fed a rat’s nest of self-serving conspiracy theories: Martin was trying to protect Kamala Harris as she considers another presidential run, Obama campaign alumni were protecting each other, high-priced consultants were trying to keep millions in fees from being revealed, or the party was trying to hide how voters reacted to the Gaza crisis.”
The report itself reads like a bad script that was poorly written intentionally. It’s as if the Democrats were attempting to mimic the strategy utilized in Mel Brooks’ The Producers, in which two con men hatch a scheme to get rich quick by overselling shares on a musical so offensive to the masses that it would ultimately fail. But instead of writing “Springtime for Hitler,” which in Brooks ‘ film actually becomes a raging success, the Democrats, with their autopsy report, actually wrote something more along the lines of “Springtime for Incompetence,” which is less a dark comedy and more a comedy of errors.
Despite the fact that numerous polls indicated that Joe Biden, Kamala Harris and the Democrat Party’s stance on the ongoing genocide in Gaza and its general incompassionate and inhumane treatment of Palestinians - which included sending billions of dollars to fund the zionist ethnostate of Israel’s genocidal war machine - played a key role in losing the 2024 election, the autopsy report makes no mention of this issue. It should be noted that Harris herself alluded to the impact the genocide had on the election in her book, 107 Days, wherein she claims that “I pleaded with Joe [Biden], when he spoke publicly on this issue, to extend the same empathy he showed to the suffering of Ukrainians to the suffering of innocent Gazan civilians.” Harris continues,““But he couldn’t do it: While he could passionately state, ‘I am a Zionist,’ his remarks about innocent Palestinians came off as inadequate and forced.” The report also fails to make any mention about voter’s concerns with Biden’s age - concerns that were only exacerbated following his infamous and ignominious debate with Trump on June 27, 2024 that prompted NBC to release an article with the headline, “Babbling and Hoarse: Biden’s Debate Performance Sends Democrats into a Panic.”
Even the Democrat Party friendly press outlet MSNOW (formerly known as MSNBC aka MSDNC) slammed Martin and the DNC for botching not only the release of the report but also for the salient elements it omits. In a piece written for the outlet last week, Zeeshan Aleem asserts, “The DNC report itself is at once both boring and a mess. And the drama surrounding its release distills how utterly disastrous Martin’s handling of the autopsy has been from start to finish.” Asleem goes on to say, “The analysis of what went wrong is narrow in scope and tracks with what one might expect from a moderate, risk-averse member of the Democratic establishment.”
Asleem is correct in naming that the autopsy report is what one can expect from the same DNC establishment regime that essentially engendered a coup following Biden’s disastrous debate and installed Harris as the nominee without allowing the masses to weigh in through an actual vote proving there is little to nothing democratic about the Democrat Party that is more emboldened to zionists, Big Tech, Big Oil and other corporate alabaster puppet masters than its own party members. Yet the conclusions as to why Harris and the Democrats lost in 2024 offered by the autopsy report is what provides the incontrovertible truth that the Democrat Party is, to use a word Joe Biden once used to describe young Black folk, irredeemable.
A quick read of the report reveals what it identifies as the key reasons for Harris’s loss in 2024. It notes the party’s failure to emerge from “stagnation and retrogression” since Barack Obama’s decisive victory in 2008 and specifically names, “These losses are the direct result of missed opportunities to invest in our states, counties, and local parties and candidates,” adding, “ [Democratic] candidates have proven incapable of projecting strength, unity, and leadership, and voters have drifted away.” This may be one of the more veracious elements of the report, and I recently discussed how the party’s anemic approach to state and local level electoralism during Obama’s presidency was myopic and is a major reason why the Democrats and the nation is at its current junction.
The report also names the failure of the Democrats to adroitly paint a picture of Trump as derelict, corrupt and unfit for the presidency specifically stating, “it was essential to prosecute a more effective case as to why Trump should have been disqualified from ever again taking office.” The Democrats’ overpaid consultants should have understood how difficult this would have been given Biden’s own issues including his age and complicitness in Israel’s genocide (two issues the report omit), as well as the state of the economy while he was running for a second term. As Eugene Ludwig wrote in an article for Politico, "Before the presidential election, many Democrats were puzzled by the seeming disconnect between “economic reality” as reflected in various government statistics and the public’s perceptions of the economy on the ground.” As such, it would have been, and apparently was, next to impossible to beguile the masses about Trump’s discretions when Biden and the Democrats were sending billions of dollars to Israel and Ukraine while “Americans” were navigating rising costs and lower wages due to the inflation hangover associated with the COVID pandemic. This further demonstrates why the omission of Gaza was either intentional, incompetent, or a combination of both.
Yet the report’s assertion for Democrats to, “focus less on abstract issues and identity politics, and connect with voters on the issues they say matter most, including the economy, disaster relief, and addressing housing affordability,” that deserves attention, especially for Black folk who continue to bestow steadfast electoral loyalty to the Democrat Party despite getting a worse return on investment than all the people Bernie Madoff screwed over. Whenever overpaid, out of touch, neoliberal Democrat Party consultants use the term “identity politics” it’s an indication and of how the party operates and what its thinking is including, but not limited to, abject hypocrisy, a signal that the Black vote can be taken for granted because Black folk have no other choice but to vote for Democrats, and a plea for Democrats to move more to the Right in order to win elections. Let’s take a look at each of these variables that make up the Democrat Party’s iniquitous and ineffective equation.
The Democrats are absolute hypocrites - in the first place, they are not even using the term "identity politics” accurately. The phrase, coined by radical Black women feminists of the Combahee River Collective refers to the belief that, “the most profound and potentially most radical politics come directly out of our own identity, as opposed to working to end somebody else’s oppression.” The Collective continues, “In the case of Black women this is a particularly repugnant, dangerous, threatening, and therefore revolutionary concept because it is obvious from looking at all the political movements that have preceded us that anyone is more worthy of liberation than ourselves.”
Who more than the Democrat Party has demonstrated to Black folk, time and time and time again, the need for our people to focus on our own oppression by organizing for alternative systems as part of a larger liberation Black liberation framework that is both intentional and intersectional? And the idea that the Democrat Party has ever shown a willingness to directly focus on issues like an economy that primarily benefits the bourgeois at the expense of poor and working class people and housing affordability is more laughable than when Alexandria Occasio-Cortex proclaimed that Kamala Harris was working tirelessly for a ceasefire in Gaza during the most recent DNC convention in Chicago. This is the party who, under Biden, voted to break up a railroad workers strike and, more recently, one of its new governors, Abigail Spanberger, just vetoed a piece of legislation that would have given public-sector government employees the right to unionize, a move that disproportionately impacts Black workers, and Black women workers specifically.
In the end, it may very well be that the reason why Martin delayed the release of the autopsy report, even though it omitted key reasons why the Democrats lost in 2024, is because it reveals what many have known for a long time - the “D” in DNC stands for dysfunctional. And further the report elucidates the fact that the Democrat Party didn’t need an autopsy report as much as it needed a mirror - for then its leadership would be able to see that the reason the party continues to fail is staring them in the face. And even though many in the party are calling for Martin to be jettisoned for his handling of the autopsy report, for putting the party in an untenable economic position ahead of the Midterm Elections while the GOP is flush with campaign cash, and for otherwise surfacing the reality that the Democrats are not an opposition party, it’s incumbent for the masses to know that removing Marin would be nothing more than a cosmetic exercise - lipstick on a jackass is still a jackass.
It’s not just that the Democrats continue a torrent of a comedy of errors as much as the fact that they are a joke and Black, Brown, Indigenous and poor folk are the punchline. Last week we celebrated the birthday of El Hajj Malik El Shabazz aka Malcolm X. In his landmark speech, Ballot or the Bullet, El Hajj Malik declared, “But it is true; you put the Democrats first and the Democrats put you last.” The Democrats’ recent autopsy report vindicates El Hajj Malik’s sage words and also reminds us that autopsies are carried out for things that have died, and in the case of the Democrat Party the best way for the masses to put ourselves first is to not resuscitate it and instead breathe life into a truly liberatory framework that exercises independent social and political power.
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