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.”
I voted and supported my candidate who damn sure didn’t run on genocide and campaigning with Liz Cheney. That was the solution, not wanking off and voting to “move farther right just one more time bro, I promise this time it’s going to work!” 🤡🌎
The candidate, I will add, whom Democrats sued to keep off ballots in swing states.
There it is. Congratulations, your principles and/or lack of understanding of how our federal system operates is responsible for Trump. Own it. You are the American that failed the open book test. I hope you get first have experience of everything you voted for.
Edit: wait holy shit did you vote green party? Did you vote for the actually literally a Russian spoiler party and wanna talk about Democrats? That’s a choice alright.
🤡🤓
Eta: I’m not young enough to know it all, nor old enough to be entirely forgetful. I’m in between, where I know and remember how many candidates Dems sued to keep off the ballots, while doing genocide and other war crimes.