
Alex Brandon/AP Photo
President Joe Biden speaks at the U.S. Conference of Mayors in Washington, January 17, 2025.
President Biden’s closing act has seen a flurry of administrative rulings, executive orders, pardons, and commutations. He’s canceled more student loan debt, taken federal convicts off death row, subjected Ozempic and Wegovy to price negotiations with Medicare, declared the Equal Rights Amendment to be ratified—it’s a long list, and by the time you’re reading this, there may still have been more.
Few presidential closing acts, however, penetrate the nation’s collective memory, chiefly because the good and the harm that presidents do invariably come well before their closing grace notes. The only two closings that even students of history remember, I suspect, are the farewell addresses of George Washington and Dwight Eisenhower, and only because of some warnings they sounded that occupied just a couple of paragraphs within much longer texts.
Biden’s farewell address could well join that company. Not surprisingly, he extolled his administration’s achievements and laid out his responses to the challenges of the moment, defending democracy against its domestic critics, and empiricism (the -ism Republicans hate most) against unmediated social media.
But as with the goodbyes of George and Ike, Joe’s farewell will be remembered for its explicit warning about the growth of an American oligarchy. Here’s what Biden said:
I want to warn the country of some things that give me great concern. And this is a dangerous—and that’s the dangerous concentration of power in the hands of a very few ultrawealthy people, and the dangerous consequences if their abuse of power is left unchecked. Today, an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead. We see the consequences all across America. And we’ve seen it before.
More than a century ago, the American people stood up to the robber barons back then and busted the trusts. They didn’t punish the wealthy. They just made the wealthy play by the rules everybody else had. Workers want rights to earn their fair share. You know, they were dealt into the deal, and it helped put us on the path to building the largest middle class, the most prosperous century any nation the world has ever seen. We’ve got to do that again.
I don’t know if Biden would have sounded this warning so explicitly if Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg hadn’t gratuitously flocked to Donald Trump’s banner, while also enabling fabrications and hate speech to enter much of the nation’s discourse. Given how the extreme wealth of American billionaires has grown hugely in recent years, however, and how much of that wealth those billionaires now deploy in elections with the goal of increasing their wealth even more, I suspect some version of this would have made it into Biden’s speech even if Musk hadn’t become Trump’s number one buddy.
I’m struck by the remedies Biden suggests in the second paragraph that I quoted. They embrace the antitrust initiatives that distinguished his presidency from those of the preceding 13 presidents. They implicitly double down on progressives’ emerging election analysis and agenda for Democrats: that the way to regain working-class voters is through policies that more effectively address their economic woes.
But I’m struck, too, by the ways in which Biden’s warning both resembles and differs from Washington’s and Eisenhower’s. Washington’s farewell address, which was actually penned by Alexander Hamilton, famously cautioned Americans “to steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world,” a slap-down directed at Thomas Jefferson and his followers, whose Francophilia had grown with their support for the French Revolution.
But Washington devoted even more of his text to the threat posed by domestic dissent, which he saw looming in the political parties that were then forming. Vengeful parties were particularly dangerous, he noted:
[The] domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism. But this leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism. The disorders and miseries which result gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual; and sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction, more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation, on the ruins of public liberty.
Washington’s warnings against Trumpism were actually more direct than those Biden delivered in his closing address, though Biden had sounded plenty of such warnings during the four preceding years.
Eisenhower’s address, of course, is remembered for his warning against the consequences of the nation having acquired a permanent military-industrial complex, not least because Eisenhower’s pre-presidential career had been famously spent in the military. Here’s what Ike said:
Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations.
This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence—economic, political, even spiritual—is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.
Less remembered is a remarkable passage in which Eisenhower warned against the corruption of scholarship by the strictures imposed by government funding, as well as the rise to power of a tech oligarchy:
[T]he free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers.
The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present—and is gravely to be regarded.
Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.
As with Washington’s warnings about vengeful parties and leaders, Eisenhower’s foreseeing the rise of a tech elite could have fit nicely into Biden’s valedictory. (I pause to note here that while Eisenhower was no liberal, liberals underrated him almost as much as they overrated his Democratic opponent in his two presidential elections, Adlai Stevenson.)
Unlike Biden, neither Washington nor Eisenhower warned about the threat that great wealth as such posed to democracy. Washington, of course, lived at a time when America’s understanding of democracy was markedly underdeveloped, with the franchise still restricted to white men of property, and with wealth concentrated in such slaveholding plantation owners as Washington himself.
Eisenhower, by contrast, lived in a nation where the heirs to the Rockefellers and the Mellons had great wealth and political influence. But he also lived in a nation where the legacy of trust-busting and, more impactfully, the continued persistence of New Deal economics had limited the rise of newer fortunes and the political clout of wealth. It was during Ike’s presidency that the tax rate on the highest incomes reached its apogee: 91 percent. It was during Ike’s presidency that the rate of unionization also reached its apogee: 35 percent. And it wasn’t until half a decade following Ike’s presidency, when CEOs had begun trying to erode some of those New Deal norms, that business and marketing guru Peter Drucker said that the highest permissible ratio between CEO pay and median worker pay should go no higher than 20-to-1. Eisenhower warned against the power of institutions, while Biden warned against the power of the super-rich who’ve arisen only after decades of deregulation, deunionization, and the arbitrage inherent in globalization.
So it’s not just Biden’s farewell that called out the current dangers to our democracy. Biden’s warnings against the threat posed by great wealth, Eisenhower’s warnings against the military-industrial complex and the rise of a tech elite, and Washington’s warnings against an intolerant factionalism and entanglements with foreign powers can all be literally and justly applied to Elon Musk, whose Starlink and SpaceX have supplanted various Pentagon projects, and who has sought to ingratiate himself with Chinese president Xi so he can sell his driverless cars to the Chinese market almost as much as he’s sought to ingratiate himself with Trump.
The nightmare oligarchy that descends on us today has been foreseen by America’s leaders for a very long time.