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.”
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.
…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.
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
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.
The point I’m trying to explain to you is that the CONCEPTS of Liberal and the LIBERAL PARTIES are different even to the point of being opposed. The DNC are a Liberal Party, but the Liberal Party of Australia is NOT a Liberal Party.
It’s kind of like how Republicans aren’t upholding a republic, the Chinese Communist Party aren’t Communists, and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea are not a Democratic Republic, doesn’t belong to the people, and also do not own the Korean Peninsula.
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:
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.
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.
The part that says Liberalism would ban the occupation and sale of land? I feel like that’s not the “gotcha” you think it is, that basically opposes the concept of statehood and capitalism entirely.
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.
I feel like if you used Fox News calling something bad as a litmus test for it being good that you would be correct more often than not.
The DNC policies are very left. They want to remove money from politics, fairly redistrict election maps, give medical care to everyone, build strong alliances and reduce nuclear weapons stockpiles across the world, and tax the rich. If we had more than 48 DNC senators at any point in the last ten years things wouldn’t be so shit in the first place.
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
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