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.”
It’s rising because of the American public’s complacency and ignorance.
It’s the same thing that happened in 1930s Germany. An authoritarian government steps in, the people think it won’t be that bad, they allow it, they support it, they put up with it, they think government checks and balances still work … then when its all too late, people suddenly want to act.
If Americans don’t know what to do right now … they won’t have a chance to do anything later.
People don’t feel like there’s anything they can do, outside of the ordinary [eg voting]. There is no real intermediate step between peaceful protest and targeted violence. And people understandably don’t want to target their local authorities, who may not even be complicit.
This is a little vague but could be partly correct and is a good critique of Obama. Its also missing some points like billionaires ammassing too much monetary wealth.
I do think not attempting to break up media companies is a problem but taxing billionaires would have stopped a lot of this.
Typical. They ignore their members who are screaming “grow a spine, we’re losing because we aren’t fighting!” Literally for decades, then after they lose it all, contritely act like there’s something nobody could have seen coming they now have to learn from.
What, you didn’t see the consequences of letting the senate leader block a supreme court assignment for a fucking year? It never occurred to you they’d turn right around and seat the Republican assigned one within 24 hours?
Unprecedented? Really? You have a house election victor who still hasn’t been seated after a month and the Republican ones were seated within 24 hours. I haven’t seen one iota of fight in you fucking dweebs. They stop you when you have the majority, but you can’t do fucking anything when they have control. You guys fucked us over more than the Republicans did. At least we knew what they were doing. We expected you to fight for us and you fucking folded every single time, while telling us you would stand up and fight.
Now the only way were getting those Nazis out is full on military uprising, and anybody with a fucking clue knows it.
When Biden was like “we have too much respect for the country to pack the court” and privately they were saying “the polling doesn’t look good for us” I lost hope and realized we were going to lay down right in front of a steamroller. Mad frustrating.
This article lacks material analysis. Fascism is on the rise because it is the tool that capitalists use when workers gain class consciousness and start to demand more equality. The second Bernie became popular, a backlash like this was inevitable.
This article lacks material analysis
? It’s based on a report that was just released. It examines and critiques real life examples of mistakes within the previous administration. Building a More Effective, Responsive Government: Lessons Learned from the Biden-Harris Administration
One of its most compelling conclusions is that the Biden administration seemed reluctant to engage in “picking the fights worth having” and sometimes took refuge in incremental policy gains due to a self-limiting “risk aversion.” One senior official is quoted suggesting the White House didn’t give adequate support to agency leaders who thought they had a policy stance providing an opening to “have a fight and show who you’re for.”
Not standing up for the values that are supposed to be at the party’s roots, and acknowledging that doing the most basic wasn’t enough to lead the country where it needed to go, seems like a pretty perfect summary of why most people dislike establishment Democrats.
The second Bernie became popular, a backlash like this was inevitable.
No the second we became ok with normalizing executive overreach, ignoring checks and balances, and unilateral decisions by the president, it was inevitable. It’s not a backlash when every president in modern history basically paved the way for it to happen.
Material analysis is not so much concerned with the actions of individuals or even entire administrations. It is more so a lens to view an entire society. When I say that the backlash was inevitable, I am talking about the rise of fascism generally, not just the rise of Trump. So yes, the policies of previous politicians did “pave the way” for Trump, but that didn’t happen in a vacuum. It happened because the capitalist rulers saw that their position was at risk, so they exerted pressure to consolidate more power (i.e. fascism).
I dont think it was bernie that lit the fuse, i think it was having a black man as president. It made so many people unreasonably angry, they just couldnt accept it. Thats when the temperature started rising.
i’d argue it was more having the first black president running on a campaign of HOPE AND CHANGE
then…doing absolutely fuck all but furthering the status quo, completely unjustified warmongering, unsustainable ratfucking etc.
The second Bernie became popular, a backlash like this was inevitable.
A material analysis of Bernie Sanders would rule out a backlash because he’s never held power or set policy.
But even if you rate effectiveness by how much they aggravate the right, politicians like Pelosi prove that being effective is more threatening than being left. Politicians like Obama prove that being black is more threatening than being radical.
I think you’ll find Bernie Sanders rates far higher in MAGA circles than Pelosi or Obama. Because he doesn’t represent any threat to them. (check out his defense of Trump’s immigration policy)
Reactionaries don’t need the actual existence of revolutionary power to pull the fascist card, they just need the threat of it. I use Bernie as an example of rising class consciousness, not because he is some Great Man who is the epicenter of history.
the whole dnc this year exemplified and was iconic of the democrat party and had their full face shown mask off
but in full on football politics fashion democrats just like republicans get blindly straight color ticket voted on using voting machines that are the property of some unknown company without a wikipedia page to do it with
and the information that got them to cast a blind vote for red or blue came from media that is owned by the same groups that own the voting machine
and citizens are taught how to interpret data at schools which use materials that are owned by the same ones control the media and the vote machines
democracy is dead
