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.”
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.