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 they oppose liberalism then they’re not left. Liberalism doesn’t even have anything to do with capitalism inherently, just that government intervention should be limited to protecting people’s rights.
You do not understand what the term liberal actually means as it’s used in American economic and political discourse. You’re waging a semantic war over your own personal definition of the term. Liberalism is literally a capitalist economic policy. You are not describing liberalism, you’re describing some weird sort of social libertarianism.
The sad thing here is we all largely agree with one another about what’s important but are arguing about terms. Classical leftist problems, can’t get anything done because we’re too busy correcting each other. I digress. Everyone else is using the term liberal correctly, and you are not. Sorry bud.
I am using it how I have always used it, how my opponents have always used it, and how the dictionary says it is used now and historically.
The reason the word is getting more bad reputation these days are because:
Tankies unironically don’t support human rights advocacy, actively try to tie the word into their anti-“capitalist” ideology.
This online community has a lot of people frequenting from nations which have Liberal Parties which are all actually cunts, yeah.
In political science and philosophy terms, that’s more precisely called Classical Liberalism or Civil Libertarianism, whereas in common American parlance, the unqualified term “liberal” has become colloquially tied to Neoliberalism.
You can fight that if you want, but the ship left the harbor decades ago.
I should know where the Liberal ship sails. I’m on it. One with the ship, One with the crew. When people tell you who they are, you could make an effort to give the benefit of the doubt.