You Don’t Fix a Relationship by Hiding the Fight

The DNC shelved its 2024 post-mortem because it might “distract” us. That’s how you lose people for good.

Dec 24, 2025

If you’ve ever had a fight with someone you love, you already know the most dangerous move isn’t honesty. It’s pretending nothing happened because, finally, you’re having a good week.

That’s how resentment starts. Not with one blow-up, but with the quiet decision to swallow it. To “move forward.” To keep the peace. To convince yourself that bringing it up again would be selfish, disloyal, or a distraction.

That’s exactly what it feels like watching the Democratic National Committee commission a full 2024 post-election review, brief it to insiders, and then decide the rest of us don’t get to read it. Not because it’s classified or because it’s wrong. But because they’ve decided the conversation is the threat.

They’re not saying, “We don’t have answers.” They’re saying, “We have answers, and you’re not going to see the full work.” You get a curated sampling. A highlight reel. A controlled drip of “lessons learned.” Just enough to claim progress, not enough for anyone outside the building to evaluate it, challenge it, or strengthen it.

And if you’re wondering why that pisses people off… it’s not because grassroots Democrats are addicted to drama. It’s simply because this isn’t “unity.” It’s management.

It’s the party treating the people who fund it, build it, and haul it uphill like they’re useful for turnout weekends and donor deadlines, but too inconvenient to trust with the truth.

That’s a breach of trust, and it lands harder because trust is the scarce resource right now. Not money. Not messaging… Trust.

The language in that ASDC document (ASDC = Association of State Democratic Committees) gives the whole game away. It doesn’t just say “we’re focused on 2026.” It makes accountability sound like a nuisance. The theme is basically… the North Star is winning, and anything that doesn’t directly serve that gets labeled a distraction.

So, let me translate that into normal-person English.
They’re telling you accountability is optional.

Winning matters. Of course it does. Anyone serious about stopping what the GOP has become is serious about winning. But the idea that asking what went wrong is somehow a threat to winning isn’t strategy. It’s insulation, and it’s leadership wrapping itself in the word winning so nobody can touch the decisions that got us here.

And it’s especially insulting when you remember who actually carries this party on its back.

State parties. County parties. Precinct captains. Candidates who run anyway when the checks don’t come. Volunteers who knock doors after work and still show up Saturday morning. The folks who put yard signs on a credit card and pray the balance doesn’t bite them next month. Organizers keeping the lights on with duct tape and enough caffeine to kill a horse.

That’s the backbone. That’s the muscle. That’s the “ecosystem” everybody loves to name-drop when it’s time to ask for labor and donations.

That’s why the ASDC matters here. It represents the state parties doing the grinding, unglamorous work of building power in places where Democrats don’t automatically win. If anyone has earned the right to see the full homework, it’s them (and the volunteers, donors, activists, and candidates they’re accountable to).

And if the party’s “North Star” is winning, then the first step is treating the people doing the work like partners, not props, and giving them the full truth instead of a curated highlight reel.

Because here’s what’s really happening when the national party says, “We did the review,” and then tells the ecosystem it can’t read the review because it might cause “distraction”… they’re deciding what you’re allowed to know. That isn’t how a pro-democracy institution behaves.

If you want to call yourself the party that stands up to authoritarianism, you don’t get to normalize secrecy and internal decree. You don’t get to turn “pro-democracy” into a slogan while telling the people who do the work that they’re not allowed to read the evaluation.

Sunlight is not a distraction. Sunlight is the prerequisite.

Release the report. Publish the findings, the disagreements, the trade-offs, and what you’re actually changing. Because right now what they’re offering instead is the political version of… “Don’t worry about it. We handled it.” And that is not partnership.

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Ken Martin’s internal email is the perfect example of the tone they want to convey about this decision. It’s tidy. Confident. Corporate. The vibe is that we listened, we learned, we’re modernizing, we’re improving, we’re aligning the ecosystem, we’re building the right tools, we’re marching toward 2026.

Look. This work is hard. I don’t doubt people inside these institutions believe what they’re saying. But the shape of the relationship they’re describing is still backwards. We will study voters, refine the product, and deliver the improved brand.

A political party is supposed to be the vehicle ordinary people use to take power and improve their lives. It is not a PR firm. It is not a consultancy. It is not a donor vehicle with a field program attached.

And those “lessons learned” bullets land the way they do because they read like internal performance notes, not a public accounting. Media mix. Tech and data. Results-driven organizing. Youth vote. Some of it is obvious. Some of it is overdue. Some of it is the kind of stuff organizers have been screaming for years… But the point isn’t whether the bullets are right.

The point is they’ve decided you don’t get the full diagnosis. You get the sanitized version. The version that can’t embarrass anybody important. The version that doesn’t force a real argument about what failed, who made which calls, and why Democrats keep bleeding credibility with people who are exhausted and broke and trying to survive.

Now, I already hear the scold-script warming up, because I’ve heard it before.

A Tennessee Democratic insider responded to this debate with the usual… we need unity, we’re trying to save democracy, the opposition is the GOP, not the people beside us, we don’t control candidates, this work is hard, we’re doing something bigger than our own opinions.

I want to be abundantly clear… that sounds noble. But it also functions like a permission slip for leadership to never answer for anything.

“Unity” is not a gag order. “Saving democracy” is not blanket amnesty for insider decision-making. And “something bigger than my own opinions” is not an argument against transparency. It’s an argument for it.

Because if you want people to give you their weekends, their money, their relationships, their mental health, their reputation in a red town where being a Democrat is treated like a character flaw… you don’t get to turn around and say trust us, no notes.

Also, and I say this as someone who actually lives inside party politics… it’s always funny who gives the unity lecture.

A lot of the “stop tearing each other down” sermonizing comes from the same clique culture that does the tearing. The gatekeepers. The whisper networks. The people who decide who’s “serious” and who’s “messy.” The ones who weaponize “teamwork” when what they mean is “don’t question us.”

So forgive me if I don’t bow down to a unity lecture while the national party is choosing secrecy over trust.

Here’s the standard I’m using, and I think it’s simple… if you can’t handle the people who power the party reading the party’s own assessment of its failures, you’re not leading a democratic institution. You’re managing a machine that’s afraid of its own reflection.

And this matters beyond inside baseball for one big reason…

Trump being unpopular does not automatically make Democrats trusted.

MAGA didn’t rise because everyone loved Trump’s personality. It reshuffled the Republican coalition. It built an identity machine. It created a constituency that will still exist when Trump is gone, and it will probably be more effective without his personal baggage.

So if Democrats are trying to win the next cycle on “at least we’re not them” again, we’re setting ourselves up to get rolled by the next version of MAGA that’s slicker, younger, and less radioactive.

That’s why the autopsy fight matters. It’s not drama. It’s whether the party is willing to tell the truth about why we keep hemorrhaging trust with working people, rural voters, disengaged voters, and the massive slice of the country that isn’t ideological but is exhausted, broke, and trying to survive.

If the DNC genuinely believes its lessons are strong, transparency makes the whole ecosystem smarter. Candidates. County parties. Volunteers. Organizers. Donors. Regular people who might actually run for something.

If the lessons are weak, embarrassing, or implicate powerful people, hiding the report doesn’t prevent division. It delays it until the next loss, when it will detonate.

There’s the relationship analogy again. You can shove the problem under the rug, but you’re still walking on the same floorboards.

So yes, debate strategy. Fight about it, even. Adults do. But don’t ask the base to keep investing in a party that won’t even show its own work. Release the report.

Or if you won’t, at least stop insulting people’s intelligence by calling secrecy “focus.” Because what you’re really doing is protecting insiders from accountability, and you’re doing it at the exact moment we cannot afford more rot.

The opposition is the GOP, yes. But this call is coming from inside the house.

And that’s what I want to discuss… because this autopsy fight is a symptom. The disease is bigger. Let’s call this discussion series The D Word, because in places like mine, “Democrat” has become a cultural insult before you ever open your mouth. And the answer isn’t to run from the label like it’s poison. It isn’t to scold voters. It isn’t to chant “democracy is on the ballot” like it’s a spell.

The answer is to build something people can feel in their bones. A politics that makes life less expensive, less precarious, less humiliating. A platform that’s more popular than MAGA, not just “less embarrassing.”

But you don’t get there by hiding the autopsy. You get there by facing it.

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