The truism that insanity means trying the same thing again and again and expecting another result is as threadbare as they come. But the Democrats—who seem to love nothing more than redeploying the same losing tactics, even against the same candidate, and expecting to win—are powerful evidence of why that cliché sticks around.

In late September, I warned about the reemergence within the Democratic coalition of the failed #Resistance mindset that defined the 2016 election and the response to Donald Trump’s first term. Among that movement’s defining features were trying to shame or scare voters into voting against Trump, rather than for the Democrat, an over-reliance on pop culture signifiers rather than policy, and a hope and a prayer for the system, in particular prosecutors and the FBI, to deliver us from evil. If anyone doubted that this kind of politics is a dead end, the reality that set in on election night—when, in an almost spooky echo of the scene at Hillary Clinton’s 2016 gathering, Harris sent her supporters home rather than give a speech—hopefully settled the argument. And now that we’re on the other side of the 2024 debacle, it’s more important than ever that we bury the #Resistance mindset once and for all.

Rather than engage in meaningful self-reflection, though, many top Democrats are looking for someone other than party leadership and their own candidate to blame. Just like after Clinton’s 2016 loss, they’re landing on the progressive wing of the party and voters from marginalized groups.

They’re also flailing wildly. We need a Joe Rogan of the left! No, we don’t! Harris lost because of woke! She lost because she was insufficiently supportive of Israel, despite being a heartbeat from the presidency in an administration funding its genocide! She should’ve picked Josh Shapiro as her running mate, not Tim Walz! Perhaps the worst argument yet was Adam Jentleson’s take that the Democrats actually tried too hard to coalition-build with progressives, which is rich coming from a former John Fetterman staffer, who should know something about squandering goodwill by embracing one interest above all others. Jentleson’s op-ed, which earned praise from others who helped get us here, also argued for jettisoning identity politics in favor of “supply-side progressivism,” whatever that means.

At the most loathsome end of this spectrum, some liberals are descending into pure unfiltered racism, seemingly clamoring for Arab and Latino voters to be deported and for Gaza to be leveled as a hateful form of retribution for the election result.

Better answers about why Harris lost are abundant, and many of them stem from the party’s reliance on the same kind of #Resistance tactics that have failed so many times before. For starters, the campaign reportedly blew through an unprecedented $1 billion war chest and still ended up $20 million in debt, spending six figures on a set for the vice president’s appearance on the Call Her Daddy podcast that netted less than 1 million views (by comparison, Trump’s appearance on Rogan has racked up more than 50 million) and a staggering $20 million on production costs alone for swing-state concerts by Katy Perry, Lady Gaga, Ricky Martin, and others. The campaign also paid Oprah’s production company $1 million for her own town hall. All of these line items should be raising more eyebrows than they are for what they signal about the party: Its understanding of its base is through celebrity and culture, not grounded in any material reality. “Fight Song” might as well have been playing faintly in the background.

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Harris’s economic plans—whatever they amounted to—didn’t resonate, and she failed to convey that she felt and understood Americans’ pain. Intricacies of the government’s budgeting process aside, it leaves a bad taste in voters’ mouths when they’re struggling to pay for groceries or waiting for their government to provide hurricane relief when the same body is expeditiously sending a record $18 billion to military aid for Israel and billions more for Ukraine’s war effort. Trump, however falsely, told America that he would fix its problems. Harris told us there wasn’t an inch of light between her and Biden.

It’s also clear that the Harris campaign’s bizarre embrace of Liz Cheney and her war-criminal father resonated with precisely no one, instead only serving to further alienate demobilized liberal voters. Days after the election, several Dem operators and insiders told Rolling Stone that they lobbied the campaign against buddying up with the Cheneys, with one source saying of Dick, “People don’t want to be in a coalition with the devil.”

Senator Bernie Sanders, who very well might’ve won, argued that the party has deserted working-class people, and Chris Murphy, who just won reelection, pointed to Democrats’ neoliberal turn and alignment with elites, both of which are entirely credible arguments.

But the answer is far more simple than that: Democrats desperately need to start honestly addressing America’s problems and offering real solutions.

The lesson to take from this crushing loss is that #Resistance logic and its attendant electoral strategies are dead and must be buried. No more leaning on celebrities, no more odes to a political system that most people can’t stand, no more worshiping of cops in all their forms.

It’s absolutely imperative that the party start offering a vision of the future and a value proposition to voters instead of continuing to run on what they’re not and disciplining voters who dare ask the party to reflect their policy interests. Democrats need to marry their ideologies with class consciousness or risk wandering the wilderness forever. Medicare for All and a housing guarantee would be excellent places to start, as would providing material support for women whose reproductive rights have been curtailed, rather than stopping at empty promises to codify Roe. Most urgently, they need to meaningfully resolve the existential crisis they’ve created for themselves even without Trump’s help: becoming a party of war and genocide. Biden and Harris’s policy in Gaza absolutely played a role in sending Democratic turnout plummeting across the country.

Let’s not forget that this started with the party machinery and the president himself. Biden was willing to bet this election and the fate of his own party for the sake of his vanity when he announced he’d run for reelection. Only after it was made clear that Biden and party leadership had for years lied to their own voters and the American public about his fitness to serve did they replace him with his vice president, who had helped prop him up. Voters were desperate for any indication that the Democrats wanted to win and were taking this election seriously with a change at the top of the ticket. What they got was a campaign that squandered the surge in enthusiasm among its base almost instantly and inspired no trust in the American public.

When Harris took over, she made clear that her loyalties were with Wall Street and the party’s corporate donors. Whenever she landed on an actual plan that could have mattered, like an effort to stop price gouging on groceries, her donors immediately leaned on the campaign to walk it back, which she did, reportedly at least in part out of concerns that such a policy would cater to progressives. That’s the Democrats’ essential catch-22: Any policy that could gain them broad, lasting electoral support by centering economic concerns would be a poison pill to their donor class and is therefore a nonstarter.

Now that these party elites have helped drive the rest of us off a cliff, the immediate political future looks bleaker than bleak. With the Democrats handing the White House, Senate, and House to MAGA, there are early indications that this administration could prove even more cataclysmic for the country. This time around, the former and future president seems confident, ready, and raring to start remaking the country in his image from day one. His transition team has assembled a murderer’s row of cranks, ghouls, and alleged sexual predators in what The New York Times characterized as “breakneck speed.” Crucial government decisions will now be made by cretinous hangers-on like Elon Musk. The dopiest supporting players in the MAGA movement are also gearing up. (“It is my honor to inform you all that Project 2025 was real the whole time,” Benny Johnson, who can make even the dimmest bulb look fluorescent-bright, posted with an American flag emoji after Trump’s victory.)

The #Resistance won’t save us from any of that. Nor will the deeply entrenched system it spent so many years exalting. The sooner Democrats understand this, the sooner they can begin to rebuild their discredited party. One thing’s for sure: The results won’t change until they do.