In his farewell address, a weary President Biden issues an essential warning.
January 16, 2025
Photograph by Evelyn Hockstein / Reuters
George Washington’s farewell address, a long valedictory letter written largely by Alexander Hamilton, and published in Claypoole’s Daily Advertiser, in September, 1796, was an eloquent rationale for his departure from public life and for the need for peaceful transitions of power. Washington’s centrality as a leader of the Revolution and as the first President had the effect of making him seem irreplaceable, kingly. In the spirit of a “parting friend,” he warned against such regard for a leader and the factional and institutional threats that might undermine a fledgling democracy.
In modern times, most Presidents use the occasion of a farewell for rote self-justification, a summary of accomplishments, gestures of gratitude. It is, in other words, almost uniformly dull. The exceptions—from Dwight D. Eisenhower’s caution against 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.
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On Wednesday night, Joe Biden delivered his last address from the Oval Office. Much of the speech was hackneyed in its rhetoric and weary in its delivery. Biden is leaving office not merely with understandable exhaustion but with pangs of barely concealed bitterness. He continues to believe that, were it not for the betrayals in his own party, he could have won reëlection, but no one could watch his final performance at the Resolute desk and think that he could go on in the job, no matter how much one dreads the dreadful alternative. In a low and papery voice, Biden shifted from one subject to the next—from the perils and the prospects of artificial intelligence to the persistence of freedom in Ukraine—giving each subject a flat sentence or two. As Los Angeles burns, climate change warranted little more than a couple of lines.
And yet one passage in Biden’s remarks stood out and should echo with the same lasting resonance as Eisenhower’s prescient admonition more than half a century ago. What Biden was intent on describing was quite real, even self-evident by now, but to hear it from a President was startling.
“I want to warn the country of some things that give me great concern. And this is a dangerous concern. And that’s the dangerous concentration of power in the hands of a very few ultra-wealthy people,” Biden said. “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.”
Watching Biden, I was reminded of a moment, in December, 1990, when the Soviet Foreign Minister, Eduard Shevardnadze, stood before the assembled grandees of the government, the Communist Party, the military, and the K.G.B., and said, “Dictatorship is coming. I tell you that with full responsibility. No one knows what this dictatorship will be 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 linger in the hall. In less than a year, those forces, led by the K.G.B., put President Mikhail Gorbachev under house arrest, sent tanks into Moscow, and seized power—until it was seized back, three days later. (Dictatorship, of course, eventually arrived, hand in hand with oligarchy, in post-Soviet Russia.)
Biden, in delivering his stark warning about the course of power in the United States, was reserved, unspecific. He made no direct mention of Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, or other tech billionaires who have sought the favor of the incoming President. He offered no dissection of the pro-Trump libertarianism that has become the prevailing ideology of so much of Silicon Valley. There was no detailed description of the way that the nascent American oligarchy differs from the more developed, more unchallenged forms of oligarchy in Russia or China. But to hear Biden, who ran for the Presidency not as a democratic socialist or a social democrat but as a centrist in the party, speak out against the gathering signs of oligarchy has meaning. Immense dark-money contributions already infect both major parties. Thirteen of Donald Trump’s key Administration appointees are billionaires. Two of them, Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, are entering the Administration promising to cut trillions of dollars in “inefficiencies.”
This sombre week has also made it plain that Trump has bolstered his Administration of fat cats with gaudy and alarmingly under-equipped mediocrities. Of Pete Hegseth’s alleged behavior with women and in proximity to a bottle, much has been published. Hegseth’s lame denials (“Anonymous smears!”) in that regard were as expected as they were galling. Even more spectacular was his lack of competence, capacity, or knowledge. When Senator Tammy Duckworth asked Hegseth about ongoing international negotiations, he was clueless: she asked him to name which countries are in ASEAN, the union of countries in Southeast Asia with which the U.S. has crucial business, and he was forced to plead ignorance. He hadn’t done the reading before class—which is fine for a weekend host on Fox News, but less desirable for a candidate to be the day-to-day leader of the most powerful military in the world at a moment of extraordinary tension and transformation.
Biden is leaving office with a considerable policy legacy that is badly marred by his failure to limit himself to one term. The cost is apparent: a second Trump Administration that is quickly making itself clear in character and in policy. It is to Biden’s credit, though, that in his farewell address he was at pains to warn against what is “taking shape,” a uniquely American form of oligarchy that threatens the democratic spirit that runs through the valedictory of his most distant predecessor. ♦
