Do Democrats think they lost because they were not radical enough?

Noah Rothman:

Try as they might, Democrats will find no peace in the wilderness. Not while they refuse to reconcile the conditions that led voters to relegate them to a position of impotence unseen by Democrats in nearly a century. Rueful introspection is, however, unpleasant. Democratic elites appear disinclined to put their members through any more trauma than they’ve already endured. That’s a recipe for disaster. As a result, the Democratic activist class is leading the party by the nose into heedless courses of action they will soon regret.

Say what you will about the GOP’s post-2012 “autopsy,” the recommendations of which the party disregarded entirely in 2016. At least Republicans engaged in a critical self-examination, and not without cost. That document’s suggestions and the legislative course on which it set the party’s members in Congress arguably set the stage for a populist backlash personified in Trump. Mindful of that history, Democrats declined to perform any sort of public post-mortem on their party’s role in the demise of Hillary Clinton’s presidential aspirations. Behind closed doors, however, Democrats seem fully aware of their predicament.
...
It was New York Times columnist Thomas Edsall who foreshadowed the abandonment of the “white working-class” by Democrats in his prescient 2011 column, “The Future of the Obama Coalition.” In 2012, Barack Obama demonstrated that he did not need the blue-collar white voters who had made up the backbone of the New Deal coalition to win. The following two election cycles showed pretty definitively, however, that no other Democrat could replicate Obama’s coalition.

All this is terribly embarrassing for Democrats, and so they simply choose to ignore it. Acknowledging Hillary Clinton as the terrible politician she always was is just too much to bear. Conceding that Barack Obama sacrificed the party he led in the construction of his own personality cult is anathema. Convincing the Democratic Party’s activists that they cannot win national elections without the aid of a class of voters at whom they look down their nose is an unendurable insult.

... Democrats are allowing themselves to be defined by their most radical elements.
...

There is much more.

The Edsall piece is important because it really demonstrates why Clinton lost in the rust belt and therefore lost at the electoral college level to Trump.  In one way they are acting like the radical Islamists who think they are not winning because they are not radical enough, thus they rush to ISIS or al Qaeda.

Not content with running off white working-class voters, some in the leadership are pushing throwing pro-life Democrats out of the party too.  They appear to be seeking ideological purity of a much smaller base.  That is the kind of thinking that has made the British Labour Party a near nonentity.