Joe Biden’s farewell speech: “An oligarchy is taking shape”

George Washington’s Farewell Address, a long farewell letter largely written and published by Alexander Hamilton Claypoole’s Daily Advertiserin September 1796, was an eloquent justification for his withdrawal from public life and for the need for a peaceful transfer of power. Washington’s centrality as the leader of the Revolution and the first president made him seem irreplaceable and regal. In the spirit of a “departing friend,” he warned against such appreciation of a leader and the factional and institutional threats that could undermine a young democracy.

Today, most presidents use the occasion of a farewell for routine self-justification, a summary of their accomplishments, or gestures of gratitude. In other words, it’s almost entirely boring. The exceptions—from Dwight D. Eisenhower’s warning of a growing “military-industrial complex” in 1961 to Richard Nixon’s rhetoric of self-pity in the face of his resignation and disgrace in 1974—are rare.

On Wednesday evening, Joe Biden gave his final address in the Oval Office. Much of the speech was trite in its rhetoric and dull in its delivery. Biden leaves office not only with understandable exhaustion, but also with a touch of barely concealed bitterness. He continues to believe that he could have won re-election without the betrayal within his own party, but no one could watch his final appearance at the Resolute office and think that he could continue in his job, no matter how much one fears the terrible alternative . In a quiet, papery voice, Biden moved from one topic to the next — from the dangers and prospects of artificial intelligence to the continued existence of freedom in Ukraine — giving each topic a flat sentence or two. As Los Angeles burns, climate change needed little more than a few lines.

And yet one passage in Biden’s remarks stood out and should resonate with the same lasting resonance as Eisenhower’s prescient exhortation more than half a century ago. What Biden was trying to describe was quite real, even self-evident now, but hearing it from a president was frightening.

“I would like to warn the country about some things that worry me greatly. And that is a dangerous worry. And that is the dangerous concentration of power in the hands of a few super-rich people,” Biden said. “Today, an oligarchy of extreme wealth, power and influence is taking shape in America, threatening literally our entire democracy, our fundamental rights and freedoms, and offering everyone a fair chance to get ahead.”

As I watched Biden, I remembered a moment in December 1990 when Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze stood before the assembled dignitaries from the government, the Communist Party, the military and the KGB and said: “Dictatorship is coming. I tell you this with full responsibility. Nobody knows what this dictatorship will look like, what kind of dictator will come to power and what order will be established.” A few sentences later, Shevardnadze announced his resignation and let his words resonate in the hall. In less than a year, these KGB-led forces put President Mikhail Gorbachev under house arrest, sent tanks into Moscow and seized power – until it was retaken three days later. (Of course, at some point, dictatorship arose hand in hand with the oligarchy in post-Soviet Russia.)

Biden expressed his urgent warning about the course of power in the United States cautiously and unspecifically. He did not directly mention Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg or other tech billionaires who have sought the new president’s favor. He offered no analysis of the pro-Trump libertarianism that has become the dominant ideology in much of Silicon Valley. There was no detailed description of how the emerging American oligarchy differed from the more developed, unchallenged forms of oligarchy in Russia or China. But hearing Biden, who ran for president not as a democratic socialist or social democrat but as a centrist in the party, speak out against the growing signs of oligarchy makes sense. Huge donations of black money are already infecting both major parties. Thirteen of Donald Trump’s most important members of his government are billionaires. Two of them, Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, enter government promising to cut trillions of dollars in “inefficiencies.”

This dismal week has also made clear that Trump has bolstered his fat cat government with pretentious and worryingly underequipped mediocrities. Much has been made public about Pete Hegseth’s alleged behavior toward women and around a bottle. Hegseth’s lame denials (“Anonymous slander!”) in this regard were as expected as they were annoying. Even more spectacular was his lack of competence, capacity or knowledge. When Senator Tammy Duckworth asked Hegseth about the ongoing international negotiations, he had no idea: She asked him to name which countries were involved ASEANthe unification of countries in Southeast Asia with which the United States does important business, and he was forced to plead ignorance. He hadn’t done the reading before class — which is fine for a weekend anchor on Fox News, but less desirable for a candidate slated to be the leader of the world’s most powerful military at a time of extraordinary everyday tension and transformation.

Biden leaves office with a significant political legacy, severely marred by his failure to commit to one term limit. The costs are obvious: a second Trump administration that is quickly becoming apparent in its character and policies. However, it is to Biden’s credit that he carefully warned in his farewell speech about what is now “taking shape,” a quintessentially American form of oligarchy that threatens the democratic spirit that runs through the farewell speech of his most distant predecessor. ♦