President Biden felt a duty to warn us in his farewell address on January 15, 2025:
I want to warn the country of some things that give me great concern. [One is] the dangerous concentration of power in the hands of very few ultra-wealthy 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.
We see the consequences all across America. And we’ve seen it before, more than a century ago. But the American people stood up to the robber barons back then and busted the trusts.
They didn’t punish the wealthy. They just made the wealthy … play by the rules everybody else had to. Workers won rights to earn their fair share. You know, they were dealt into the deal, and it helped put us on the path to building the largest middle class and the most prosperous century any nation the world has ever seen, and we’ve got to do that again.
… I’m equally concerned about the potential rise of a tech-industrial complex that could pose real dangers for our country as well.
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.
Biden’s speech reminds us of another farewell address. In one of the most famous speeches in American political history, President Eisenhower, in his farewell address in January 1961, warned America about a new thing, the anti-democratic military-industrial complex:
In the councils of Government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
The military-industrial complex, composed of military contractors and lobbyists, was seen as potentially pushing war to increase their business to increase profits. Many observers argue that this problem has been realized since Eisenhower’s speech.
In 2017, we received another warning from a group of mental health professionals about our then-new president, Donald Trump. As they explained, “Constrained by the American Psychiatric Association’s ‘Goldwater rule,’ which inhibits mental health professionals from diagnosing public figures they have not personally examined, many of those qualified to answer [questions about Trump’s behaviors] have shied away from discussing the issue.”
However, as they went on in the book The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, twenty-seven psychiatrists, psychologists, and other mental health experts argue that, in Mr. Trump’s case, their moral and civic “duty to warn” America supersedes professional neutrality. They then explore Trump’s symptoms and potentially relevant diagnoses.
Now, President Biden warns us about an oligarchy and the tech-industrial complex.
What is the problem with oligarchies? Here is what three U.S. Presidents said about them in the past.
As we view the achievements of aggregated capital, we discover the existence of trusts, combinations, and monopolies while the citizen is struggling far in the rear or is trampled to death beneath an iron heel. Corporations, which should be the carefully restrained creatures of the law and the servants of the people, are fast becoming the people’s masters.
— President Grover Cleveland
Behind the ostensible Government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people. To destroy this invisible Government, to dissolve the unholy alliance between corrupt businesses and corrupt politics, is the first task of the statesmanship of the day.
— President Theodore Roosevelt
We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace: business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering. They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob.
— President Franklin D. Roosevelt
For the future of this democracy, we must heed these warnings.
