Joe Biden vs. the "Oligarchy"

The twist is that the "oligarchs" are backing freedom and democracy.

As he mumbled and slurred his way out of the White House, Joe Biden’s farewell address fetched dystopian visions from the past, channeling William Jennings Bryan and Ida Turnbell with warnings about 21st Century “robber barons”:

That’s why, in my farewell address tonight, I want to warn the country of some things that give me great concern. And this is the dangerous concer- – and that’s 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.

After meandering about “climate change” and declaring that “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”, the Presidential remnant invoked Dwight Eisenhower’s parting words, which are remembered, though not as we shall see very accurately, for strictures on a “military-industrial complex”.

Biden – or, to be accurate, his speech writers – interested only in transforming President Eisenhower’s phrase into a “vibe”, had this to say:

You know, his farewell address, President Eisenhower spoke of the dangers of the military-industrial complex. He warned us then about, and I quote, “the potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power,” end of quote.

Six day lec- – six decades later, I’m equally concerned about the p- – 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.

We must hold the social platforms accountable to protect our children, our families, and our very democracy from the abuse of power.

That lament would be less laughable if the “tech-industrial complex” had not pushed progressive talking points with near unanimity from the first days of the World Wide Web up to the moment when Elon Mush bought Twitter and dismantled its government-entwined censorship apparatus. One other social media platform, Facebook, started to follow suit scant weeks ago. Meanwhile, Google and TikTok and Instagram and the rest of the vibe ecology continue in their old ways. As Noah Rothman writes –

Observers of a foolish consistency could be forgiven for concluding that the threat to democracy posed by social media companies is directly proportional to the extent to which their proprietors support Republican politicians and their policy preferences. After all, the threat to democracy posed by private wealth is ever-shifting depending on how much of that wealth finds its way into Democratic coffers. Nor was the Democratic Party all that vexed by “misinformation and disinformation” when they were the ones improperly wielding the coercive power of the state to prevent Americans from accessing accurate information, albeit the sort that made Democrats uncomfortable.

But let us not demand consistency from Mr. Biden. Leaving it aside, a couple of other points are worth attention.

If the President’s ghostwriter had read President Eisenhower’s farewell with any care, he might have become aware that the 34th President conceived of “industry” as the junior partner in the military-industrial complex. He warned specifically against “the prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money”, that is, against the subordination of the private sector to an intrusive government rather than a takeover of the government by a new breed of robber barons.

Biden denounces the opposite: private intrusion on what he sees as the rightful sphere of politicians. The “abuse of power” for which “we” – meaning the government – “must hold the social platforms accountable” is their failure to suppress opinions of which the executive branch of government has during the past four years disapproved.

Ever since democracy was instituted as a form of government, its critics’ most telling argument has been that the demos is too ill-informed and easily misled to guide policy. Joe Biden’s ventriloquists evidently agree with that premise. (Who knows whether their marionette understands it?) They regard it as essential to democratic rule that the demos be instructed about its own best interests and ringed off from contrary opinions.

Many men of undoubted intellect and virtue have espoused that position. It was the nearly unanimous view of every Classical author whose works survive and was taken for granted, albeit without the same rigor of thought, everywhere on Earth until barely four hundred years ago. England and its American colonies emerged in the 17th and 18th Centuries as extreme outliers favoring the opposite principle, and they have been in the minority ever since: an ascending minority for a couple of hundred years, a descending one today.

The “tech-industrial complex”, to the extent that Joe Biden characterizes it accurately, upholds the minority view that government of, by and for the people grows stronger when citizens can freely form and express their opinions. Perhaps they are wrong and the supporters of censorship are right. Maybe a state that allows full freedom of expression can survive only if decision making is placed in the hands of a monarch, an aristocracy, an oligarchy, a clerisy or a caudillo, with elections, if conducted at all, just a façade.

The issue is well worth debating, but a rational debate will be impossible so long as the advocates of censorship avoid candor. Let us know how “misinformation” and “disinformation” are to be defined and identified, and by whom? What mechanism will be put in place to stifle them? How will the public be convinced that the guardians do not themselves need to be guarded against? How should the structure of government be altered to reflect the new regime? And what concept will replace “democracy” as the beau ideal of good government (for a government without such a concept has no solid basis for claiming legitimacy)?

At the moment, so far as I can see, the pro-censorship, implicitly anti-democratic position is incoherent. It amounts to, “Don’t let the ‘Far Right’ have the means to speak, and the Left gets to define the ‘Far Right’.” That’s a demand for submission rather than an argument. Now, however, the federal government’s notion of proper and permissible speech is likely to take a libertarian turn or, if the much-predicted fascist junto takes power, change radically. The Left has four years to refine its thoughts. One wonders whether it will put the time to good use.