“The Blue Road To Trump Hell”: Norm Solomon On “How Corporate Democrats Paved The Way For Autocracy”

“If you don’t examine real history, then you’re in a cycle that repeats the same problems,” says Norman Solomon, director of RootsAction, who joins Democracy Now! to discuss his organization’s findings.

By Amy Goodman, Juan Gonzalez, and Norman Solomon, Democracy Now!

A new report from the grassroots organization RootsAction aims to do what a promised “autopsy” from the Democratic National Committee ultimately did not: publicly reckon with the failures of the Democrats’ 2024 presidential campaign. While the Democratic Party’s official postmortem assessment was pulled from public release earlier this month, RootsAction’s “Democratic Autopsy” looks at how factors like “service to corporate power, hostility to the progressive wing of the party, out-of-control militarism [and] disconnection from the base of the working class” contributed to declining support for the party’s platform and candidates. “If you don’t examine real history, then you’re in a cycle that repeats the same problems,” says Norman Solomon, director of RootsAction, who joins Democracy Now! to discuss his organization’s findings.

Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: We end our final live broadcast of 2025 with Norman Solomon, director of RootsAction, executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. He’s just published a new book. It’s titled The Blue Road to Trump Hell: How Corporate Democrats Paved the Way for Autocracy. He also has a new piece for The Guardian headlined “Why is the Democratic party hiding its 2024 autopsy report?” in which he argues, quote, “A party unable to publicly examine its own failings is unlikely to climb out of the rut that proved so helpful to Donald Trump in 2024.”

Norm, thank you so much for being with us. So, why don’t you answer that question for us? Why is the Democratic Party hiding its 2024 autopsy report? What report is that?

NORMAN SOLOMON: Well, it was officially going to be released before the election in November this year. Then it was — the can was kicked down the road, and we were told it would be released by the end of the year. And that didn’t happen. And it didn’t happen because the history of the Democratic Party is a repetition compulsion to serve corporate power, and it can’t withstand the light of day. And so, rather than do self-examination, the people running the Democratic National Committee decided to just pretend that, as the saying goes, “look forward, not backward.” But if you don’t examine real history, then you’re in a cycle that repeats the same problems.

And so, in response to what we anticipated would be either a whitewash official report from the Democratic Party or none at all, as it turned out, our team at RootsAction put together our own autopsy. And we found that it really echoed the same kind of critique that we presented in our autopsy after the 2016 election. In fact, if you were to swap the names Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris, it would be entirely accurate in a lot of the report, because in both cases — and here we have elections, what, eight years apart — service to corporate power, hostility to the progressive wing of the party, out-of-control militarism, disconnection from the base of the working class, that’s been a common thread of the Democratic Party.

As we celebrate and look forward to the mayoral reality in New York City coming up, I think it’s really notable and very important to remember that, as the saying goes, the Democratic Party is a field of struggle. And I work at RootsAction with my colleague India Walton. Four years ago, as a democratic socialist, she won the Democratic Party nomination in the city of Buffalo, the second-largest city in the state. And then right-wing Democrats teamed up with racists and Republicans and defeated her with a rubber stamp write-in campaign. Well, that’s a defeat. And a lot of people who are defeatists, unfortunately, or say, “Hey, forget about the Democratic Party,” they say, “Oh, we lose. We can’t defeat the Democratic Party elite leadership.” Well, see what happened four years later is another democratic socialist didn’t give up and, because of being part of a social movement, was able to not only galvanize tens of thousands of volunteers, but actually win.

So, I just sort of sum up by saying that the official Democratic Party leadership, such as it is, is unwilling, unable to really examine the true history of that party and the capacity of that party to respond to the working class, which has been diminishing. And at the same time, when people organize and when people look at real history and struggle to change what comes up in the future, we can win victories.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Norman, I want to get back to this DNC autopsy. The Harris campaign spent $1.5 billion in just 107 days of their campaign. What did they spend all that money on?

NORMAN SOLOMON: They spent it on consultants. They spent it on TV ads. They spent it on the traditional way that when you don’t believe in your party base and you try to win an election from the top down, you squander the money. And there has not been transparency within the DNC or the various presidential campaigns of the party.

It’s very lucrative. It’s a racket. They win whether they win or lose. It’s sort of like — I would compare it to the weapons manufacturers and the military-industrial complex. You know, the U.S., quote, “lost” in Vietnam, “lost” in Iraq and Afghanistan, but the military-industrial complex, corporate America, they never lose. And in a similar way, the consultants, who are intertwined with corporate America and militarism at the Democratic Party at the very high levels, they have huge quantities of dollars shoveled their way, and, frankly, they would rather lose the presidential election and retain control of the Democratic Party than, heaven forfend, have Bernie Sanders be the nominee, and they would lose control of the party.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And could you talk about, in terms of the analysis of RootsAction, to what degree the National Democratic Party and, obviously, Biden and Harris positions on the war in Gaza affected the turnout for president?

NORMAN SOLOMON: Well, there’s no doubt that the polling at the time, as early as August 2024, showed that in crucial swing states, like Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, that if Kamala Harris had been willing to call for an arms embargo, even say she would consider an arms embargo, on Israel as it continued its genocide against Palestinian people in Gaza, that she would have gained a lot more votes than she would have lost. This was not a secret. And retrospective polling shows very clearly that she very well may have won the election and be in the White House today if she had been willing to break from the Israel, right or wrong, keep shoveling arms to the murderous regime there. If she had broken with that policy of the Biden White House, as I say, she might well be president today.

And I do again see a parallel between 2016 and 2024. When corporate Democrats, when the militarists control the party, then we have the kind of events and the losses where Hillary Clinton picks up — I mean, we’re talking checks — quarter-million dollars for one check for one speech that Hillary Clinton got, and then she turns around and says she’s a candidate for working people. It’s preposterous. And then we had Kamala Harris saying that she couldn’t think of anything that she would do differently than Joe Biden. Well, that signified the complete moral collapse of the Harris campaign last year, just as Joe Biden’s policy of supporting genocide also was a collapse of the Democratic Party from the top.

One of the things that we emphasize in this new RootsAction autopsy report, which, by the way, is online at DemocraticAutopsy.org, is that it was very clear that this was the case and that Biden and the hierarchy of the Democratic Party have a 50-plus-year history of very clearly saying that whatever Israel does, we’re going to support it. Well, in point of fact, the polling, not only in the swing states, but across the country, then and today, which brings us to the current time, shows that the top of the party, most of the Democrats in Congress, certainly the DNC, they’re way disconnected from what people actually want. And that’s a parallel again with the polling. It was very clear. Democrats didn’t want Biden to run again, and the elites at the top essentially said to Democratic voters and independents around the country, “We know what you want, even if that’s not what you say you want.”

One unpublicized reality in the last few months is that when the DNC held its semiannual meeting in August, because of the pressure to take a position against sending further arms to Israel, the chair of the DNC, Ken Martin, pledged that he would appoint a task force to study Democratic Party policy towards Israel. Four months later, nothing has happened. We don’t even have an announcement of the members, of who is on this task force of the Democratic Party. And this is a way of saying, “Actually, we don’t care. We run the Democratic Party. And arms are coming from the United States to slaughter men, women, children in Gaza. Now there’s all these restrictions on basic humanitarian aid, the genocide, the gradual extermination of the lives of so many Palestinian people. We don’t care. We don’t have to. We run the Democratic Party.”

Well, that has to change from the bottom up. And let me just say that Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib and Zohran Mamdani, they are, quote, “Democrats,” but they’re a different kind of Democrat. And we need to fight to elect more of those Democrats.

AMY GOODMAN: So, Norman Solomon, we just have a minute and a half, and, yes, Zohran Mamdani will become the mayor of New York at midnight New York time. Tomorrow, Democracy Now! will be live-streaming the inauguration at 1:00 New York time. Forty thousand people are expected to come out. Can you contrast Zohran Mamdani’s victory and what he is promising right now when he talks about free child care, free and fast buses, freezing rent increases, with what you talk about, the recent eight Senate Democrats who you say are surrendering to Trump on healthcare? And the meeting that Mamdani had with Trump, where Trump praised him, and he didn’t take back, Mamdani, that he had called Trump a fascist?

NORMAN SOLOMON: Yeah, being principled is a winner in two ways. It’s because that’s the way you advance a politics worthy of the name democratic socialist, worthy of the name progressive. You stick to it, you have an analysis, and you have a commitment to changing what is fundamentally wrong.

Let me say that as the title of my new book — by the way, which is free at BlueRoad.info for anybody. BlueRoad.info will be a way you can read the book. It charts the way in which we have been led down the path to a fascistic politics out of the White House and Congress and much of the judicial branch because of the failure of corporate Democrats to defeat Republicans or have decent policies. So, this is — as I said at the beginning of our discussion, this is a field of struggle. Let’s struggle to change the Democratic Party. That’s the only way next year and in 2028 to defeat this fascistic Republican Party.

AMY GOODMAN: Norm Solomon, we thank you for being with us, director of RootsAction, author of the new book, The Blue Road to Trump Hell: How Corporate Democrats Paved the Way for Autocracy. And we’ll link to your piece in Common Dreams and The Guardian. That ends it for our show. A happy birthday to Dennis McCormick! Happy News Year! I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.