I
n politics, analyzing a defeat is not mandatory, but it is recommended. This exercise is often undertaken in the United States after a presidential loss. One year after Donald Trump's reelection, however, members of the Democratic Party will not have the opportunity to reflect on the lessons of the report commissioned by its highest body, the Democratic National Committee (DNC). The DNC has decided to let it gather digital dust until it is forgotten, clearly so as not to reopen poorly healed wounds, but without knowing precisely which ones.
Those who favor short memories can justifiably argue that post-mortems of defeats do not necessarily produce the recipe for the next victory. After Mitt Romney's loss to Barack Obama in 2012, Republican Party leader Reince Priebus published a roadmap advocating greater openness to ethnic minorities, particularly Latinos, and a focus on inclusivity toward young people and women. Then Trump burst onto the primary campaign and won on slogans that ran counter to those recommendations.
The case of the American Democratic Party is emblematic of the current political cycle, in which the spectrum of regulatory parties – those concerned with artificial intelligence, environmental policy, financial capitalism or international relations – is often silent and blind (insofar as they might experience vision problems) in the face of an ethnonationalist wave sweeping nearly simultaneously across all continents. This wave is propelled by the current administration in Washington in the name of a quasi-right of intervention, bearing no resemblance to the previous doctrine of intervening in a country's internal affairs in cases of massive human rights violations.
