As President Trump’s consolidation of autocratic power gains steam, it’s often been argued that the failures of liberal governance meaningfully helped to bring us to this moment. In this reading, the Biden administration—and other Democratic leaders in recent years—allowed well-intentioned caution and respect for parliamentary safeguards and procedures to hobble ambition, frustrating voters and making them easier prey for demagogues peddling authoritarian governance as our civic cure-all.
This reading has now picked up the endorsement of a surprising group: A large bloc of former high-level members of the Biden administration.
The left-leaning Roosevelt Institute is releasing a major new report Tuesday—with input from nearly four dozen former senior Biden officials across many agencies—that seeks to diagnose the administration’s governing mistakes and failures. The report, provided in advance to The New Republic, may be the most ambitious effort involving Biden officials to determine what went wrong and why.
In the report, Biden officials extensively identify big failings in governing and in the execution of the politics around big decisions—but with an eye toward creating the beginnings of a Project 2029 agenda. The result is a kind of proto-blueprint for Democratic governance to show that it can work the next time the party has power.
“We must reckon honestly with how we got here and why the American public has been so frustrated with these institutions for so long,” Roosevelt Institute president Elizabeth Wilkins writes in the report’s introduction. “The rising authoritarianism we see today shows us the stakes.”
a project 2029 agenda
Get the he fuck out of here with this bullshit. This is exactly the fucking problem with dems. They fail, so they just look for how to copy the last successful gop strategy.
We see through it you fucking morons, this is why your polling is in the toilet. Instead of supporting winning, successful candidates with resonating messaging, they form committees, and find the next one in line to support.
We’re so fucking cooked if this is what they are coming up with.
They fail, so they just look for how to copy the last successful gop strategy.
What’s funny is the guy that created the Heritage Foundation and wrote the first mandate for leadership was inspired to organize by the coalition building and strategizing of the left following the civil rights movement. Heritage’s entire success is based on a strategy to drive more wedges between factions on the left, while creating a false narrative of victimhood (us vs them) in order to bring as many factions as possible under a single “Republican,” umbrella and form a solid and reliable voting bloc on the right.
It’s kind of like the more bold and radical the right became over time, while stirring up narratives about the radical left and culture wars, the more establishment Dems fell for the trap they set. Instead of realizing they were under attack, they tried to reach across the aisle, and present a welcoming and more moderate face in an attempt to counter the narrative being spun by the right. They began ignoring their shared core values, and instead focused on rebranding themselves by using the right’s strategy of allowing banks, corporations, and other big donors to heavily influence their decision making. Basically, just throw money and marketing at a problem until it’s solved.
Meanwhile, the right used political theater to create the illusion of “grassroots” movements actually funded by billionaires, and injected into every facet of government and politics starting at the most local levels. Now the people who wrote the most recent iteration of Mandate for Leadership (Project 2025), are sitting in the White House.
I actually thought this part of the article was really insightful, and exactly what we need establishment Democrats to wake up and understand:
One of its most compelling conclusions is that the Biden administration seemed reluctant to engage in “picking the fights worth having” and sometimes took refuge in incremental policy gains due to a self-limiting “risk aversion.” One senior official is quoted suggesting the White House didn’t give adequate support to agency leaders who thought they had a policy stance providing an opening to “have a fight and show who you’re for.”
If anything, Dems haven’t been copying conservatives enough in terms of the right’s very successful coalition building and strategizing (which was originally stolen from their own abandoned playbook back in the 70’s).
However, they have been copying them in the shit way they actually do their jobs/govern: unilateral decision making cautiously based on keeping wealthy donors happy, cheap transparent pandering that often doesn’t actually change anything for the better, ignoring the advice of experts in favor of sycophants, and most importantly; forgetting why you’re in this job, and who you’re supposed to be fighting for.
Cheap pandering without providing actually benefits to voters will only work if you use the false narrative/shared victimhood (us vs them), and attack on scapegoats (them) to make it look like you’re doing your job/representing the interests of your base. Dems have been playing right into their hands by distancing themselves from their roots and shared core values, minimizing very real issues for Americans, and allowing truly marginalized groups to be attacked/used as scapegoats by the right, in order to attract more “moderate” voters.
This is a little vague but could be partly correct and is a good critique of Obama. Its also missing some points like billionaires ammassing too much monetary wealth.
I do think not attempting to break up media companies is a problem but taxing billionaires would have stopped a lot of this.
Talk about too little too late.
Typical. They ignore their members who are screaming “grow a spine, we’re losing because we aren’t fighting!” Literally for decades, then after they lose it all, contritely act like there’s something nobody could have seen coming they now have to learn from.
What, you didn’t see the consequences of letting the senate leader block a supreme court assignment for a fucking year? It never occurred to you they’d turn right around and seat the Republican assigned one within 24 hours?
Unprecedented? Really? You have a house election victor who still hasn’t been seated after a month and the Republican ones were seated within 24 hours. I haven’t seen one iota of fight in you fucking dweebs. They stop you when you have the majority, but you can’t do fucking anything when they have control. You guys fucked us over more than the Republicans did. At least we knew what they were doing. We expected you to fight for us and you fucking folded every single time, while telling us you would stand up and fight.
Now the only way were getting those Nazis out is full on military uprising, and anybody with a fucking clue knows it.
When Biden was like “we have too much respect for the country to pack the court” and privately they were saying “the polling doesn’t look good for us” I lost hope and realized we were going to lay down right in front of a steamroller. Mad frustrating.
What exactly does “fighting” look like to you in this context? You keep repeating that word without explaining what you mean by it. Because I kind of feel like this is what it looks like: Making plans to regain control of the government and try to stop this sort of situation from ever happening again. It might seem boring and too little too late, but it’s exactly how the Republican party got where they are. They spent decades planning and scheming and stacking the deck in their favor. You can’t undo that overnight.
Do some of the same shit the Republicans have been doing for ages any time THEY are in the minority.
There should be a daily press briefing with Pete B, Bernie S., or Alexandria O.C. that’s covered by every journalist who’s been kicked out of the white house. Call that shit “The American Way” briefing and compare the events of the last 24 hours of trump BS to the constitution and the declaration of independence.
Obstruct every last piece of illegal garbage the Republican Nazis are trying to get away with loudly and publicly.
Put themselves OUT THERE in the public eye as AGAINST FACISM and go full-on captain America on those Nazi Republicans.
you definitely can, just take out their funding. the majority are roaches in it for a paycheck. no paycheck and they go back to running scams in their hometown
you definitely can, just take out their funding.
And how are you going to do that?
It’s rising because of the American public’s complacency and ignorance.
It’s the same thing that happened in 1930s Germany. An authoritarian government steps in, the people think it won’t be that bad, they allow it, they support it, they put up with it, they think government checks and balances still work … then when its all too late, people suddenly want to act.
If Americans don’t know what to do right now … they won’t have a chance to do anything later.
People don’t feel like there’s anything they can do, outside of the ordinary [eg voting]. There is no real intermediate step between peaceful protest and targeted violence. And people understandably don’t want to target their local authorities, who may not even be complicit.
The american public has been told for the last 30 years that voting for democrats would prevent something like this
It’s democratic complacency that this report is pointing to that is at fault.
I fear you are correct. As much as I mention I kind of like the counter protestors as it shows how small a group it is relative to people fighting facism I also have verified to my satisfaction that in some cases they are not paid shills and they seem to be able to be blind to everything for the sake of their side winning. I mean we have masked unmarked paramilitary killing, injuring, destroying property, and invading private residences. Its crazy they can ignore that.
This article lacks material analysis. Fascism is on the rise because it is the tool that capitalists use when workers gain class consciousness and start to demand more equality. The second Bernie became popular, a backlash like this was inevitable.
I dont think it was bernie that lit the fuse, i think it was having a black man as president. It made so many people unreasonably angry, they just couldnt accept it. Thats when the temperature started rising.
i’d argue it was more having the first black president running on a campaign of HOPE AND CHANGE
then…doing absolutely fuck all but furthering the status quo, completely unjustified warmongering, unsustainable ratfucking etc.
This article lacks material analysis
? It’s based on a report that was just released. It examines and critiques real life examples of mistakes within the previous administration. Building a More Effective, Responsive Government: Lessons Learned from the Biden-Harris Administration
One of its most compelling conclusions is that the Biden administration seemed reluctant to engage in “picking the fights worth having” and sometimes took refuge in incremental policy gains due to a self-limiting “risk aversion.” One senior official is quoted suggesting the White House didn’t give adequate support to agency leaders who thought they had a policy stance providing an opening to “have a fight and show who you’re for.”
Not standing up for the values that are supposed to be at the party’s roots, and acknowledging that doing the most basic wasn’t enough to lead the country where it needed to go, seems like a pretty perfect summary of why most people dislike establishment Democrats.
The second Bernie became popular, a backlash like this was inevitable.
No the second we became ok with normalizing executive overreach, ignoring checks and balances, and unilateral decisions by the president, it was inevitable. It’s not a backlash when every president in modern history basically paved the way for it to happen.
Material analysis is not so much concerned with the actions of individuals or even entire administrations. It is more so a lens to view an entire society. When I say that the backlash was inevitable, I am talking about the rise of fascism generally, not just the rise of Trump. So yes, the policies of previous politicians did “pave the way” for Trump, but that didn’t happen in a vacuum. It happened because the capitalist rulers saw that their position was at risk, so they exerted pressure to consolidate more power (i.e. fascism).
The second Bernie became popular, a backlash like this was inevitable.
A material analysis of Bernie Sanders would rule out a backlash because he’s never held power or set policy.
But even if you rate effectiveness by how much they aggravate the right, politicians like Pelosi prove that being effective is more threatening than being left. Politicians like Obama prove that being black is more threatening than being radical.
I think you’ll find Bernie Sanders rates far higher in MAGA circles than Pelosi or Obama. Because he doesn’t represent any threat to them. (check out his defense of Trump’s immigration policy)
Reactionaries don’t need the actual existence of revolutionary power to pull the fascist card, they just need the threat of it. I use Bernie as an example of rising class consciousness, not because he is some Great Man who is the epicenter of history.
As President Trump’s consolidation of autocratic power gains steam…
with an eye toward creating the beginnings of a Project 2029 agenda. The result is a kind of proto-blueprint for Democratic governance to show that it can work the next time the party has power.
…How cute, they think there’s going to be another administration after this one… :/
Why is it rising?
Because that was the fucking platform he ran on. The “you won’t have to vote again” platform. I know that the orange turdsack has more shit leave his mouth in an hour than he deposits into his Depends in a day, but ffs, did everyone just forget this slip?
He’s bringing what he promised. Anyone claiming they didn’t know this was coming are either room temp IQ in Celsius and shouldn’t even have the right to vote, or are lying through their teeth. People have been warning about this since 2015, but nobody took it seriously, and well… Here we fucking are.
And this will only ever get worse. Mango Mussolini has entrenched himself as Glorious Leader, and even in his death, there will be people to take over. MAGA won’t even matter anymore because they’re building out the framework of never giving up power, right in front of your fucking faces, you flag-shagging, “freedom”-loving, burger munching morons who voted for him or didn’t even bother to get your fat asses out of your couches. This is on you all. All the ones who went “but I can’t vote for Harris”, fuck off. You couldn’t hold your nose to at least preserve the semblance of democracy, and now the whole world has to suffer your insufferable arrogance. Fuck you all, seriously.
Because see, I’m not a US citizen nor do I live in your third world shithole country. Yet your moronic “cleanliness” political ideology is affecting me, without me having a say. You couldn’t be bothered to do against fascism because it wasn’t convenient. Well tough titties.
My only hope is that the US collapses as the house of diarrhea-soaked cards it is, and whatever emerges from it will learn from the mistakes made.
Tough talk for someone not living here. Everybody wanna fight fascism until it’s your ass on the line. You have no idea what it’s like in the US. It’s not like most votes matter or there is any real organization on the left. We also have jobs, health insurance, families and other responsibilities than whatever bullshit goes on in Washington.
This right here. This whole attitude is why the world thinks us Americans are getting what we deserve. It’s your own fucking responsibility to save yourself asshole, and if you weren’t bugging every damn person you know to vote last November then, well, this is why the world thinks we’re getting what we deserve. Way too fucking many Americans refuse to take responsibility for their own disengagement from civic duty. It is literally your and my goddamn duty as fucking citizens to be informed educated and engaged with the civic process. We collectively fucked around and are now finding out. Own your part. I own mine.
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Ah so fuck the world because you can’t be arsed to vote after you established a system that does precisely this?
Typical murican. Fuck everyone else, I’m tossing TNT into my cesspit, and even if half the neighbourhood is covered in my shit, I’ll just blame someone else for not stopping me.
You give a shit about our politics
We don’t think about you at all.
I’ll get right on that whole convincing 100 million Americans what to do and vote in a gerrymandered and electoral college rigged system. While working ten hour days, fighting my employer for basic rights and trying to have a life outside politics. Also having zero resources compared to any corporate influence in Washington.
Sorry I don’t live in some idealistic European utopia.
We don’t think about you at all.
Yet your shit keeps falling into my backyard and fucking it up.
Would your fuckup not affect the rest of the world I’d be making popcorn by the bucket watching you melt down.
Sadly, you DO affect other countries. So please shut the fuck up and fix it.
Holy shit, dude.
The wealth of the USA is much more from colonial extraction and market manipulation than the mythology of productivity would have you believe. The dark waters of American imperialism have flooded the globe for nearly a century.
So yeah, you, as in the polity, think about the rest of the world all the time, but more like buffet than neighborhood.
But more to the point, examine the defeatist viewpoint that is part of the democracy-suppressing ideology that is prominent in many countries, and results in low civic participation, the hero complex: “I’ll get right on that whole convincing 100 million Americans what to do and vote”.
No, just no. No-one asks that.
What we ask is just resistance in the form of what is possible. For those ground under the millstone, it may just be educating yourself with documentaries or a study buddy, so you can better see how to build the society you want, and represent that in speech and action. Every act of resistance counts, it really does.
But essentially, just help organize. Volunteer 4h a month at first. In a sea of 400 million people every drop counts, because you only have to sufficiently organize about 20 million for real change to kick in.
Don’t second guess too much what is effective, that requires massive data, and there are all kinds of unexpected wins and losses. I have had some successful activists tell me that I made a difference in their chosen directions years ago, and I had no idea. Sometimes it’s just a comment that leads to a lot of convincing.
Is the answer because Democrats allowed their rise, partnered with the same billionaires the reps did and the public went along with it all because comfort means everything is great for everyone?
the whole dnc this year exemplified and was iconic of the democrat party and had their full face shown mask off
but in full on football politics fashion democrats just like republicans get blindly straight color ticket voted on using voting machines that are the property of some unknown company without a wikipedia page to do it with
and the information that got them to cast a blind vote for red or blue came from media that is owned by the same groups that own the voting machine
and citizens are taught how to interpret data at schools which use materials that are owned by the same ones control the media and the vote machines
democracy is dead
I’m kind of on the fence about how to vote on this post. On one hand it uses liberal as an insult, which is usually a red flag I use to identify tankies and their dupes, but this clearly isn’t a Tankie because it supports the idea of electing Democrats which the CCP and Russia wouldn’t support.
I think if we can’t acknowledge our own flaws and imperfections, we give the right and tankies the ammunition they need to spread both sides disinformation.
We should be the adults ready to acknowledge what went wrong and discuss ideas for how we can fix a broken system, instead of rationalizing it by pointing out they did it too, or doubling down on revisionist history that places flawed humans on a pedestal. We should be able to critique elected leaders because we don’t need any one individual to be the single representative of liberal policy.
give the right and tankies the ammunition they need to spread both sides disinformation.
…except there was plenty of actual both sides stuff going on under Biden/Harris. Stuff like immigration crackdowns, and support for increased police powers and budgets, a failure to show up to protect Roe, a willfull failure to hold trump accountable for an insurrection and collaborating with Russia, and with Biden throughout his career-- always a lack of respect for our civil and human rights. Lets be honest for once and not pretend the dems didnt veer hard right on a lot of things under Bidens watch. As an example, Biden led the country in enabling and funding a far right genocide and Harris said she’d do the same. People were murdered on Bidens watch via war crimes he actively participated in. Americans, some of them. Biden/Harris lost the left and a good part of their base doing it. Is any of that “both sides disinformation”? Did or did not harris talk lovingly about her glock on the campaign trail? she did. While students across the country cower in live fire drills and kids and parents are terrorized in the name of pewpew ownership for all, wondering if someone will kill them at school. Thats both sides supporting those bad policies, which is why a cheney could hover unironically at harris’s elbow during her campaign.
This is simple reality that a lot of centrist liberals refuse to acknowledge, and they need to in order to move forward with their left flank-- who they cant win elections without. Dems arent simply “the good guys” lately and thats why a big chunk of their own voters and almost all youth effing hate them and only vote for them because they are the second party of a 2 party system. Biden lost the left because he’s had an entire career of being a racist halfwit republican-curious dealmaker instead of a leader. He was a bad candidate and had dumb, bad policies that polled badly on all sides. And harris couldnt order her own lunch without help from someone else. And the centrists in the party cant admit to Biden leading the way away from the traditiobnal Dem party platform. Theres our problem.
And this is what taking AIPAC’s money gets you. An utterly destroyed party on life support. And aipac couldnt care less.
That is literally what this report says. The Dems didn’t pick their fights to prove who they were fighting for.
One of its most compelling conclusions is that the Biden administration seemed reluctant to engage in “picking the fights worth having” and sometimes took refuge in incremental policy gains due to a self-limiting “risk aversion.”
and yet you call out “both sides” as a “tankie” and right wing attack. Why did you do that?.
Being a literal advocate for human rights is not a flaw or an imperfection. that is the same vein as thinking of empathy as weakness or of logic as heartless.
Who is saying being an advocate for human rights is a flaw or imperfection? I’m saying the opposite. You can’t ignore human rights to justify the actions of a leader or movement, even if the actions were allegedly done for a greater good.
That’s what authoritarians always do. We can only achieve utopia if we get rid of the people standing in our way. We can only achieve X ideal tomorrow by sacrificing liberty today. We have to trust that the leader/party knows what’s best for us, even if we disagree with their actions.
Liberal means proponent of human rights.
Talk about not having a point. If that was still true, they would have changed their party name.
There is no Liberal Party of the USA. There is a Liberal Party in UK, Australia, etc and in those places you could rightfully say “liberals are cunts” but in the USA the word means what the dictionary says it means. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/liberalism
The Democratic Party is a liberal political party in the United States.
First line on their Wikipedia article. You don’t need to have the word “liberal” in your name to be one. It’s actually precisely why it’s used as an insult by certain progressives. They stopped being a liberal party a long time ago. Compared to Europe, Australia, Canada, etc, we have two shades of conservative as a choice.
Edit: I did say party name tho, I get it if you mean how we don’t have a liberal party in the sense they aren’t called “the liberal party” but I’m thinking that’s not what you were getting at either.
No. Liberal generally means fiscally responsible while moderately socially progressive. You’ll note in that statement that the economic policy comes before the social ones, and generally at the expense of the social policies.
That just sounds like watered down libertarianism, and btw you’re not arguing with me you’re arguing with an american dictionary: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/liberalism.
Yeah, it’s right there 2 d because it’s literally an economic policy platform.
Right, liberalism is about equality and conservativism is about hierarchies. That’s why it’s important to call people out when they fall short of those values out of a sense of needing to appease a wider voter base:
One of its most compelling conclusions is that the Biden administration seemed reluctant to engage in “picking the fights worth having” and sometimes took refuge in incremental policy gains due to a self-limiting “risk aversion.” One senior official is quoted suggesting the White House didn’t give adequate support to agency leaders who thought they had a policy stance providing an opening to “have a fight and show who you’re for.”
Its not that Biden didnt show up for those fights he secretly beleived in, its that Biden and the modern dem party doesnt beleive in those fights anymore. They keep them around as campaign props. They beleive that whoever amasses the most campaign money wins the campaign, regardless of platform.
it used to. It no longer does.
Absolutely still does, now more than ever with so many vocal opponents to it. Fox News decrys “librulz!” as the scum of the earth for daring oppose the ethnonationalist takeover of the USA.
Sure. But fox news calling someone bad doesnt necesarrily always mean they are good. We should never define ourselves by what idiot shitstains say, especially for a party so sensitive to bullying.
The DNC and thus the democratic party has been a dumpster fire for a decade at least and Biden drove us all off a cliff. Everyone wants to pretend his unpopularity was solely about his age, and not about his republican-curious career of bad ideas and mediocre half-measures lukewarm leadership. In the last election the DNC steered hard right so they could keep taking AIPAC money and ignore the left, and it failed, like it always does. They will try it again too-- they hate the left more than they hate centrist republicans-- and liberals still wont even admit that. So we’re all doomed until centrists pull their heads out of their collective rears.
More people are liberal than they want to admit because it’s become such a “dirty word” and I do think that is by design. What we’re seeing is both these groups becoming victims of a campaign that is simply anti-humanitarian. What I try to drive home is that liberalism can exist in any economic system, and it will thrive in places that aren’t authoritarian.
If you believe the government shouldn’t attack free speech or any one’s rights, rights should be expanded, that immigrants deserve to exist, or a mass defense of freedom means we all stay free then YOU ARE LIBERAL
If you believe the government shouldn’t attack free speech or any one’s rights, rights should be expanded, that immigrants deserve to exist, or a mass defense of freedom means we all stay free then YOU ARE LIBERAL
cool, but the last dem presidency acted against all those things instead of standing for them.
Not disagreeing entirely but that doesn’t mean the meaning of words change
NoOOo LiBeRaL iS tHe wOrSt tHiNg tO bE!!11
There’s a whole subset of actual leftists and progressives that use both tankie and liberal as insults. Like, most of us probably would.
If you use Liberal as an insult you either have no idea what the definition of the word is or you’re not left or progressive. Likewise for those who don’t use tankie with negative connotation.
People that call themselves liberal typically aren’t, hence the ironic insult. It’s that simple dude. Everyone I know that’s actually liberal calls themselves a leftist or progressive, but never a liberal. The Democratic establishment are called liberals, but generally aren’t now are they?
They absolutely are Liberal by definition. The Biden Admin pardoned thousands for nonviolent marijuana offenses, expanded protections to gay marriage, expanded healthcare access, restored the EPA to working condition, and put a pro-immigration leader at the helm of the ICE as well as reimplementing 72 hour holding limitations and criminal only focus.
The party wants to codify Roe V Wade into the constitution, giving bodily autonomy to the people, and they want to remove money from politics and tax the rich.
The DNC are liberals.
1: left marijauna federally illegal
2: gay marriage is about to be overturned by supreme court because they never made it into law
3: fucking what healthcare access
4: didnt abolish ice
And they didnt do any of that when they had the power to in 2021 which is why people with actual values and beliefs and demands for those in power use liberal as a pejorative. And youre just out here proving the rule. You believe in nothing but maintaining the status quo.
The problem is that the article doesn’t explain what it means by “liberal” or which aspects of it the author considers problematic. This leads to conflating different issues and different criticisms of liberalism.
Liberalism in its traditional sense is not a left-leaning political stance. But in the USA “liberal” can either have its traditional political meaning or be a catch-all term for anything not fully right wing. So you get a lot of confusion around the term.
The left criticises liberalism, understood in the traditional sense, for being capitalist and, as such, unable to solve the basis structural problems of capitalism. Liberals don’t even recognize capitalism itself as problematic, which ties their hands for solving social problems, and when the chips are down they defend capitalism against the left and abandon the working class to become allies of the right. And the left will say liberals are unrealistic about the historical forces that have effectively reined in capitalism, and how hard the system had to be fought to win even the smallest concessions from capitalists.
You absolutely don’t need to be a tankie to criticize liberalism like this, you just need to be on the left.
The right criticises liberalism, in the “not right” sense, for caring about people those on the right deem not worth caring about. It criticises it for regulating businesses to protect people the right deems not worth protecting, and for suggesting that the poor are not poor through their own fault. It also criticises it for being too thoughtful and compassionate and not cruel enough.
The article seems to contain a bit of this right-wing-style criticism of liberalism, which is off putting, but the author also doesn’t seem very clear about what they mean by liberalism. And so we get arguments in the comments that perpetuate the ambiguity and confusion.
I like that you tried to explain it with depictions of how each side sees it, but I refuse to let anyone muddy this water.
The left does not criticize Liberalism for being capitalist. At least not in the USA. We don’t have a liberal party here like they do in Australia or UK, in the USA we use the term Liberal as it is defined: advocacy for human rights and freedoms so long as those rights do not infringe upon others, and a government that does not control us but instead upholds those rights fairly and equally.
Left means progress. I like to imagine progress doesn’t involve a return to economies planned by ruthless dictators and oligarchies like in the medieval era. If you stand against liberalism, you are right wing, end of story.
Nah, leftists that call themselves leftists do criticize liberals for being capitalist, the comment you’re responding to is one hundred percent spot fuckin on.
If they oppose liberalism then they’re not left. Liberalism doesn’t even have anything to do with capitalism inherently, just that government intervention should be limited to protecting people’s rights.
You do not understand what the term liberal actually means as it’s used in American economic and political discourse. You’re waging a semantic war over your own personal definition of the term. Liberalism is literally a capitalist economic policy. You are not describing liberalism, you’re describing some weird sort of social libertarianism.
The sad thing here is we all largely agree with one another about what’s important but are arguing about terms. Classical leftist problems, can’t get anything done because we’re too busy correcting each other. I digress. Everyone else is using the term liberal correctly, and you are not. Sorry bud.
I am using it how I have always used it, how my opponents have always used it, and how the dictionary says it is used now and historically.
The reason the word is getting more bad reputation these days are because:
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Tankies unironically don’t support human rights advocacy, actively try to tie the word into their anti-“capitalist” ideology.
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This online community has a lot of people frequenting from nations which have Liberal Parties which are all actually cunts, yeah.
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In political science and philosophy terms, that’s more precisely called Classical Liberalism or Civil Libertarianism, whereas in common American parlance, the unqualified term “liberal” has become colloquially tied to Neoliberalism.
You can fight that if you want, but the ship left the harbor decades ago.
I should know where the Liberal ship sails. I’m on it. One with the ship, One with the crew. When people tell you who they are, you could make an effort to give the benefit of the doubt.
I like to imagine progress doesn’t involve a return to economies planned by ruthless dictators and oligarchies like in the medieval era.
You seem to have a very strong caricature of the left, for someone who claims to be sympathetic. There is a wide diversity of thought on the left, opposed to capitalism including liberalism in the traditional sense. They do not criticize liberalism for its support of progress and human rights, but for its failure to see what’s needed to achieve those. And not everyone with that criticism is a dictator-loving tankie.
If you stand against liberalism, you are right wing, end of story.
Only if you ignore the historical sense of “liberal”, which is the one liberalism’s critics on the left are using. Again, they are not criticizing liberalism for supporting progressive causes; they’re criticizing it because they think it is unable to effectively advance those causes.
The left does not criticize Liberalism for being capitalist. At least not in the USA.
A good chunk of the left in the USA does criticize liberalism for exactly that. But they don’t get exposure in the media, so a lot of Americans think that the liberals who get exposure are “the left”. There’s a whole big spread of the left in between capitalist liberals and tankies.
If you oppose Liberalism, you’re not left.
If you define liberalism as what the biden/harris administration has been up to, then you’re not left either.
He expanded healthcare access, added protections for gay marriage, put a pro-immigration individual in charge of the ICE, returned the EPA back to working order after the Trump admin was having it run by a literal coal lobbyist, returned protections for streams from contamination by industry, he stood with workers on the picket line, he pardoned thousands of nonviolent marijuana crimes, and was enabling the IRS to audit the rich which was so successful that it actually made a lot of money in return.
Thats not the whole list of who this guy was, is it. When the ‘defund and reallocate’ movement resolutions hit Bidens desk he flatly rejected it and increased cop funding instead. You couldnt dickslap civil rights any harder than that.
When students were protesting he started what trump has continued-- persecuting them for expressing their constitutionally guaranteed freedom of speech, over some contrived definition of antisemitism equating to students “feeling uncomfortable” about other peoples peaceful ideas.
Harris and Biden mustered one of their rare victory laps when they declared that no president had ever been as hard on immigrants and asylum seekers as biden had been.
He took more money than any other politician from israel-- even before he was president. He was their creature and did their will instead of his constituents. In my book thats taking bribes and being a traitor to his oath.
Great that he did the things you cited, but that doesnt wash his hands of enabling a genocide + mass murder of journalists, doctors and aid worker either. He has a whole lot of blood on his hands-- in exchange for money. If there were any justice in the world he created, he’d be in handcuffs at the Hague with the rest of the war criminals. He also could have taken steps to trump proof the government after he lost, and he didnt do a damn thing. He left it wide open. Like an idiot-- at best.
Befoire he was president he created civil asset forfeiture which is a ridiculous violation of all of our constitutional rights, and rode the ridiculously overzelous 3 strikes laws through congress, demagoguing to drum up celebrity. Whenever there was a blue dog movement in congress, there he was. And his best friend was Strom Thurmond, and ex KKK leader. Biden was a ghoul. And his son made a life out of lobbying-- because he had access to his dad. He’s an expert at nothing at all. Not a good look for either one of them.
Do you remember how Good old loose lipped crazy uncle Joe used to be a “gaffe machine”, but every gaffe just happened to be about black people? I’m white, but that sure stuck in my mind. He was never presidential material. Obama brought him in because he was an old white guy who was republican-curious, not because he could lead his way out of a shallow paper lunchbag. I’m sure Obama regrets that decision to this day.
Well, I guess you’ve got Karl Marx all worked out.
Where does it uses liberal as an insult?
Right here:
it’s often been argued that the failures of liberal governance meaningfully helped to bring us to this moment.
How is that an insult?
In fact the only thing I would say is incorrect is the word ‘failures’, since I think they (the liberals, be it the Democrats or the equivalent in other countries) haven’t failed at all, quite the opposite, they’ve played their part masterfully to bring us here.
And before the liberals around feel attacked, this is not a ‘both sides are the same’ comment. That’s not how controlled opposition works. It’s more ‘both sides work together, even when they do very different things, to achieve the same goals’.
Just an example. While Trump’s DoJ is prosecuting people only because they are political opponents, Biden’s didn’t prosecute actual criminals (specially an orange one) because ‘they were political opponents, and it’s a bad look’. They disguise their inaction as civility, when it’s clear as water they’re doing it to further the plans of the people paying them, which is the same privileged class that’s paying the other side.
Even this side of the pond, without a ‘first pass the post’ system, with lots of parties, coalitions, and what not, it’s still exactly the same play.
It’s not that Trump didn’t have ongoing investigations and cases at the DOJ, it’s just that Biden took a hands off approach, the SCOTUS ruled Trump had Immunity for some of it, and then the US plurality reelected Trump to the white house.
Biden took a hands off approach
They always do, which was the point of my comment. When the ‘good ones’ are in power everything is impossible to do, ‘civility’ and ‘decorum’ being the usual excuses. But when it’s the turn for the ‘bad ones’ to rule, magically, everything is very straight forward and promptly done, without any impediment from the ‘good’ opposition or even with their blessing in the name of ‘bipartisanship’.
I, still, can’t see how that use of the word ‘liberal’ was an insult.
Lmfao anything is a tankie these days according to Lemmy. Anarchist? Tankie. SocDem? Tankie. Says the word liberal? Tankie.
I don’t believe that. I honestly also believe the majority of internet tankies probably originated as an unfortunately successful psyop campaign against the left.
True tankies and right wing extremists have a lot more in common than they seem to be willing to acknowledge. If you’re unable to critique authoritarian policy or murder of innocent civilians and political dissidents, regardless of which side of the political spectrum the policy was coming from, then you’re helping to normalize authoritarians like Trump, Putin, and Orbán.
For example, I have a very hard time believing this is not a right wing psyop disguised as a radical leftist movement in France:
I believe it’s fact that Robespierre had people conspiring against him, but “one mistake?” That seems to be an extreme understatement/deflection of reality. Robespierre initially had (or at least claimed to have) beliefs that most rational people would probably agree with. Like the belief that no one has the right to hoard heaps of wheat while his fellow man is starving.
That doesn’t change the fact that way too many innocent civilians were sent to the guillotine under his rule. Or the fact that people continued starving under his rule while his cabinet made some very odd financial decisions. Why does anyone need to prop a historical figure up as the representative of a modern leftist movement, and rationalize the mistakes he made in order to argue that you don’t believe anyone has the right to hoard money and resources by exploiting individuals who are starving and being oppressed?
The historian she cites in the article seems to argue the reign of terror was basically fake news created by Robespierre’s enemies after he died. One of the more recent articles I could find about the historian is an interview he gave discussing his work in a right of center publication. In the interview, he says that it was a complex period and shouldn’t be reduced to its decapitations. Seems reasonable.
Then he goes on to talk about examples of good that came from the time period, like the idea of free education for children. I understand you don’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater, but you also shouldn’t conflate achieving something positive with very unnecessary political violence. Choices were made. Decapitating everyone was not somehow excusable because Robespierre had reason to be paranoid/it was a chaotic time, and some good did come from it. That is exactly how people always manage to justify clearly unjust bullshit.
It just means we have another couple of decades of suffering to do before people catch on and decide to organize, but hey, that’s cool. 🤷
Some kind of system that treats people fairly and equally with guaranteed rights? One where everyone gets a say in how things are done? Maybe could call it: Deem-ewe-cra-teak Rep-oob-lick, rolls off the tongue.
Tankies claim to take us in the same direction we all want to go, but then their actions like abstaining from elections or instigating violence leads us towards GOP victories.
Name one instance of a fuckin tankie instigating real world violence in the US. Like, I’m a proper leftist and despise tankies as their general worldview is as reductive and stupid as libertarians, but there are no tankies wielding any sort of left wing influence. Certainly nothing remotely affiliated with liberals or the Democratic party. There’s less tankies in America than trans people. They’re not the problem, they’re just annoying. The problem is half the country, which would probably self-describe as liberal in context, couldn’t tell the difference between Trump and Harris.
https://sh.itjust.works/post/37226752
Though I suppose you absolutely needed an example of “in the USA”, but they’re in this very thread saying that voting doesn’t work cuz boTh SIdEs and that we need a bloody revolution. There is also CPUSA who have a literal weapons stockpile.
So what real world violence was instigated? We all know ml are nutcases but they have no impact or influence.
That’s like believing the Russian Troll Farms had no impact in 2016.
right, right, because USA hasn’t moved so far right, center doesn’t exist, and Democrats didn’t hand-wring and capitulate at every opportunity. Meanwhile, the EU is certainly a shining example of democracy…🧐😮💨🤮
Democratic party platform is healthcare for all, removing money from politics, and taxing the rich. People like you seem to never be able to elaborate how the USA is further right, but that never stops you from repeating the lie.
You want the USA to stop moving to the right? Elect more than 48 DNC senators for the first time in over ten years.
MF we’ve pointed it out repeatedly! Nixon was to the economic left of Clinton, Obama or Biden, I’ve lived here for six decades, but do go on at telling me I’m wrong!
Platforms don’t mean shit without codification and Dems conveniently excuse not doing any of it for 40 years, meanwhile GOP GET THINGS DONE. Not that they’re good things but they deliver what they promise. Dems wear kente cloths and vote for Rep agendas.
ETA moreover, Nixon was environmentally left of Democrats since then, too.
The solution was to roll your sleeves up and pull the country back left but you were apparently too busy jerking yourself off over being above it all. You register in closed primaries, stump for progressives and primary incumbent and establishment dems that aren’t progressive enough. You get grassroots support because these are wildly popular positions and always have been. But that’s a lot more work than just wanking off to “both sides bad”. Bit late for all that now though isn’t it Maeve?
For the record the guy you’re arguing with clearly doesn’t understand what the terms he’s using actually mean, but that doesn’t give you an excuse to spout literal Russian propaganda points.
Nixon sold drugs to black communities, is recorded on tape ranting about jews, kept a war going for personal gain, etc.
He might have saved some trees and whales, but he wasn’t left of jack shit. Here’s him talking about the dangers of homosexuality:
“They have a problem. They’re born that way. You know that. That’s all. I think they are. Boy Scout leaders, YMCA leaders and others bring them in that direction and teachers,” Nixon said. “And if you look over the history of societies, you will find, of course, that some of the highly intelligent people - Oscar Wilde, Aristotle, etc., etc., etc., were all homosexuals … Once a society moves in that direction, the vitality goes out of that society.”
NoooOOooOo Harris wuz teh GeNoSiDeeeeeeZsz!!1!
All I’m saying is it would be really very easy to oppose authoritarianism instead of railing specifically about liberals and very specifically western capitalism. It doesn’t help that such a large tankie community and psyop exists on Lemmy in the first place, if it didn’t then maybe we wouldn’t have to be so skeptical of everyone.
And what happens when the liberals kowtow to the authoritarians? You know like they have been doing. They supposed to be off limits from being called out?
If they kowtow to authoritarians then they are by definition not a Liberal.
I’m skeptical of people sounding like they’re well-off capitalist investors afraid they’ll have to pay a dime on a dollar in taxes.
I’m so pro-tax that it’s on my fucking profile page.
Right, right, just like Democrats are. 🤡
Correct.
