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.”
How is that an insult?
In fact the only thing I would say is incorrect is the word ‘failures’, since I think they (the liberals, be it the Democrats or the equivalent in other countries) haven’t failed at all, quite the opposite, they’ve played their part masterfully to bring us here.
And before the liberals around feel attacked, this is not a ‘both sides are the same’ comment. That’s not how controlled opposition works. It’s more ‘both sides work together, even when they do very different things, to achieve the same goals’.
Just an example. While Trump’s DoJ is prosecuting people only because they are political opponents, Biden’s didn’t prosecute actual criminals (specially an orange one) because ‘they were political opponents, and it’s a bad look’. They disguise their inaction as civility, when it’s clear as water they’re doing it to further the plans of the people paying them, which is the same privileged class that’s paying the other side.
Even this side of the pond, without a ‘first pass the post’ system, with lots of parties, coalitions, and what not, it’s still exactly the same play.
It’s not that Trump didn’t have ongoing investigations and cases at the DOJ, it’s just that Biden took a hands off approach, the SCOTUS ruled Trump had Immunity for some of it, and then the US plurality reelected Trump to the white house.
They always do, which was the point of my comment. When the ‘good ones’ are in power everything is impossible to do, ‘civility’ and ‘decorum’ being the usual excuses. But when it’s the turn for the ‘bad ones’ to rule, magically, everything is very straight forward and promptly done, without any impediment from the ‘good’ opposition or even with their blessing in the name of ‘bipartisanship’.
I, still, can’t see how that use of the word ‘liberal’ was an insult.