Last night, President Joe Biden gave his farewell address from his desk in the Oval Office. For many reasons, it was difficult to watch, but for me, I think the most painful moment came when he said, “I still believe in the idea for which this nation stands — a nation where the strength of our institutions and the character of our people matter and must endure.”

After the electorate handed the keys to the shop over to a gang of criminals and thugs who will loot and vandalize it, I just don’t know. The institutions couldn’t stop Donald Trump. Can they matter if they’re that weak? As for the character of “our people,” well, right now it’s hard to imagine our people enduring after choosing to neuter ourselves.

The Statue of Liberty was central to his speech. It is the enduring symbol, the president said, “of the soul of our nation, a soul shaped by forces that bring us together and by forces that pull us apart. And yet, through good times and tough times, we have withstood it all.” 

He went on: 

A nation of pioneers and explorers, of dreamers and doers, of ancestors native to this land, of ancestors who came by force. A nation of immigrants who came to build a better life. A nation holding the torch of the most powerful idea ever … that all of us are created equal. That all of us deserve to be treated with dignity, justice and fairness. That democracy must defend, and be defined, and … moved in every way possible: Our rights, our freedoms, our dreams. But we know the idea of America, our institution, our people, our values that uphold it, are constantly being tested.

He outlined three tests. 

One is oligarchy, Biden said – “the dangerous concentration of power in the hands of a very few ultrawealthy 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. We see the consequences all across America. And we’ve seen it before.”

The “avalanche of misinformation and disinformation” is the second test, the president said. “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 [media] platforms accountable to protect our children, our families and our very democracy from the abuse of power.”

Finally, artificial intelligence, he said. “Nothing offers more profound possibilities and risks for our economy, and our security, our society. For humanity. Artificial intelligence even has the potential to help us answer my call to end cancer as we know it. But unless safeguards are in place, AI could spawn new threats to our rights, our way of life, to our privacy, how we work, and how we protect our nation. We must make sure AI is safe and trustworthy and good for all humankind.”

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Another time, I’ll address this “tech-industrial complex,” as he put it. For now, I want to go back to the Statue of Liberty. For Biden, it’s a beacon of hope for America’s future. Just as easily, though, it could symbolize a future that’s a return to our past, a future in which the United States failed these tests, and as a result, democracy turned despotic – again.

The man who came up with the idea of the monument was Edouard de Laboulaye. He was one of the most prominent French liberals of his time (1811-1883), in large part because of the setting in which he was working: the tyrannical regime of dictator Napoleon Bonaparte III. 

The nephew of the original Napoleon, Bonaparte III rose to supreme power in the bloody aftermath of the French Revolution. His government was something new then, but familiar now around the globe. It was a collectivist police state – authoritarian but democratic. 

Worse, to liberals like Laboulaye, it was also popular. 

To Laboulaye and other liberals, Bonaparte’s dictatorship illustrated a fundamental flaw in democracy — its tendency toward despotism. While he suppressed dissent and jailed rivals, the emperor subsidized bread, funded festivals and provided tax credits for housing. 

To Laboulaye, the question was how to liberalize democracy. 

Liberal democracy called for representative government balanced with individual freedoms, specifically the right to speech, press, assembly and religion. But Laboulaye and his network of associates were not laissez-faire liberals. They were republican liberals (with a small “r”). 

Rights, freedoms and responsibilities were never for their own sake. They were primarily instruments by which the people of a nation morally improved themselves and their communities. “To improve himself, even at the cost of suffering,” Laboulaye wrote, is how to fight greed and corruption, and ultimately to liberalize democracy.

From the point of view of French liberals in an authoritarian regime, Abraham Lincoln seemed to model the ideal character. This admiration was rooted in his abolitionism. They were flummoxed by a nation founded on equal parts human dignity and human bondage. With Lincoln, they saw a leader who could finally prove their argument. 

“Could Americans dedicate themselves to such a noble ideal as the abolition of slavery and pursue it to end?” wrote Helena Rosenblatt in The Lost History of Liberalism, from which I am drawing this history. 

“Were they capable of sustained courage, patriotism and self-sacrifice?” she said. “Through his inspired leadership, Lincoln proved that they could. Under the right leadership, a liberal democracy was possible.”

To liberals, not just French ones, the Civil War proved something they had faith in but never saw — greed, stupidity, decadence and moral decay being overcome to build “the most inspiring and most promising idea of modern Christian civilization — the true brotherhood of man,” wrote American liberal Charles Eliot Norton in 1865 at the war’s end.

That same year, Laboulaye envisioned the Statue of Liberty.

It was a monument to freedom, but also to what can happen to a democracy. Democracy can evolve from being tyrannical, as ours was before and during the Civil War, to being imperfect but liberal.

In his speech, Biden encouraged us to believe we can’t go back.

But with the election of a criminal president, no one should be sure.

(Some material here, specifically the history of the Statue of Liberty, appeared in different form in the Editorial Board in August 2019.)