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.
The american public has been told for the last 30 years that voting for democrats would prevent something like this
It’s democratic complacency that this report is pointing to that is at fault.
I fear you are correct. As much as I mention I kind of like the counter protestors as it shows how small a group it is relative to people fighting facism I also have verified to my satisfaction that in some cases they are not paid shills and they seem to be able to be blind to everything for the sake of their side winning. I mean we have masked unmarked paramilitary killing, injuring, destroying property, and invading private residences. Its crazy they can ignore that.