President Joe Biden used his farewell address Wednesday to do many things. He expressed his gratitude to the American people for the honor of serving as their president, heaped praise on things his administration had accomplished and highlighted looming threats to the future of American democracy.
Most presidential farewell addresses have done what Biden did last night when he expressed gratitude and touted his own accomplishments. But, only a few focus on threats to American democracy.
Indeed, at the genre’s origin, George Washington’s famous farewell address was the first to alert the American people to forces that might undermine the still-new constitutional republic. Washington himself called it “a warning from a parting friend.”
So Biden was in good company when he spoke about things that “threaten… our entire democracy.” Along the way, he delivered thinly veiled but pointed criticisms of his successor and the administration he will bring to the nation’s capital on January 20.
But before looking more closely at Biden’s words, we should acknowledge that history has not been kind to most farewell addresses. What Abraham Lincoln said when he gave remarks after the Battle of Gettysburg is an apt summary of history’s judgment of most presidential farewell addresses: “The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here.”
Still, they offer a departing president’s reading of the temper of the times. They enable them to claim a legacy and offer them a last opportunity to use the bully pulpit to rally the nation. Even so, after Washington, few presidents took advantage of that opportunity until the middle of the twentieth century when President Harry Truman took up the baton. Since then, every president has done so.
This development reflects what political scientist James Ceaser and his colleagues call “the rise of the rhetorical presidency.” As they explain, “Popular or mass rhetoric, which Presidents once employed only rarely, now serves as one of their principal tools in attempting to govern the nation.”
While Americans today, they argue, may have qualms about the nature, quality, and limits of presidential leadership, “they do not consider it unfitting or inappropriate for presidents to attempt to ‘move’ the public by…speeches that exhort and set forth grand and ennobling views.”
In the end, Biden eschewed bitterness, even as he let Americans know what may unfold over the next four years. But, as Ceaser and his colleagues note, “inspirational rhetoric” cannot deal with the most serious political problems.
“Grand and ennobling views,” some farewell addresses have been crafted with such ambitions in mind; others, Richard Nixon’s farewell is the classic example, reveal a small-mindedness and bitterness at shifting fortunes or at their political opponents. In fact, George Washington’s classic farewell address came perilously close to eschewing grandness and nobility and offering a precursor to Nixon’s approach. In his first draft, as Alexis Coe, author of an important biography of the first president, notes, the notoriously “thin-skinned” Washington “included such harsh words for…(his) detractors that (Alexander) Hamilton felt compelled to step in.”
Hamilton ”advised the president to ‘embrace such reflections and sentiments as will wear well, progress in approbation with time and redound to future reputation.’”
Washington took that advice.
He reminded Americans that they had “in a common cause fought and triumphed together. The independence and liberty you possess are the work of joint councils and joint efforts—of common dangers, sufferings, and successes.” And, he added in words that have special resonance today, “The basis of our political systems is the right of the people to make and to alter their constitutions of government. But the Constitution… is sacredly obligatory upon all.”
Washington advised Americans to be wary of what he called “the baneful effects of the spirit of party…” This spirit, he said, “exists in all governments…but, in those of the popular form, it is seen in its greatest rankness and is truly their worst enemy.”
Washington sounded the alarm, as if speaking to President-elect Trump and his Republican colleagues, about the “domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge… which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities…(and), is itself a frightful despotism.”
Forty years after Washinton’s farewell and two decades before the Civil War, President Andrew Jackson offered his own reflections at the end of his two terms. He targeted the excesses of “state pride” which “may in time create mutual hostility… and foment…fatal divisions…”
Like Washington, Jackson said the most critical threats to democracy come “from within, among yourselves—from cupidity, from corruption, from disappointed ambition and inordinate thirst for power….” He denounced “moneyed power” that could “undermine…free institutions” and “engross all power in the hands of the few.”
Fast forward to January 1961, when President Dwight Eisenhower used his farewell address to shine a light on the “conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry,” which he memorably called the “military-industrial complex.” As he saw it, that conjunction threatened our “liberties and democratic government.”
More than a half-century later, Barack Obama’s farewell address took up themes similar to those found in Washington, Jackson, and Eisenhower’s remarks. Like them, he focused on “the state of our democracy.”
Echoing Washington, he argued that democracy requires “a basic sense of solidarity — the idea that for all our outward differences, we’re all in this together; that we rise or fall as one.” And he called the Constitution “a remarkable, beautiful gift.”
However, he cautioned, “The gains of our long journey to freedom are not assured.” They are endangered “when we allow our political dialogue to become so corrosive that… Americans with whom we disagree are seen not just as misguided but as malevolent.”
“It falls to each of us,” Obama concluded, “to be… anxious, jealous guardians of our democracy.”
Biden’s speech borrowed themes from the man he served as vice president, even as he spoke in ways that offered unmistakable criticism of the president-elect. He reminded his successor “that believing in the idea of America means respecting the institutions that govern a free society,” including “a free and independent press.”
And speaking about an administration in which Elon Musk and his ilk will wield disproportionate power, Biden, reprising Andrew Jackson, highlighted how “the dangerous concentration of power in the hands of a very few ultrawealthy people” can cause “distrust and division.”
Taking another swipe at Donald Trump, Biden warned that “an oligarchy is taking shape in America… that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead.”
Finally, a la Eisenhaower, Biden criticized “a tech-industrial complex that could pose real dangers for our country.” Singling out Mark Zuckerberg’s decision to end fact-checking, the president said that the choice was made so that “The truth is smothered by lies told for power and for profit.”
In the end, Biden eschewed bitterness, even as he let Americans know what may unfold over the next four years. But, as Ceaser and his colleagues note, “inspirational rhetoric” cannot deal with the most serious political problems.
“(R)hetoric,” they rightly observe, “does not possess the power to make citizens devote themselves selflessly to the common wheel…”
Biden understood that message. That is why he ended his speech by calling on the American people “to stand guard” over our democracy and be “the keeper of the flame.”
History may not long remember his words, but it will remember whether Americans heed them. Biden has said his piece, now that work begins.
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