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.”
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Who is saying being an advocate for human rights is a flaw or imperfection? I’m saying the opposite. You can’t ignore human rights to justify the actions of a leader or movement, even if the actions were allegedly done for a greater good.
That’s what authoritarians always do. We can only achieve utopia if we get rid of the people standing in our way. We can only achieve X ideal tomorrow by sacrificing liberty today. We have to trust that the leader/party knows what’s best for us, even if we disagree with their actions.
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Talk about not having a point. If that was still true, they would have changed their party name.
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First line on their Wikipedia article. You don’t need to have the word “liberal” in your name to be one. It’s actually precisely why it’s used as an insult by certain progressives. They stopped being a liberal party a long time ago. Compared to Europe, Australia, Canada, etc, we have two shades of conservative as a choice.
Edit: I did say party name tho, I get it if you mean how we don’t have a liberal party in the sense they aren’t called “the liberal party” but I’m thinking that’s not what you were getting at either.
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Right, liberalism is about equality and conservativism is about hierarchies. That’s why it’s important to call people out when they fall short of those values out of a sense of needing to appease a wider voter base:
Its not that Biden didnt show up for those fights he secretly beleived in, its that Biden and the modern dem party doesnt beleive in those fights anymore. They keep them around as campaign props. They beleive that whoever amasses the most campaign money wins the campaign, regardless of platform.
No. Liberal generally means fiscally responsible while moderately socially progressive. You’ll note in that statement that the economic policy comes before the social ones, and generally at the expense of the social policies.
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Yeah, it’s right there 2 d because it’s literally an economic policy platform.
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it used to. It no longer does.
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Sure. But fox news calling someone bad doesnt necesarrily always mean they are good. We should never define ourselves by what idiot shitstains say, especially for a party so sensitive to bullying.
The DNC and thus the democratic party has been a dumpster fire for a decade at least and Biden drove us all off a cliff. Everyone wants to pretend his unpopularity was solely about his age, and not about his republican-curious career of bad ideas and mediocre half-measures lukewarm leadership. In the last election the DNC steered hard right so they could keep taking AIPAC money and ignore the left, and it failed, like it always does. They will try it again too-- they hate the left more than they hate centrist republicans-- and liberals still wont even admit that. So we’re all doomed until centrists pull their heads out of their collective rears.
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More people are liberal than they want to admit because it’s become such a “dirty word” and I do think that is by design. What we’re seeing is both these groups becoming victims of a campaign that is simply anti-humanitarian. What I try to drive home is that liberalism can exist in any economic system, and it will thrive in places that aren’t authoritarian.
If you believe the government shouldn’t attack free speech or any one’s rights, rights should be expanded, that immigrants deserve to exist, or a mass defense of freedom means we all stay free then YOU ARE LIBERAL
cool, but the last dem presidency acted against all those things instead of standing for them.
Not disagreeing entirely but that doesn’t mean the meaning of words change
NoOOo LiBeRaL iS tHe wOrSt tHiNg tO bE!!11