A few days ahead of Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and tech executives aligned with the Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement coming to power, Joe Biden delivered a forceful warning about the emergence of a new "tech industrial complex" threatening the US's democratic ideal. For the outgoing president, the extreme concentration of wealth and power risked undermining "our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms, and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead."

Biden is not wrong. The issue is that he has done little to oppose the oligarchic drift taking place both in his country and globally. In the 1930s, his predecessor Roosevelt, also deeply concerned about such trends, did not stop at making speeches. Under his leadership, Democrats implemented a robust policy of reducing social inequalities (with tax rates on the highest incomes nearing 70%–80% for half a century) and investing in public infrastructure, health, and education.

In the 1980s, Republican Ronald Reagan, deftly playing on nationalism and a feeling of catching up, undertook to dismantle Roosevelt's New Deal. The problem was that Democrats, far from defending this legacy, actually helped legitimize and solidify Reagan's turn, notably under the Clinton (1993-2001) and Obama (2009-2017) administrations.

Inflation, a major issue

Biden has often been described as more of an interventionist than his predecessors in economic matters. This is not entirely false, minus two major drawbacks. Biden was among the Democrats who voted for the Tax Reform Act of 1986, the foundational law of Reaganism, which dismantled Roosevelt's progressive tax system by lowering the top tax rate to 28%. Everyone can make mistakes, but Biden has never felt it necessary to explain that he had made a mistake or changed his mind. If spending isn't funded, inflation inevitably rises, another major issue on which we are still awaiting Biden's remorse.

Moreover, the outgoing administration's so-called "Inflation Reduction Act" primarily facilitated the flow of public funds into private enterprises, effectively supporting the accumulation of private capital. There is no doubt that the Trump administration will push this unrestrained alliance between the federal government and private interests to its peak.

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