After several months of heated arguments over whether the Democratic National Committee (DNC) should release its autopsy report on the 2024 election, the dispute has neared a boiling point. With one recent media appearance after another, the DNC chair, Ken Martin, has set off fierce criticism and even derision, while offering notably illogical explanations for keeping the autopsy secret.

As the controversy simmers, no one has more at stake than the party’s latest standard-bearer. Kamala Harris, apparently preparing for another run, leads in polls for the 2028 Democratic presidential nomination. One of the last things she needs is a widely publicized narrative from the DNC about failures of her 2024 campaign. A maxim from George Orwell applies: “who controls the past controls the future” and “who controls the present controls the past”.

At present, Martin is holding firm to his announcement last December that he would not fulfill his promise to make the autopsy public. That was a boon to Harris, but this spring’s escalating uproar over the decision has given her reason to distance herself from it.

Last week, NBC News reported that Harris was “signaling that she has no problem with a public airing of what went wrong last time – telling donors she believes the Democratic National Committee should release its buried autopsy of her failed 2024 campaign, according to a person who has heard the conversations”.

But Harris hasn’t made any public statement that she believes the autopsy should be released. Her “signaling” is evidently an effort to disassociate herself from the taint of Martin’s unpopular decision without openly opposing it.

While declining to apply direct pressure for release of the autopsy, Harris apparently moved to dispel the plausible assumption that she would like it to stay under wraps. Axios reported in February: “Top Democratic officials who worked on the party’s still-secret autopsy of the 2024 election concluded that Kamala Harris lost significant support because of the Biden administration’s approach to the war in Gaza.”

Any honest autopsy would include data from polling that showed Harris’s support for Biden on Israel damaged her campaign. Polls during the campaign and after the election found that her backing of Biden’s Israel policy was political malpractice as well as a moral collapse.

Under Martin’s leadership, the DNC has continued to dodge the issue of US military support for Israel – thus maintaining a huge gap between the Democratic party’s governing body and Democrats nationwide whose views and interests it supposedly serves.

By last summer, a Gallup poll was showing that just 8% of Democrats approved of Israel’s military actions in Gaza. Opinion surveys continue to reflect such outlooks among Democratic voters. Three-quarters of Democrats agree that “Israel is committing genocide,” and they’re more sympathetic to Palestinians than to Israelis by a 4-to-1 margin. The Pew Research Center reported last month that 80% of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents “currently have an unfavorable view of Israel”.

When Martin suggests that only top DNC officials need to see the 200-page autopsy, he’s relying on the assumption that history – including the records of Democratic leaders – should not be of great concern. “Instead of navel-gazing and looking backwards and trying to relitigate 2024,” Martin said during an interview in late April, what was needed was recognition that “the only thing we can do is actually change what happens in the future.”

That approach is not unlike Barack Obama’s assertion shortly after he won the presidency in 2008 that there was no need to prosecute officials who had authorized torture during the George W Bush administration. “Look forward instead of looking backward,” Obama said. With similar reasoning, Martin has made sure that the DNC remains mum about the genocide that took hold in Gaza, enabled by the Biden administration’s massive shipments of arms to Israel.

For Kamala Harris, history will not be possible to elude. Last fall, from the outset of the book tour for her campaign memoir 107 Days, she encountered chants like “Your legacy is genocide! Your legacy will always be genocide!” Her book is bereft of remorse for her steadfast support of arming the Gaza genocide during the last 15 months of the Biden-Harris administration.

The ghost of Hubert Humphrey would be stalking a Harris 2028 campaign.

After losing to Richard Nixon as the Democratic presidential nominee in 1968, Humphrey went on to seek the nomination again in 1972. During that effort, he hoped that his record of supporting the Vietnam war while President Lyndon Johnson’s vice-president would not be an obstacle to again winning the party’s nod. But Humphrey could not outrun history.

Humphrey, like Harris five decades later, kept sounding morally obtuse about his record of support for an unpopular war as he geared up to run for president again. At first, in 1971, national polls put him in first place. “Democrats regarded Humphrey as their party’s most experienced candidate, and he led everyone,” the Humphrey biographer Arnold Offner writes. But when Humphrey’s hopes crashed to earth the following year, Offner recounts, the New York Times columnist James Reston “wrote that the 1972 nomination was really lost at the 1968 convention when Humphrey showed greater loyalty to Johnson than to his deeper Vietnam War beliefs”.

Instead of taking seriously the fact that most polled Democrats believe Israel has committed genocide and a similar number say the US should halt or curtail its enormous flow of weapons to the Israeli military, Martin has stonewalled every attempt to pass any resolution to bring the DNC into line with the opinions of registered Democrats. The modicum of debate about policy toward Israel that occurred at the DNC’s semiannual meeting last month received some undeserved praise, but the gathering’s discourse was minimal while the DNC remained aloof and sealed off from the views of the party’s voters.

Nine months ago, with media fanfare, Martin had announced that he would appoint a DNC taskforce that became known as the Middle East Working Group. Supporters of Palestinian rights are in the minority on the panel, which hasn’t done much of anything. But it has served as a useful rationale for deflecting resolutions critical of Israel, on the grounds that the working group is weighing such issues.

The DNC continues to reject all initiatives like the ones that the president of Democratic Majority for Israel last month condemned as “a set of divisive, anti-Israel resolutions”. Nothing comes from the DNC that reflects any of the opinions on Israel now held by large majorities of the Democratic electorate.

Across the country, people who identify as Democrats are way ahead of the DNC. With top party leaders stuck in the past yet refusing to participate in openly assessing its lessons, real leadership needs to come from the grassroots.

• Norman Solomon is the director of RootsAction and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. His latest book is The Blue Road to Trump Hell: How Corporate Democrats Paved the Way for Autocracy