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.”
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.