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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   25761 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 27, 2026

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Pod Save America host Jon Favreau interviewed DNC Chair Ken Martin yesterday after months of criticizing Martin's leadership on the podcast. Martin apparently requested an appearance to defend himself, but the attempt backfired severely. Favreau's discontent stems from the DNC's unwillingness to release their "autopsy" on Kamala Harris' loss in the 2024 presidential election - a viewpoint Ken Martin once claimed to agree with during his Chair campaign.

Obviously Martin is in a difficult position (indeed, I wouldn't envy any white man attempting to lead the Democratic Party) because 1) everyone knows the autopsy will be humiliating for Harris, 2) Harris may be a future presidential candidate, and 3) donor funds rely on the DNC or their candidates not being revealed to have acted incompetently.

But really, Martin going back on his campaign promise is not of note here - keeping the autopsy to themselves is likely the right move to retain any dignity. More interesting is the bellwether progressive media mouthpiece openly targeting their ideological and sociopolitical wellspring. Favreau seems to conflate the burial of the autopsy with peril in future elections, as if 1) the Democrats have a history of being honest and confessional and 2) the mistakes of the DNC in 2024 are not apparent. I often question whether PSA are true believers or the modern equivalent of César Chavez's "don't want to hurt the cause" club, but here Favreau radiates (or pretends to radiate) true-believer-dom to a naive and childish extent. Of course he wants to see his party be honest - they're the good guys.

In the end, Ken Martin looks like Jerry from Fargo and Favreau looks like a kid struggling to accept that Santa Claus isn't real. But I don't expect either to leave their post - Martin is too valuable as a scapegoat and Favreau has a comfortable incentive to just keep swimming.

Obviously Martin is in a difficult position (indeed, I wouldn't envy any white man attempting to lead the Democratic Party) because 1) everyone knows the autopsy will be humiliating for Harris, 2) Harris may be a future presidential candidate, and 3) donor funds rely on the DNC or their candidates not being revealed to have acted incompetently.

But really, Martin going back on his campaign promise is not of note here - keeping the autopsy to themselves is likely the right move to retain any dignity.

This is the perspective that I see commonly but disagree with vehemently. As a Kamala voter who wants the Democratic Party to have success in the future, the most dignified thing to do here would be not only to release the autopsy but to point highlights at the dirtiest of the laundry that gets aired out in the process. When one fails, there's no dignity in hiding or obfuscating the failure. Dignity is in owning the failure in a way that makes it clear that the most important thing to you about the failure is your wrongdoing or errors that caused the failure, to the extent that you welcome any and all humiliation that public ownership of that failure brings you.

If Harris's 2028 POTUS run's viability is dependent on the dirty laundry of her 2024 campaign not being public, then may her 2028 POTUS run not be viable, for the sake of the success of the Democratic party.

This is the perspective that I see commonly but disagree with vehemently. As a Kamala voter who wants the Democratic Party to have success in the future, the most dignified thing to do here would be not only to release the autopsy but to point highlights at the dirtiest of the laundry that gets aired out in the process.

The issue I see with the autopsy is its unlikely to be helpful. There are a few ways it could go. It could be like the RNC Mitt Romney autopsy, which was nonsense corporate donor catering. Embrace immigration, lower taxes, reform entitlements, etc. The Trump campaign rejected basically every recommendation and won.

So what ways did the DNC actually take the autopsy? I only think there are a few ways they'd actually take it:

  1. Racist-Sexist America rejected Kamala because racism and sexism.
  2. Kamala was too moderate. Joe was too moderate. We need Mahndami.

I don't think either direction would actually be a good evaluation of what happened, and would not help Democrats improve their chances.

If the Democrats were to release a report like that, the fact that the DNC would put their names on such a pathetic ego-protecting report is something every Democratic voter would find immensely valuable, for deciding how much reform the party leadership needs. Because a DNC that would produce such a report is one that is neither interested in getting things right nor in winning, and those are important characteristics for any supporter of any party to consider.

I am intrigued why you think Democrat voters think it would be valuable as a tool revealing the soul of the and dnc to voters as opposed to just confirming their priors.

Well, I understand that a lot of Democrats are blind tribalists, but a lot of them still do value the idea that our side should win because it's actually better than the other side, not merely because it's our side. If we can't openly analyze the "soul of the dnc," then we can't be confident that our side actually is better.

So you think there is a significant Democrat block that would be heartened by an official DNC document that says, basically, "we are too extreme on every issue other than the expensive old age retirement programs that will soon need to be cut even if we give our best efforts to fix them. Americans basically want a less loud 2019 Trump, which is what Biden promised, but because he was a corpse in a suit instead we got open borders and naked trannies on the steps of the white house. Everyone but Fetterman should take a breath of freaking air?"

Yes, I would wager there's a significant such bloc, though I'd also wager that the bloc of former-Dems or borderline-Dems who would be heartened by such a report to such an extent as to influence their vote positively in the Dem direction is even more significant. If not in absolute numbers, then certainly in the effect on votes. It's almost certain that such a report would cause a significant bloc of current Dem voters to peel away, but they don't have a mainstream party to go for, and I'd also wager that a very significant number of that group are concentrated either in blue states or blue enclaves of red states where the POTUS election, at least, would have minimal negative impact.

I would be heartened to find such a bloc, because it would mean the Democrats have a chance of becoming a party where there victories don't pose an existential threat to the future of the country. But they would need to seize power from the radicals as well.

For a lot of people, and not necessarily fully blind tribalists, their side is better because of prior assumptions that are not in question. For instance, if you consider all immigration to be inherently enriching, or the kind of environmental positions that the Democrats have been pushing to be a non-negociable minimum, then there is no need to analyze the "soul of the DNC"; you are not going to alter these positions, you might at best appear to compromise on them publically but still intend on cynically carrying them on when in power. Basically, you just need to manage the situation with regards to the public, including avoiding giving the other side ammo.

For a lot of people, and not necessarily fully blind tribalists, their side is better because of prior assumptions that are not in question.

I would say that this sentence is essentially self-contradictory. The "fully" can sorta save it, but even then, to whatever extent these people are only partially blind tribalists, it just doesn't touch on the actual, meaningful thing about not being a blind tribalist, which means being open to questioning such prior assumptions.

Is not that they're blind, it's just that some things are not realistically in question; a blind tribalist would be 100% on board to dump these assumptions if their tribe also dumped them.

A correct autopsy (the party needs to publicly and noisily repudiate Defund the Police and TWAW and boast about the wailing and gnashing of teeth from the work left) would be even more controversial within the Democratic Party than either of those possibilities.

This is a difference between the UK and US centre-left - centrist Labourites bellyfeel that the left of the Labour party is mostly useful because you can punch them as a costly signal of alignment with the median voter, centrist Democrats see the left as the conscience of the party.

That is why I don't think a correct autopsy would ever be drafted or released

Except in a realpolitik way it doesn't make sense to release it. If I'm in the DNC and want the party to have success in the future, the best situation is to move on entirely from anything that had to do with Biden. There are plenty of younger politicians out there without any of the political baggage that comes with being tied to an unpopular president and losing bid. If they release it now it's news for a week, only political junkies pay attention to it, and a year from now when people start announcing their candidacies the whole thing is yesterday's news.

If you really think that Harris candidacy is a threat to the party, then you tell her not to run with the implicit threat that if she does then it may get leaked at an inopportune time. If she doesn't announce then it never sees the light of day. If she does, then she isn't a team player and they won't mind throwing her under the bus. If it's leaked and she wins the nomination anyway, then she's a stronger candidate than anyone thought and she deserves to have it.

I'm in the DNC and want the party to have success in the future, the best situation is to move on entirely from anything that had to do with Biden.

Hard disagree. The best situation is to highlight it so much that every Democratic politician has no choice but to learn from it. Prove to the electorate that this party is actually better than the other one, because it actually learns from its mistakes and takes punitive actions, even against its own ego, to make sure it doesn't happen again. Losers who don't learn usually stay losers, and people usually don't like to side with losers.

When one fails, there's no dignity in hiding or obfuscating the failure. Dignity is in owning the failure in a way that makes it clear that the most important thing to you about the failure is your wrongdoing or errors that caused the failure, to the extent that you welcome any and all humiliation that public ownership of that failure brings you.

If there were a noticible portion of the population who were even capable of this, the world would probably have a lot fewer topics for this thread, and fewer problems at all. It requires a focus on something other than the Self that is rarely seen, and not particularly valued in our society. I've felt this way about things that really matter to me. Letting down the people I love. And then only sometimes; I quickly return to Me.

Assuming there are at least some people who accept personal responisibility with this depth regularly, they'd never be allowed anywhere near the reigns of power.

When one fails, there's no dignity in hiding or obfuscating the failure. Dignity is in owning the failure in a way that makes it clear that the most important thing to you about the failure is your wrongdoing or errors that caused the failure, to the extent that you welcome any and all humiliation that public ownership of that failure brings you.

Do you have any idea how rare this sort of psychological self-awareness is? You are nothing like representative of pretty much any major movement that's ever existed. That's true of more or less each of us here.

The masses of humanity don't have anything like that kind of mental horsepower or internal philosophical integrity. We throw the word 'tribe' around for a reason. Politics is generally irrational and votes come through stoking subconscious emotional responses. Under that rubric, admitting one's side was wrong is generally devastating. People want to be on the side of success, not failure.

Try instead "the process [electoral college] is flawed"; that has some legs. Or, you know what would be even better? "They stole the election from us."

Now we're cooking with democracy.

Do you have any idea how rare this sort of psychological self-awareness is? You are nothing like representative of pretty much any major movement that's ever existed. That's true of more or less each of us here.

You don't need this kind of psychological self-awareness to bow out after an electoral defeat. "The people have spoken, the ungrateful bastards. I have heard them and will retire from front-line politics and cash in as a lobbyist" is an ego-protective alternative.

I don't think this requires psychological self-awareness. It only requires self-interest. It doesn't take someone particularly self-aware to notice that, when someone fails spectacularly and then tries to hide it or ignore it or otherwise try to minimize it, this lowers their esteem in the eyes of people who aren't already predisposed to liking them. Or the opposite, that someone who takes full ownership of their failures, in a way that credibly signals that they're not doing so for the purpose of image, tends to have their esteem raised in the eyes of people who don't particularly like them but are open to the possibility of liking them.

I do get that the market voter-base can stay irrational tribal longer than you can stay solvent the next election cycle, but also, if my side decides that embracing tribalism over responsibility is fine, then that substantially lowers my ability to believe that my side is actually better than the other side. The entire and only reason my side is better than the other side is because we actually did and do the hard work of finding our errors and correcting them, and the only way to credibly do that is to, again, be so much more concerned with correcting one's faults than concerned with one's image to others that one welcomes any humiliation that follows from highlighting one's faults.

I don't think this requires psychological self-awareness. It only requires self-interest. It doesn't take someone particularly self-aware to notice that, when someone fails spectacularly and then tries to hide it or ignore it or otherwise try to minimize it, this lowers their esteem in the eyes of people who aren't already predisposed to liking them. Or the opposite, that someone who takes full ownership of their failures, in a way that credibly signals that they're not doing so for the purpose of image, tends to have their esteem raised in the eyes of people who don't particularly like them but are open to the possibility of liking them.

I work in a very regulated industry that places a massive emphasis on responsibility and owning and learning from mistakes. It has been a horrendous struggle to get people to not run screaming any time there's a problem and a fact finding analysis.

I can only imagine it's a hundred times worse for something like politics rather than engineering.

I work in a very regulated industry that places a massive emphasis on responsibility and owning and learning from mistakes. It has been a horrendous struggle to get people to not run screaming any time there's a problem and a fact finding analysis.

Of course. You're asking them to not be defensive, to show their belly. And instinctively they know that's asking to get stabbed. And no matter how much talk there is about responsibility and owning and learning from mistakes (or "blameless postmortems" or whatever the buzzword is for this)... sometimes someone's going to get stabbed in the belly.

sometimes someone's going to get stabbed in the belly.

There may have been a very significant disconnect between senior management and the ICs over "proportion of these investigations that do in fact result in someone being stabbed in the belly, or indeed whether the purpose actually is fact-finding and improvement or just an excuse to stab someone in the belly..."

I hope she runs and gets curbstomped in a 3-to-1 blowout.

If that's going to happen, it will happen in the primary. And I wouldn't find it that surprising in the primary.

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