Why Is Trump Autocracy Rising? These Dems Have an Unnerving Answer.

That’s something Democrats have been slow to entertain: Picking big arguments designed to stoke conflict and controversy can jar low-information voters out of their algorithmic torpor and get them to take sides themselves. The alternative is giving right-wing propaganda more leeway to determine the prevailing political “weather,” as Brian Beutler puts it.

In another good example, the report notes that officials were hampered by fear of “high profile funding flops,” like the scandal that erupted around green energy company Solyndra during Barack Obama’s presidency. That led officials to build safeguards into clean energy investments that slowed them down. As one noted, that allowed “fear of a mistake” to overshadow discussion of whether it’s “more important to have this happen quickly.”

“There’s almost been a great forgetting that’s happened across agencies,” Lina Khan, former commissioner of the Federal Trade Commission, told me. A half century of right-wing attacks on government, she said, has led to “insufficient attention to all the things that can go wrong when you’re not doing enough.”