No Mention of Gaza in the DNC’s 2024 Autopsy? Seriously? |
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No Mention of Gaza in the DNC’s 2024 Autopsy? Seriously?
Too many Democrats still refuse to acknowledge how gravely the party was harmed by a failure to actively oppose genocide.
A pro-Palestine protest on the third day of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, on August 21, 2024.
The whole debate about whether the Democratic Party would release its autopsy report on the 2024 presidential election—as it finally did this week—always seemed silly to me. How, I wondered, could a hastily prepared report by a party insider tell us anything we hadn’t already known for a very long time?
The party’s many missteps in the 2024 election were clear before anyone cast a vote: too much time spent campaigning with Republicans like Liz Cheney and too little time spent rallying in the union halls of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania; inadequate attention to core economic issues in a moment of intense anxiety over inflation; a failure to develop a steady and coherent critique of an increasingly cultish and corrupt Republican Party; and a stark refusal to recognize the depth of opposition to the genocide in Gaza.
That the Gaza issue threatened to upend the party’s best efforts to defeat Donald Trump was evident months before the Democrats nominated Kamala Harris for the presidency in August of 2024. By April of that year, more than 500,000 people had voted “uncommitted” in primary elections across the country to send a message to Democrats to shift their Gaza policy.
In late May of 2024, prior to the dismal debate performance that destroyed Joe Biden’s reelection bid, I met with grassroots Democrats in rural southwestern Wisconsin’s Lafayette County.
Lafayette County is about as far as you can get from the urban centers and college campuses where protests developed in the spring of 2024 over the Biden administration’s failure to oppose Israel’s assault on Gaza. The county‘s biggest city is Darlington, population 2,462. The most notable political statement in that community is a reminder that the region stood on the right side of the bitterest conflict that defined America: a 56-foot high monument topped with the statue of a Union army........