Checks and Balance newsletter: Joe Biden’s farewell shot at the oligarchy

It shouldn’t have surprised me, but it did: after a half-century as perhaps America’s most garrulous politician—Donald Trump may have edged him out in recent years —Joe Biden still had something new to say. Amid what has otherwise been a wan goodbye, he used his farewell address to sound an alarm. “An oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power, and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy,” he said. Some members of this oligarchy are deriving their power from new technology, Mr Biden went on to say. The precedent for Mr Biden’s address, which he cited, was President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s farewell, in which he warned of a rising “military-industrial complex” and its potential for “unwarranted influence,” not just on the government but, via government contracts, on scientific research. Mr Biden spoke of a “tech-industrial complex” that was burying Americans in misinformation and potentially menacing all humanity with artificial intelligence. I a few weeks back about how Silicon Valley was slipping away from the Democrats and towards Mr Trump. That shift has since become a stampede, and Mr Biden’s speech will probably speed it on its way. That does not make him wrong, and I think he deserves credit for using his last national address as president to do more than just attempt to cast a retrospective glow over his administration. As with Eisenhower, history may judge his warning prophetic, though. Just as Eisenhower himself presided over growth in the military, Mr Biden cannot be said to have made a priority of disempowering the oligarchy while in office. In fact, he recently gave the Presidential Medal of Freedom to some very wealthy people who have used their money to influence politics, albeit in ways of which the president approves.Mr Biden did have substantial achievements in office, but I don’t think history will be kind to his administration overall. He used to warn that Mr Trump was an existential threat to democracy, too. But he did not govern as if he really meant that. Against his own long-demonstrated centrist instincts, he indulged unpopular, unwise left-wing positions on matters such as illegal immigration and forgiving student loans, and, despite well-founded public concern about his age, he hubristically pursued a second term for far too long. Rather than consigning Mr Trump to history’s dustbin, Mr Biden has, in the end, in pursuing his MAGA agenda, at home and abroad. As we caution in , Mr Trump’s emphasis on the unilateral exercise of economic and military power rather than moral leadership could squander the greatest amount of geopolitical strength America has had since the second world war. He would do well to consider another of Eisenhower’s parting thoughts to the nation. “Down the long lane of the history yet to be written, America knows that this world of ours, ever growing smaller, must avoid becoming a community of dreadful fear and hate, and be, instead, a proud confederation of mutual trust and respect,” he said in his farewell speech. “Such a confederation must be one of equals. The weakest must come to the conference table with the same confidence as do we, protected as we are by our moral, economic, and military strength.”