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.”
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.