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.”

  • Basic Glitch@sh.itjust.worksOP
    92·
    2 days ago

    I don’t believe that. I honestly also believe the majority of internet tankies probably originated as an unfortunately successful psyop campaign against the left.

    True tankies and right wing extremists have a lot more in common than they seem to be willing to acknowledge. If you’re unable to critique authoritarian policy or murder of innocent civilians and political dissidents, regardless of which side of the political spectrum the policy was coming from, then you’re helping to normalize authoritarians like Trump, Putin, and Orbán.

    For example, I have a very hard time believing this is not a right wing psyop disguised as a radical leftist movement in France:

    For me, Robespierre made one major mistake in the Revolution, in not addressing the issue of women’s right to vote. He’s often cast as the architect of the Terror. But historians, especially Jean-Clément Martin, have shown how far the Terror was in fact invented after Robespierre’s death by those who killed him.

    I believe it’s fact that Robespierre had people conspiring against him, but “one mistake?” That seems to be an extreme understatement/deflection of reality. Robespierre initially had (or at least claimed to have) beliefs that most rational people would probably agree with. Like the belief that no one has the right to hoard heaps of wheat while his fellow man is starving.

    That doesn’t change the fact that way too many innocent civilians were sent to the guillotine under his rule. Or the fact that people continued starving under his rule while his cabinet made some very odd financial decisions. Why does anyone need to prop a historical figure up as the representative of a modern leftist movement, and rationalize the mistakes he made in order to argue that you don’t believe anyone has the right to hoard money and resources by exploiting individuals who are starving and being oppressed?

    The historian she cites in the article seems to argue the reign of terror was basically fake news created by Robespierre’s enemies after he died. One of the more recent articles I could find about the historian is an interview he gave discussing his work in a right of center publication. In the interview, he says that it was a complex period and shouldn’t be reduced to its decapitations. Seems reasonable.

    Then he goes on to talk about examples of good that came from the time period, like the idea of free education for children. I understand you don’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater, but you also shouldn’t conflate achieving something positive with very unnecessary political violence. Choices were made. Decapitating everyone was not somehow excusable because Robespierre had reason to be paranoid/it was a chaotic time, and some good did come from it. That is exactly how people always manage to justify clearly unjust bullshit.