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.”
More people are liberal than they want to admit because it’s become such a “dirty word” and I do think that is by design. What we’re seeing is both these groups becoming victims of a campaign that is simply anti-humanitarian. What I try to drive home is that liberalism can exist in any economic system, and it will thrive in places that aren’t authoritarian.
If you believe the government shouldn’t attack free speech or any one’s rights, rights should be expanded, that immigrants deserve to exist, or a mass defense of freedom means we all stay free then YOU ARE LIBERAL
cool, but the last dem presidency acted against all those things instead of standing for them.
Not disagreeing entirely but that doesn’t mean the meaning of words change
NoOOo LiBeRaL iS tHe wOrSt tHiNg tO bE!!11