The Upside of Gerontocracy

T his is a difficult time to defend the gerontocracy. The past week has dramatically highlighted both the disproportionate grip on power by the elderly in American politics — and the problems with their power. But the positive aspects of old age in politics deserve a better defense than some of the most prominent examples of it may incline us to offer today.

Joe Biden’s suspiciously timed stage 4 prostate cancer diagnosis has raised many questions. It would have done so even if it hadn’t come amid heightened scrutiny of Biden’s marked decline while president, an office he assumed at age 78.

This isn’t just a Biden problem. On Wednesday, Representative Gerry Connolly (D., Va.) died at 75, making him the third Democratic member of Congress to die in office this year. Three other elected Democrats have died in the past 13 months.

It isn’t even just a problem for Democrats. Nearly 25 percent of Congress is over 70 today; 40 years ago, it was 5 percent. Until last November, Senate Republicans were led by the then-82-year-old Mitch McConnell. Until last December, the Dallas-area constituents of then-Representative Kay Granger were unaware that the then-81-year-old had moved to an assisted-living facility and had effectively ceased to do her job.

These and many other examples provide evidence of the basic, practical problems of domination of politics by people who should long ago have decided to spend more time with their grandkids. The Federalist Papers called for “energy in the executive.” The passage of time simply makes it less likely that an older executive will have the requisite energy. The Senate was modeled on a Roman institution whose name derives from a Latin word (“senex”) for old. But even the “cooling saucer” needs warm bodies in it.

These practical problems don’t even get at the bigger-picture distortions that arise from a politics of conscientious objectors to retirement. It can lead to the entrenchment of political advantage for the old, often in the form of legislation, such as Social Security and Medicare, that benefits the old at the expense of the young.

It can also enshrine a certain generational cohort’s way of doing or envisioning things as the default for political discourse. Yuval Levin has argued that the still-regnant Baby Boomers have done precisely this by mapping all of politics onto the mental model they hold for their own lives: nostalgia for the idyllic 1950s of their childhood, obsessive re-creation of the exciting 1960s of their young adulthood, etc.

Yet for all this, it is important not to forget certain advantages that age can bring to politics. For practical illustrations, it is easiest to look to the same Democratic Party of late uniquely afflicted by senescence.

It’s not a universal trait, but older politicians tend to have greater resistance to novelty and to political fads. Look at Joe Biden himself. It is now becoming increasingly admissible that Biden’s deterioration was evident as far back as his 2020 presidential campaign. That did not stop him from realizing that chasing the far left was not the best way to win that year’s Democratic primary or the general election, a fact that eluded the candidates younger than he (and, to be fair, one who was older). That Biden as president succumbed to the same progressives he (relatively speaking) spurned as a candidate does not negate the success of his campaign strategy.

Elder statesmen have other uses, too. With accumulated authority, extensive knowledge (almost to the point of muscle memory) of the rules of the game, and a near-obsession with practicality, they can make decisions others can’t. Last summer, when the reality of Biden’s age had become too obvious for everyone (except Biden and his closest allies) to ignore, it took another elderly politician to yank him off the stage. Nancy Pelosi, the California Democrat who led her party in the House, in and out of the majority, from 2003 until she stepped down from leadership in 2023 at age 82, became the driving force behind Democrats’ effort to get Biden not to run for reelection.

There is even an advantage to the way old age can inoculate you from the reckless ardor of the young. Aristotle believed the youth “think they know everything, and confidently affirm it, and this is the cause of their excess in everything.” The young climate activists who confronted Nancy Pelosi’s fellow California Democrat Dianne Feinstein in 2019 gave an apt demonstration of this.

Feinstein, who was in the Senate from 1993 until she died in 2023 at age 90, was likely in decline even by the time of this confrontation. She nonetheless aggressively pushed back against the young activists’ maximalist demands. At one point, one of them demanded Feinstein represent the people who voted for her. Feinstein asked for her interlocutor’s age, which she revealed as 16. “Well, you didn’t vote for me,” Feinstein replied.

Of course, Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, and Dianne Feinstein don’t deserve reputations as pillars of our constitutional order. Each committed many offenses against it. There are many other examples of older politicians being irresponsible, impractical, and ideologically unhinged, and of younger ones being the opposite. It is nonetheless difficult to ignore that each, at key moments, eschewed follies those around them could not resist — and that their age likely had something to do with it.

Their myriad other failures have discredited them, however. That many of the current generation of older political figures have ruined being old is their final insult, one that may prove a product of their particular generational cohort, and not always an inherent byproduct of old age. It may take the disappearance of the current generation of Democratic leadership, and some time experiencing its youthful and intemperate successors, to make us nostalgic for what once was.