There won’t be any introspection.

Empires, like fortunes, are lost slowly and then all at once.

I’m afraid what is coming is going to fall on every American fairly equally like the snow on the graveyard at the end of James Joyce’s “The Dead”

Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, further westwards, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling too upon every part of the lonely churchyard where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

Democrats who have themselves not yet fallen into precarity or the economic abyss can not and will not accept that our system is completely rotten and we need to change course and leadership.
It took the GOP from 2008 to 2016 to admit that the Reagan/Bush playbook and leadership class was bankrupt and had to go.
It will likely take multiple election cycles before some figure or movement arises that can win a Democratic primary. And given that the Democrats have a long and proud history of sabotaging the most popular and most likely to win the general election candidates it might require a whole new party emerging.
Democrats had their chance at a new direction and likely multiple administrations and an even longer dominance of the Congress with Bernie Sanders but rejected the clear will of the overwhelming majority of the young voters of their party.
Those young voters are drifting away in multiple directions.
Of my comfortably retired upper-middle classic acquaintances none are even willing to admit publicly (some will in private) that the Democrats make poor tactical choices, much less admit that the whole party and every individual needs to really re-evaluate their approach and even core beliefs.
Trump is at least a wild card which presents some chance of positive change, but the odds of radically negative change are much higher.
Regardless, the status-quo has been thoroughly rejected by the majority of the American public.
That is a fact people need to accept in order to try and steer that majority in the least self-destructive direction possible.
It’s unfortunate that the members of professional-managerial class (and those of us who have pretensions to it) have never truly accepted the idea of majority rule.
We’re going to lose a war in humiliating fashion — with an outside chance that it will be over quickly — which will trigger economic collapse (and that’s if we don’t start nuking people).
Then and only then will our ruling elites turn on each other in something that will be like a post-modern parody of the first American Civil War.
Hopefully it’ll be over in 5-7 years and some of us will be alive to adjust to the new normal and enjoy a few decades of relative peace as we adjust to penury, plagues, and rapidly worsening climate change.
Jonathan Cook had some good observations:

Kamala Harris didn’t lose because she’s a woman or because she’s black.

She lost because, if your political and media system – rigged by donors – limits the choice to two hardline neoliberal candidates, with anything else denounced as “communism”, the most hardline, neoliberal candidate has an edge.

Over time, the system keeps moving further to the hardline, neoliberal right. You can’t stop that relentless shift by voting for one of the two symptoms of your diseased political system.

You have to rise up against the diseased system itself.

As did Freddie de Boer:

You can’t blame losing the popular vote and all seven swing states on Jill Stein.

You can’t blame losing the popular vote and all seven swing states on Putin and the Russians.

You can’t blame losing the popular vote and all seven swing states on Bernie Sanders and his supporters.

You can’t blame losing the popular vote and all seven swing states on Joe Rogan.

You can’t blame losing the popular vote and all seven swing states on Glenn Greenwald and The Young Turks.

You can’t blame losing the popular vote and all seven swing states on the decision to run with Tim Walz.

You can’t blame losing the popular vote and all seven swing states on the New York Times and its occasional Democrat-skeptical opinion pieces.

You can’t blame losing the popular vote and all seven swing states on Joe Biden for getting out of the race too late.

You can’t pull all the usual Democrat tricks. You have to actually figure out what’s wrong with your party, root and branch. Because you called the guy a fascist, again, and he walked right through that insult to the Oval Office, again. And the eternal question presents itself: what are you going to do about it?