Democrats Invent a New Bogeyman

By Noah Rothman

Thursday, January 16, 2025

 

When Joe Biden’s presidency is remembered, if it is remembered at all, it will not be for its competence, invention, or creativity. When it comes to wallowing in self-pity, however, the outgoing president is setting new standards for his successors.

 

In the president’s offensively petulant farewell address — one of several self-indulgent final bows he has allowed himself — Biden invented a new nemesis, the existence of which explains why his party failed to meet the public’s expectations.

 

“In his farewell address, President Eisenhower spoke of the dangers of the military-industrial complex,” Biden said in a primetime address to the nation from behind the Resolute Desk. “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.”

 

Americans, he slurred, “are being buried under an avalanche of misinformation and disinformation,” he added. The “free press is crumbling, editors are disappearing,” and “social media is giving up fact-checking.” If Americans are not spared “the abuse of power” exhibited by social media companies, the threat to the republic is total.

 

His intended audience ate it up. Biden’s warning “put a shiver down my spine,” MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow confessed. “That is stark and sober,” she observed. “I think he’s correct.” David Axelrod agreed. Biden’s “warnings about the dangers the Tech-Industrial Complex and emerging oligarchy were true and important,” Barack Obama’s former campaign strategist exclaimed. “President Biden’s warning about the oligarchy taking shape in America,” MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell mused, “might be the most remembered lines spoken by President Biden.” We might take this moment to remember that it’s the GOP that is supposed to be unusually susceptible to manipulation.

 

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.

 

Biden’s attempt to appropriate the gravity of Dwight Eisenhower’s farewell address borrows heavily from a left-wing revisionist history of his remarks. Even if we accept the progressive’s premise, which maintains that Ike’s fear that a monopsonist enterprise that accounted for 10 percent of U.S. GDP at the time applies to the entire capitalist undertaking, that observation has little bearing on the disparate entities that make up Silicon Valley. And yet, it’s easy to see why Biden’s speechwriters convinced themselves that they could incept a new bogeyman into the American political lexicon. The paucity of evidence notwithstanding, Democrats adhere to an abiding belief that they can shape our perception of reality through rhetoric.

 

The menace that is the “tech-industrial complex” is likely to compete for space within Democratic heads among so many other existential right-wing threats. It will have to muscle its way past “Christian nationalism,” which came into vogue not long ago. It adhered to the proposition that “our rights, as Americans, as all human beings, don’t come from any earthly authority,” Politico’s Heidi Przybyla disparagingly sneered. They “don’t come from Congress, they don’t come from the Supreme Court, they come from God.”

 

This articulation of the Jeffersonian ideal codified in the Declaration of Independence gave away the game, but progressive academicians and Democratic politicians were savvier in their indictment of the GOP’s theocratic impulses and a totalitarianism that looms forever just over the horizon. For decades, Democratic partisans have alleged that the American Right’s fundamentalism is adjacent to their susceptibility to fascism. The familiarity of that allegation probably contributed to the national yawn that greeted Kamala Harris’s efforts to brand Donald Trump a “fascist.” Indeed, when right-wing “fascism” is not descending across the land, a vague “authoritarianism” threatens to upend the American social order. Democrats need merely invent the menace and universities will conduct studies, pollsters will hit the field to identify the scale of the threat, and mainstream media outlets will saturate the landscape with lurid portents of our imminent dystopia.

 

A related but distinct specter that haunts Democratic imaginations is the scale of the scourge represented by “white supremacy.” That real but negligible American political phenomenon was elevated by Joe Biden to “the most dangerous terrorist threat to our homeland” in 2023. Its close cousin — “Jim Crow 2.0” — described the operationalization and systemization of racial animus that manifested in policies designed to thwart black Americans from voting in places like Georgia. But just as Israel’s “genocide” of Palestinians somehow yielded a growing Palestinian population, Georgia’s efforts to suppress the vote gave way to a 204 percent increase in early voting in 2018. The preposterous assertion that voting in America is harder today than it has ever been — certainly more difficult than purchasing a firearm — persists despite the utter lack of support for the proposition. It’s as if Democrats believe that if they say it enough, it will become real.

 

We could say the same for the flights of fancy that overcame Democrats’ instinct toward prudence and self-preservation over the course of the last two years. The peril represented by the GOP’s mesmeric power to compel the impressionable to do violence in their names — the fabricated plague of “stochastic terrorism” — became the subject of a breathless news cycle until we learned that the incident that inspired it, the attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband, was the work of a deranged madman. But for a few heady weeks, we were treated to a national conversation about the tenuous link between acts of inchoate violence and the Republican Party’s sordid engagement in politics.

 

What is the allure of these clearly seductive but ephemeral campaigns? Perhaps it is the Democratic assumption that the public will forget that they are all the same if they are packaged in the polysyllabic jargon native to the faculty lounge. In that sense, it’s an outgrowth of Democratic hubris. But not in Biden’s case. For him, it is an expression of his insecurity.

 

Biden set out to be the next Franklin Roosevelt, convinced himself that he might have to settle for being the next Lyndon Johnson, and ended up as the modern incarnation of Jimmy Carter. He has always measured himself against his predecessors and come up wanting. Last night, Biden sought to borrow the mystique around Eisenhower’s farewell address, only to highlight his own deficit of ingenuity. The White House likely concluded, not irrationally, that the press would take the baton and fill in the blanks for him. And they probably will — at least for a while, until it becomes clear that the public isn’t buying it.