A Country for Old Men

F rom the Gothic streets of New Haven, Conn., Yale Law School professor Samuel Moyn is spearheading the war on America’s elderly.

Two weeks ago, Moyn took to the podcast Interesting Times, hosted by former New York Times opinion columnist and soon-to-be CBS 60 Minutes correspondent Ross Douthat. Moyn is the author of Gerontocracy in America: How the Old Are Hoarding Power and Wealth — and What to Do About It, and the episode serves as a continuation and extrapolation of Moyn’s written argument: that the United States has become an “oldigarchy.” The portmanteau is meant to convey how recent advances in longevity, combined with America’s existing political and economic structures, have allowed elderly Americans to secure a disproportionate share of power, from town halls to the U.S. Senate chamber.

This extension of human life spans is, of course, a good thing. Moyn quips in the episode that he won’t turn down the chance to live longer. The problem, however, lies in the institutional lag in responding to this relatively sudden scientific progress. Older Americans have been able to spend decades longer than previous generations accumulating wealth and power. Younger people must consequently wait longer to inherit property, obtain promotions, and exercise meaningful political influence. Ultimately, Moyn argues, American democracy has become distorted by this disproportionately elderly power. The nation, in many ways, has become a real-life episode of HBO’s Succession.

Moyn explained that he has gotten in some “hot water” for proposing the overweighting of young Americans’ votes, or even allowing those younger voters to cast proxy votes for American children. By Moyn’s logic, young voters would best represent America’s nonvoting children, as generations closer in age would have a better sense of the interests of the young. The normally affable and intellectually charitable Douthat seemed to become aggravated by some of Moyn’s suggestions. Why, Douthat asked, would a “24-year-old recent college graduate” have a better sense of his children’s interests than he does as their father?

Online commentary echoed Douthat’s sentiments, labeling Moyn’s suggested voting changes as “truly harebrained, not to mention evil and scary,” and a proposal that “once again demonstrates the left’s devaluation of relationships between parents and children. Immature kids don’t need more power.”

Well, as a 23-year-old recent graduate, I don’t entirely disagree with such evaluations of Moyn’s possible solutions to the oldigarchy. It is unlikely that voting laws will change to give greater political power to young Americans. Even with octogenarian politicians such as Senator Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.) and Representative Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.) not seeking reelection, the traditional compact wherein older generations gradually cede political power to those younger than them is under immense strain.

The fact that the young will live the longest with political decisions made today does not entitle them to additional votes. It does, however, impose an obligation upon those entrusted with decision-making authority to ensure that younger people are being prepared to inherit responsibility for the future ability to make decisions.

But perhaps even more interesting than Douthat’s worthy parental objection to Moyn’s suggestions is the possibility that a class problem has been mistaken for an age problem. In the Boston Review, James G. Chappel argues that attacking gerontocracy is not the best way to achieve the restoration of the generational compact that Moyn seeks. The reason, Chappel posits, that older people have amassed so much political and economic power is not primarily because they refuse to retire or leave their current positions. Rather, it is because the current American economy rewards the possession of assets over active labor. This shift to an “asset economy” happens to coincide with a generation of “Boomers who had the once-in-a-lifetime chance to buy assets on the cheap.” There exists a correlation, not causation, between age and asset ownership, and thus power. But it is unlikely that a proliferation of undervalued assets will be replicated in the future; that opportunity was a unique historical gift to the generation who came of buying age in the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s.

This points to a reality that Moyn’s book glosses over: While the asset economy benefitted some older Americans, plenty of the nation’s elderly aren’t wealthy homeowners who are blocking Millennials and Gen-Z from coming into what they think is their rightful inheritance. Over 11 million Americans over the age of 65 are still working in some capacity. A 70-year-old renter living on Social Security and working as a greeter at the local Walmart should not be grouped with a 70-year-old multimillionaire in any analysis of generational economic or political tensions. Class and age are not inherently connected.

With Chappel’s critique in mind, the more compelling version of Moyn’s argument for young and middle-aged people who are not independently wealthy is this: America has, knowingly or not, constructed institutions that allow those who already possess wealth and status to retain them for much longer than previous generations could have imagined, all while dramatically increasing barriers to entry for those coming behind them. The ladder has been pulled up; age and class compound each other in a nasty, rage-inducing mixture.

In the transgenerational sense, a healthy society is not supposed to eliminate old people from public life. The wisdom and guidance they offer are invaluable. There is, however, a compact of succession to be upheld through the passing down of that wisdom and guidance to rising generations. Younger people, in turn, accept this gift and the duties that accompany it: to maintain and steward the life and society they have inherited, becoming caretakers and successors of democracy until the next generation can one day step into their place. Edmund Burke described this process as “an entailed inheritance derived to us from our forefathers, and to be transmitted to our posterity.”

Longer lives have complicated this ancient compact. Relinquishing an office, institution, or fortune to a successor once followed more naturally from the limits of aging and the realities of human life’s stages. Today, when the thought of death can be pushed toward life’s very end, stepping aside may require doing voluntarily what mortality once accomplished for us.

The Coen brothers may have been wrong: This is, increasingly, a country for old men. But a country organized around preserving the wealth, offices, and authority of those already established eventually risks producing a generation with little opportunity to practice stewardship for itself. Inheritance is not merely the transfer of money or property; it is the handing over of responsibility. If younger Americans are not permitted to exercise that responsibility until it’s too late for them, there will eventually be no one prepared to receive what the old have spent a lifetime preserving.

Ultimately, Douthat and his online supporters were right: I still live on an ungodly amount of ramen and Red Bull. I should not be voting for someone else’s children. But Moyn is pointing, albeit confusedly, toward a broader truth: A society in which one generation cannot acquire property, responsibility, institutional authority, and eventually stewardship over the commonwealth does not merely have an inequality problem — it has a severe political problem.