How the hesitation to 'pick the fights worth having' paved the way for Trump: report

Nine months into Donald Trump's second presidency, The Roosevelt Institute is releasing a report on Joe Biden's presidency that, according to The New Republic's Greg Sargent, "seeks to diagnose" his administration's "governing mistakes and failures" and includes input from "nearly four dozen" ex-Biden officials.

Sargent, in an article published on October 28, offers some takeaways on its findings.

"In the report," Sargent explains, "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…. 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 of the ex-Biden officials quoted in the report is ex-secretary of labor Julie Su, who discussed the findings with Sargent and believes that the Biden Administration didn't do enough to win the confidence of working-class Americans.

Su told Sargent, "We were facing 40 or 50 years of backsliding for working people. What we needed was to meet that moment with boldness. There was too much hesitation…. The moment demanded that we unleash the full powers of our investigative resources to go after companies for exploitation of workers in every way. It didn't happen to the extent that it could and should have."

A recurring theme in the report, according to Sargent, is that the Biden Administration played it too safe. And when liberals appear weak or indecisive, Sargent warns, that can result in "fascists stepping in."

"Biden officials who contributed to the report also include many well-known senior staffers from agencies like the Commerce, Agriculture, and Health and Human Services departments — making the range of contributors very ideologically diverse within the Democratic coalition," Sargent notes. "All this is a partial list of the proposed reforms. The report will not please everyone: It doesn't discuss Biden's age or enfeeblement, or the internal failure to take it seriously enough, and perhaps due to the Roosevelt Institute's economic focus, the report says nothing about immigration or cultural liberalism. That will irritate those who want Democrats to moderate on immigration and cultural issues to avoid inflaming right-wing reaction and those who want Democrats to engage on both forcefully to activate low-info voters' broad small-L liberal sympathies."

Sargent adds, "All this will also stir up the debate between 'abundance' liberals, who want to reform government to facilitate production of essential social goods, and those who are skeptical of them, fearing that this could sideline egalitarian and redistributive goals in favor of growth."

Read Greg Sargent's full article for The New Republic at this link.