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.”
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.
Everything short of Utopia is not progressive, I guess. Nobody is left except for you.