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.”
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:
Tankies unironically don’t support human rights advocacy, actively try to tie the word into their anti-“capitalist” ideology.
This online community has a lot of people frequenting from nations which have Liberal Parties which are all actually cunts, yeah.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Biden didn’t crack down on campus protests, he just didn’t listen to them. Biden Admin wasn’t hard on asylum seekers and immigration, a record number of immigrants attained citizenship underneath Biden. Biden was horrible on Israel Palestine conflict, but no matter how bad he was the opponent party was far far worse, and like it or not that makes his approach, cautiously and callously dealing with Israel, the progressive stance because the US Center stance was to give them the weapons they paid for and the far right stance was to bomb the shit out of the region. Have you seen charts of food trucks delivering aid by month? The moment Biden left and Trump entered offfice, aid to gaza stopped flowing.
You talk about Biden’s past, but conveniently you don’t talk about how he served as VP to the first black president. You don’t talk about how he spent his last years in congress trying to repeal laws that he wrote in 1995 because he understood that they were wrong.
Biden was a damn good president, and more progressive than any president before him, just as I know the next DNC president will be.
Not true.
“Destroying property is not a peaceful protest,” Biden said Thursday. “It is against the law. Vandalism, trespassing, breaking windows, shutting down campuses, forcing the cancellation of classes and graduations, none of this is a peaceful protest.”
https://time.com/6973969/joe-biden-condemns-campus-protests-palestine-israel-hamas/
Notice how Biden threw in some peaceful protest actions and called them violence.
we dont define our commitment to human dignity and respect on a sliding scale by what the worst humans do. Thats barbaric and its not how any of this works.
congrats to Biden for being white? Or shall I congratulate Biden for agreeing to be handpicked to be vp to a black guy after he lost the primary, like he lost every sibgle other primary after he repeatedly ran over and over? Congrats, I guess. Fr being white and saying yes to a dream offer. Do you think that took some balls for Biden? It did not.
Well, I guess you’ve got Karl Marx all worked out.