President Biden Delivers Farewell Address to the Nation With A Warning About the Future of Democracy

President Joe Biden delivers his last address to the nation from the Oval Office: NAJ screen shot

By Glynn Wilson –

President Joe Biden delivered his last political speech on Wednesday evening in his last address to the nation from the Oval Office, issuing a dire warning about the state of the country with an “oligarchy” of the ultrawealthy on the verge of taking over and destroying American democracy in a “dangerous concentration of power.”

“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,” Mr. Biden said in a political speech that harkens back to another time. A time when change came more slowly and a society-wide addiction to cable news talk and social media had not obliterated the attention spans of so many people that an actual policy speech was seen as so boring by a majority of “the people” that they mostly just laughed in disgust and waited for their somehow entertaining political savior to take the stage.

While Biden did not explicitly name Donald Trump, his words struck at the very heart of the incoming president, with weirdo tech billionaires like Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos positioning themselves to wield enormous influence over what happens over the next four years.

Biden’s warning of an unelected oligarchy coming to power echoed a similar theme in another time when President Dwight Eisenhower spoke about the military-industrial complex in his farewell address. The Biden version referred to the “tech-industrial complex,” in which he warned of the erosion of truth itself, brought on by unchecked social media platforms — a reference to Meta doing away with fact-checkers this week and the dangers of machine learning, or “artificial intelligence.”

“Americans are being buried under an avalanche of misinformation and disinformation enabling the abuse of power,” Biden said, and he was right about that.

Watch the video:

In his address, Biden only spent a few minutes touting his record of accomplishments, spending more of the 17-minute speech urging Americans to remain engaged in the democratic process and to continue to fight for progress in areas like addressing climate change.

“The powerful forces want to wield their unchecked influence to eliminate the steps we’ve taken to tackle the climate crisis, to serve their own interest for power and profit,” he said. “We must not be bullied into sacrificing the future, the future of our children and our grandchildren. We must keep pushing forward and push faster.”

The speech was greeted with sadness by millions of Americans who found a profound hope in his approach to governing, yet was not exciting enough to command the attention of so many. It capped a half-century of public service for a man who came of age in an era of politics in the 20th century “that he no longer sees around him,” according to the New York Times coverage of the address.

“After 50 years at the center of all of this, I know that believing in the idea of America means respecting the institutions that govern a free society,” he said, an idea that seems to hold no sway in this topsy-turvey world we find ourselves in here in the 21st century.

“Our system of separation of powers, checks and balances — it may not be perfect,” he said, “but it’s maintained our democracy for nearly 250 years, longer than any other nation in history that’s ever tried such a bold experiment.”

Biden called for term limits, ethics reform for the Supreme Court and banning members of Congress from trading in stocks on the job. Those are great ideas, but hold no sway in the one body that could do something about these things, Congress. No Congress to date has been willing to vote to term limit itself, and this do nothing Congress will be no exception. They will do nothing to pressure the Supreme Court to become more ethical and certainly won’t vote to cut off their own path to wealth and power by ending their legal exemption from insider trading laws.

Biden issued a call for changes that could safeguard against a recent Supreme Court decision that gave presidents broad immunity from prosecution for official acts. But of course Trump and his toady cabinet will abuse this immunity over the next four years to escape justice, just as Trump used it to blunt multiple criminal charges from his first administration and will no doubt count on that to protect him in pursuing retribution against his perceived enemies “and other autocratic acts while in office,” the Times reports.

“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,” Biden said, again, a great idea that will go nowhere in the next four years.

“In his final days and weeks in office, Biden has been trying to cement a legacy as a transformative president who stabilized domestic politics while bolstering America’s leadership abroad,” the Times reports. “Hours before Wednesday night’s address, Biden celebrated what would be a crowning accomplishment of his foreign policy record by announcing that Israel and Hamas had accepted a deal he proposed last spring for a cease-fire in Gaza.”

But as the Times reports, he remains deeply unpopular with half the people in the country.

Biden acknowledged that many of his policies had failed to resonate with Americans.

“It will take time to feel the full impact of all we’ve done together,” he said. “But the seeds are planted, and they’ll grow, and they’ll bloom for decades to come.”

Or likely be blunted and obliterated by the incoming administration.

In a tradition of farewell speeches that goes back to George Washington, Biden kept it short and to the point, whereas Trump in 2021 only addressed supporters on the tarmac at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland as he was about to take off for Florida. Politically isolated and facing an impeachment trial after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol by a mob of his supporters, he told those who had gathered to watch him take off: “Goodbye. We love you. We will be back in some form.”

“Now it’s your turn to stand guard,” Biden said in his final words to the country as president. “May you all be the keeper of the flame … keep the faith…”

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