The Democratic Party has failed. The evidence of its failure—Donald Trump—took office last Friday, 19 months after launching a campaign soaked in ethno-nationalism and misogyny. Trump and his cabinet nominees are poised to decimate public education, the Affordable Care Act, and the Environmental Protection Agency. They threaten our diplomatic relations with world powers and our labor protections. They are racist, they are clueless, they are corrupt.

In response, Democrats have undergone some remedial soul-searching. But too often the response from party officials and certain liberal pundits has been to cast the blame elsewhere, and to claim that the party is basically in good health. Above all, they call for unity on the “left,” an entity that somehow always ends up excluding critics actually located on the left side of the spectrum. “The problem with circular firing squads is everyone gets hit. I don’t think there’s any room in the party right now for a circular firing squad,” Donna Brazile, the interim head of the Democratic National Committee, told Politico on Monday. The message is that the threat posed by Trump is too great to indulge in family squabbling. The marches in Washington, D.C., and around the world that took place this weekend show the tremendous power the left possesses—if we stick together.

The problem with this approach is that it papers over the Democratic Party’s very real weaknesses, both at broad and tactical levels. It essentially defines the party as the anti-Trump party, and nothing more. And it is a way of smuggling in an ideology that should be up for criticism and debate—an ideology that likely hurt the party in 2016. The best way for the party to prepare for the 2018 midterms and beyond is through a vigorous reexamination of its values and a rejection of blind calls for unity.



It is partially correct to blame FBI Director James Comey and Russian interference for this abysmal state of affairs. And yes, let’s blame the GOP, too: President Trump is a product of the white supremacy always festering in its heart. But today’s pleas for unity should not obscure a central, unshakeable fact: We are also here because of the Democratic Party’s incompetence.

The party coalesced early around a deeply flawed and unpopular candidate. Its experts made potentially fatal campaign errors in key swing states. The rhetoric and marketing they deployed didn’t motivate the Obama coalition—millennials, minorities, women—to come out to the polls in great enough numbers. And the party didn’t just lose the presidency; according to The Atlantic, Democrats only won eight of the 32 congressional seats it targeted in Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Florida, Ohio, and Wisconsin on November 8, 2016. They lost governor’s mansions they previously occupied. They do not control a single state legislature in the South.