Joe Biden In Final Oval Office Address: Peace Out!

It was a good one. He was a good one, too.

Video screenshot, The White House on YouTube.

In his farewell address from the White House last night, President Joe Biden warned Americans that the nation faces a takeover by a literal oligarchy of tech billionaires who aren’t interested in anything but further enriching themselves. If anyone tuned in expecting a bland recitation of what he achieved in his single term, Biden had a surprise: He was far more interested in making clear the danger we’re in, not in making a case for his own legacy.

Said he:

“I want to warn the country of some things that give me great concern, 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.”

Biden did briefly talk about his very real achievements, but placed them in the context of his abiding belief that governing is about making Americans’ lives better, for the good of the country. But then he moved quite efficiently to making the case that we all need to protect democracy, since our next set of rulers isn’t especially interested in that job. Here’s the video:

Biden made an explicit parallel to Dwight D. Eisenhower’s farewell address, which warned about the threat of the “military-industrial complex” that nevertheless still has a stranglehold on our economy and politics in a “disastrous rise of misplaced power.”

Today, Biden said, we should be wary of the “potential rise of a tech-industrial complex”:

“Americans are being buried under an avalanche of misinformation and disinformation enabling the abuse of power. The free press is crumbling. Editors are disappearing. Social media is giving up on fact-checking. The truth is smothered by lies told for power and for profit.”

He didn’t name Donald Trump explicitly, just some of those forces that helped him retake power, and which threaten to help Trump and his billionaire buddies undo democracy.

Biden also offered some very concrete steps that might help rein in the destructive forces, although the chances they’ll be enacted during the tenure of the Lord of Misrule seem slim. He started with the easy stuff that won’t happen under Trump.

“We must reform the tax code. Not by giving the biggest tax cuts to billionaires, but by making them begin to pay their fair share.

“We need to get dark money — that’s that hidden funding behind too many campaign contributions — we need to get it out of our politics.”

Then it was on to three ideas that will almost certainly have to wait until we bury Trumpism, at the very least.

“We need to enact an 18-year time limit, term limit […] and the strongest ethics reforms for our Supreme Court. We need to ban members of Congress from trading stock while they are in the Congress. We need to amend the Constitution to make clear that no president, no president is immune from crimes that he or she commits while in office. The president’s power is … not absolute. And it shouldn’t be.”

OK, maybe the second one, the ban on members of Congress trading stocks, has some ghost of a chance; it also wouldn’t really do anything to keep Trump in check, though it’s certainly a general good-government idea. Maybe Biden threw it in for the sake of parallelism, to call for reforms in all three branches of government.

Letting the super-wealthy run things, Biden reminded us, is a recipe not just for oligarchy, but for despair: If everyone knows the system is rigged, we all too often give up, or lash out in violence, neither of which is good for democracy. He offered as a hopeful metaphor an image from a 1946 Norman Rockwell painting that hangs in the White House, showing a crew of workers cleaning the torch on the Statue of Liberty, so its “rays of light could reach out as far as possible.” Keeping that torch lit is the work we all have to do as citizens. And while Biden didn’t mention this detail, do keep in mind that Liberty is not enlightening the world with a damn tiki torch, either.

The bald guy with the pipe is a caricature of Rockwell. Wikipedia notes that ‘The inclusion of a non-white figure working with whites, apparently only noticed in 2011, contravened a Saturday Evening Post policy of only showing people of ethnicity in subservient roles.’ Darn that DEI!

Biden closed with a rather remarkable passing of the torch, not so much to the incoming wrecking crew, but to the only people who can stop those bastards: Us.

“I still believe in the idea for which this nation stands — a nation where the strength of our institutions and the character of our people matter and must endure. Now it’s your turn to stand guard. May you all be the keeper of the flame. May you keep the faith. I love America. You love it, too.”

What a contrast to the rhetoric of Ronald Reagan, who blithely called America a “shining city on a hill” because it’s so plainly the bestest place possible. (As Sarah Vowell reminds us, adding “shining” was a sunny perversion of the original Puritan metaphor’s dour intent, which warned that everyone would see our sins, like Abu Ghraib).

But America isn’t a self-illuminating beacon of virtue that’s virtuous just because it’s America. Instead, Biden argues, the light of freedom requires constant maintenance and renewal — and it only keeps shining if we do the hard, even risky work of participatory democracy.

We’re going to miss that guy.

[NYT transcript / National Archives / Roll Call]

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