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.”
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.
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:
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.