Naming Oligarchy as Key Threat, Biden Channels Bernie Sanders in Farewell Address

The farewell address that U.S. President Joe Biden delivered from the Oval Office late Wednesday featured a warning that's been central to progressive Sen. Bernie Sanders' messaging for decades—and particularly in the wake of the 2024 election.

"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 said, pointing to 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."

"We see the consequences all across America," the president added.

The crisis Biden belatedly identified predated his White House term and would have persisted even if his vice president, Kamala Harris, had defeated billionaire President-elect Donald Trump in November. In his Wednesday address, Biden made no reference to Sanders, who ran for president in 2016 and 2020 on a progressive platform challenging the power of entrenched wealth.

During Biden's four years in power, the wealthiest 0.1% of Americans saw their wealth grow by a staggering $6 trillion, and record federal lobbying by corporate interests—from Big Pharma to Big Tech to Big Oil—continued to derail or undermine even the most tepid reform efforts.

But Trump's victory, aided by more than a quarter of a billion dollars in campaign spending from the world's richest man—who also used his wealth to purchase one of the world's largest social media platforms—laid bare the decisive influence that present-day malefactors of great wealth have on American economic and political life.

"We are moving rapidly into an oligarchic form of society," Sanders (I-Vt.) said in an NBC Newsappearance exactly one month before Biden's farewell address. "Never before in American history have so few billionaires, so few people, had so much wealth and so much power. Never before has there been so much concentration of ownership, sector after sector."

"Never before in American history—and we better talk about this—have the people on top had so much political power," the senator added. "In this last election, in both parties, billionaires spent huge amounts of money to elect their candidates."

In a social media post early Thursday, Sanders thanked Biden for acknowledging the crisis of oligarchy.

"You were absolutely right," Sanders wrote. "This is the defining issue of our time."

Since his election win, Trump has moved to pack his incoming administration with lobbyists and other corporate cronies who stand to benefit from the president-elect's promised tax cuts and deregulatory blitz. Elon Musk, whose wealth has surged since Trump's reelection, has been tasked with leading an advisory commission designed to slash government spending.

The commission, known as the Department of Government Efficiency, is expected to use office space in the White House complex, spotlighting the extent to which the federal government and outside corporate forces are becoming increasingly intertwined.

At Trump's inauguration, American oligarchy will be on open display: The three richest men on the planet—Musk, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg—will be present.

During his speech Wednesday, Biden focused on the growing dominance of a handful of powerful U.S. tech companies and executives, many of whom—including Bezos and Zuckerberg—have pumped money into Trump's inaugural fund and signaled a desire to ally with an incoming president who has said he would let corporations buy their way around federal regulations.

"In his farewell address, President Eisenhower spoke of the dangers of the military-industrial complex. He warned us... about, and I quote, 'The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power,'" Biden said. "Six decades later, I'm equally concerned about the potential rise of a tech-industrial complex that could pose real dangers for our country as well."

"The U.S. government is becoming an outright oligarchy, with billionaire business leaders gathering around the billionaire Trump."

The president's comments broadly echoed sentiments expressed by his antitrust chief, Jonathan Kanter, who said in his own farewell address in December that "plutocracy is its own kind of dictatorship" and sounded the alarm over corporate consolidation—something he and other Biden administration officials, including Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan, worked to combat over the past four years.

But progressives weren't exactly eager to give Biden credit for using his going-out speech to zero in on a longstanding problem that continued to fester under his leadership, despite the efforts of Kanter, Khan, and others.

The term "oligarchy" was entirely absent from Biden's most prominent speeches over the past four years, including his much-touted remarks on the imperiled state of American democracy.

"One last, tired bid for relevance, as if the U.S. drift into oligarchy is some novel, profound observation he just made—not something he's ignored his whole meandering term's worth of mumbling about democracy or, indeed, the thing that explains his entire career and presidency," Jacobin's Branko Marcetic wrote in response to Biden's farewell speech.

David Moore, co-founder of the investigative outlet Sludge, noted that "when his presidential campaign was flagging in 2019, he embraced a super PAC led by fundraisers from private equity"—benefiting from the political power of corporate interests he decried at the tail-end of his White House term.

Nevertheless, as progressive commentator and radio host Thom Hartmann put it Wednesday, "Biden is right, we are facing a crisis of oligarchy."

In a column published just ahead of Biden's speech, Current Affairs editor-in-chief Nathan Robinson rejected the emerging narrative on the right that the Trump administration and its corporate allies are merely attempting to bring about "the liberation of the country from the shackles of woke oppression."

"The more important thing to pay attention to is the way that the U.S. government is becoming an outright oligarchy, with billionaire business leaders gathering around the billionaire Trump," Robinson wrote. "Linda McMahon will work to privatize the public school system. Vivek Ramaswamy will make sure his fellow fraudsters don't end up in prison. And you, the non-billionaire, will end up being screwed by those who present themselves as the champions of the people."