Biden bows out on a wrong note

Nothing demonstrates that Joe Biden’s time had passed more than the President’s farewell address. Mr Biden’s speech summed up the failure of his presidency – it warned against ambition, it counselled against aspiration, it assumed that what divided Americans was greater than the optimism that united them. In the manner of his departure Mr Biden resembles another Democrat, Jimmy Carter – a good man who was overwhelmed by what he thought could not be done. Carter was defeated by Ronald Reagan, a Republican who campaigned in 1980 to “let’s make America great again”.

In his last speech in office Mr Biden quoted another great forerunner as president – Dwight D. Eisenhower, also a Republican, who won World War II in Europe and transformed the US into a national market economy by creating the interstate highway system. But instead of referencing that earlier president’s achievements, Mr Biden used the famous warning in Eisenhower’s 1961 farewell address against the “military-industrial complex”. As the pace picked up in the nuclear arms race, Eisenhower warned the Soviet Union should be contained as economically as possible.

Mr Biden adapted this, announcing “an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power and influence”, and pointing to a “tech-industrial complex”. He spoke as Tesla creator Elon Musk and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos launched rockets, continuing the creation of what NASA has never managed: a commercial space industry.

There is a free-enterprise precedent for what these cyber-oligarchs are creating; in the 1860s and ’70s entrepreneurs built railway lines across the continent, creating the modern US. Granted, they used public funding; granted, the corporations they created required regulating, notably by yet another Republican president, Theodore Roosevelt. But transport transformed the nation incalculably for the better.

For optimists, artificial intelligence will do the same, but for Mr Biden “we must make sure AI is safe and trustworthy and good for all humankind”, with government, no doubt, doing it. As for the “military-industrial complex”, it gave Reagan the resources to stare down the Soviet Union and save humanity from the risk of a global nuclear war.

In his heart Mr Biden understands what the US is about: “The America of our dreams is always closer than we think. And it’s up to us to make our dreams come true,” he said in his farewell. But he did not know how to help the American people make them real.