How Joe Biden wasted his presidency His warnings about the oligarchy ring hollow

In his farewell address to the nation on Wednesday, President Biden warned that “an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power, and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy”. He went on to explicitly echo his predecessor Dwight Eisenhower’s famed admonition about the “military-industrial complex”, intoning that a “tech-industrial complex” similarly imperils America today.

While ostensibly addressing an important issue — concentrated wealth and power — Biden ultimately offered a shallow and pettily partisan account in a way that embodied his political failure as he exits the stage of history.

As many have noted, there was plenty of irony to be found in the address. Democrats, not Republicans, have recently been favoured — in donations and votes — by corporate America, including Big Tech, a few prominent defectors notwithstanding. But the issue with Biden’s speech wasn’t that it was hypocritical given his party’s fundraising prowess and increasingly upscale base. Ike himself, after all, had overseen the expansion of the very military-industrial complex he decried, but at least he ended his presidency with a memorable articulation of the problem that pointed the finger at an institution with which he was closely associated.

Biden, in contrast, followed up his comments on a real crisis that has been mounting for decades — a rising oligarchy — with some indications that the main such people he’s concerned about aren’t oligarchs writ large, so much as a few in particular: Donald Trump and his cronies. In this respect, he showed little understanding of why his presidency is ending in such lousy fashion: a governing vision that has vacillated between a broad critique of concentrated wealth and a far narrower one focused on the crisis represented by Trump.

“Never let a good crisis go to waste”: This phrase, attributed to Winston Churchill, was notably repurposed by Rahm Emanuel, chief of staff to Biden’s old boss, Barack Obama. Emanuel’s reference was to the 2008 financial crisis, which brought an end to two decades of bipartisan optimism about the US economy. But as former Obama adviser Reed Hundt argued in his 2019 book, A Crisis Wasted, Obama failed to seize on the opportunity to remake the economic order. Infamously, he bailed out the banks but left homeowners underwater; he also initiated quantitative-easing policies that juiced the markets but redounded heavily to the benefit of the asset-rich; and presided over a dramatic worsening of inequality. Trump’s successful defiance of GOP economic orthodoxies around free trade and entitlements and his defeat of Hillary Clinton amounted to a belated verdict on Obama’s inability to deliver real reform.

The Biden presidency, which began amid the ongoing fallout of the pandemic, offered the possibility of a do-over. Many saw the $2 trillion American Rescue Plan, enacted under two months after Biden’s inauguration, as proof his administration had discarded the excessive caution that got in the way of Obama’s hope to be a transformative president. After campaigning mostly as a moderate with the modest goal of helping lead the nation out of crisis, Biden entered office promising to be the “most progressive president since FDR,” whose portrait he hung above the fireplace in the Oval Office.

If we didn’t know Biden’s party had lost decisively after his ignominious withdrawal from the campaign, his farewell address might have sounded like a victory lap. To be sure, he can’t be faulted for an unwillingness to “go big”, between the stimulus packages, the revival of a trust-busting agenda targeting big corporations, and the industrial policy aimed at, as Biden put it, “creating new businesses and industries, hiring American workers, using American products”. Congressional progressives are happy to give him credit for all this. So why weren’t working-class voters, who not only didn’t bring back the FDR-era Democratic supermajority, but drifted even further from the party?

Many plausible answers have already been offered to this question: Biden couldn’t overcome the global anti-incumbency wave fed by inflation; he failed to control the border; the industrial and infrastructure projects he subsidised will take too long to come online to generate immediate benefits; his own senility and Kamala Harris’s inept candidacy doomed them; and so on. But Biden’s farewell address highlighted something more fundamental. Despite his administration’s sweeping economic reforms, it remained wedded to the Democratic Party’s main post-2016 sales pitch, which is roughly: whatever we are, at least we aren’t Donald Trump.

Consider the “real dangers” of the “tech-industrial complex” highlighted in Biden’s speech: not, for instance, the immense power wielded over employees by companies such as Uber (whose general counsel, as it happens, served as one of Kamala Harris’s main advisers in the 2024 race), but an “avalanche of misinformation and disinformation”. He went on to lament that “social media is giving up on fact-checking”, an allusion to Mark Zuckerberg’s recent announcement that he would retire Meta’s fact-checking programme in favour of community notes.

The notion that the gravest crisis affecting the country is “misinformation”, to be countered by fact-checking, can be traced back to the frantic postmortems that followed Hillary Clinton’s 2016 loss. That Biden is sticking to this message up to his final day in office suggests his party has hardly evolved since then, even though the misinformation narrative has been widely disputed and the eight-year war on “fake news” utterly failed to achieve its main objective: preventing Trump’s return to office.

It is unsurprising that constant warnings about these supposed threats failed to turn many voters against their nemesis, and may have done the opposite. Misinformation worries political and media elites, but barely registers for most people — for good reason. The circulation of un-approved ideas, stories, and messages is symptomatic of gatekeepers’ loss of control. If you’re a gatekeeper, that’s a crisis for you; if you’re not, it isn’t. Not only that, the misinformation narrative exudes contempt for the ordinary citizen, who is treated as an ignorant rube in need of constant supervision. No wonder this message’s resonance barely extends outside a few small precincts.

No less than Obama, then, Biden let a crisis go to waste. But part of the reason for this was he and his party, for self-interested reasons, misrecognised what the crisis was. A whole series of threats — Vladimir Putin’s Russia, fake news, authoritarianism, Covid — were conjured up or made to stand in for the crisis ostensibly represented by one man. Yet while Trump has been a crisis for the political class, most of the public hasn’t viewed him that way; even many who didn’t vote for him were unreceptive to the Democrats’ “saving-democracy” messaging. Moreover, in 2024 even more than earlier cycles, many saw his disruptive presence as a necessary response to crises they do care about, and the political class doesn’t: affordability, crime, out-of-control immigration.

The concentrated wealth of a man such as Elon Musk, who has now used it to buy himself a place in the president-elect’s inner circle, is a genuine concern — a crisis, perhaps. But Biden and his party have spent most of the past eight years claiming not that they will confront such influence-peddling, but posturing as the defenders of an establishment we all know was corrupted by the wealthy long before Trump first took control of the GOP.

In his 1936 re-election campaign, FDR could declare that “business and financial monopoly” were “unanimous in their hatred for me — and I welcome their hatred”. In 2024, Kamala Harris could say no such thing — and on the contrary, she regularly cited the plaudits she received from Goldman Sachs and other corporate interests as the ultimate proof of her competence. To anyone who remembers this, Biden’s warnings about oligarchy ring hollow.

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