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.”
…except there was plenty of actual both sides stuff going on under Biden/Harris. Stuff like immigration crackdowns, and support for increased police powers and budgets, a failure to show up to protect Roe, a willfull failure to hold trump accountable for an insurrection and collaborating with Russia, and with Biden throughout his career-- always a lack of respect for our civil and human rights. Lets be honest for once and not pretend the dems didnt veer hard right on a lot of things under Bidens watch. As an example, Biden led the country in enabling and funding a far right genocide and Harris said she’d do the same. People were murdered on Bidens watch via war crimes he actively participated in. Americans, some of them. Biden/Harris lost the left and a good part of their base doing it. Is any of that “both sides disinformation”? Did or did not harris talk lovingly about her glock on the campaign trail? she did. While students across the country cower in live fire drills and kids and parents are terrorized in the name of pewpew ownership for all, wondering if someone will kill them at school. Thats both sides supporting those bad policies, which is why a cheney could hover unironically at harris’s elbow during her campaign.
This is simple reality that a lot of centrist liberals refuse to acknowledge, and they need to in order to move forward with their left flank-- who they cant win elections without. Dems arent simply “the good guys” lately and thats why a big chunk of their own voters and almost all youth effing hate them and only vote for them because they are the second party of a 2 party system. Biden lost the left because he’s had an entire career of being a racist halfwit republican-curious dealmaker instead of a leader. He was a bad candidate and had dumb, bad policies that polled badly on all sides. And harris couldnt order her own lunch without help from someone else. And the centrists in the party cant admit to Biden leading the way away from the traditiobnal Dem party platform. Theres our problem.
And this is what taking AIPAC’s money gets you. An utterly destroyed party on life support. And aipac couldnt care less.
That is literally what this report says. The Dems didn’t pick their fights to prove who they were fighting for.
and yet you call out “both sides” as a “tankie” and right wing attack. Why did you do that?.