We Need a Generational Turnover

I n a little softball forum, President Joe Biden said of his student-loan debt-transfer: “It’s passed. I got it passed by a vote or two.”

Was it a vote among White House lawyers? Or by political aides during lunch? It certainly wasn’t in Congress.

One has the urge to simply wheel Joe Biden back to his basement in Delaware and put him down for a good nap. If recent reports from Canada and the Netherlands, about the wide availability of assisted suicide, are to be believed, they would just put him down.

America is in desperate need of generational turnover in politics. Biden, a Silent Generation figure improbably elected after a series of Baby Boomers won office, is just one symptom of the problem. Nancy Pelosi is 82 years old. Mitch McConnell is 80. Why is Washington run by people who are older than Bob Dole was when he was the unconscionably too-old nominee (73 years young) in 1996?

Anthony Fauci is 81 years old. And yet we credit his slickness when he tells obvious lies about how he had nothing to do with school closures, even though he spent the last half of 2020 criticizing Florida for not locking down hard enough. It’s very likely that Donald Trump — at age 76 — will announce another run for the presidency. Boomers love reruns.

Thirty years ago, when Time magazine still had some power in shaping our nation’s self-understanding, it marked the election of Bill Clinton as a time when “a generation takes power.” The Baby Boomers had finally arrived.

After describing the desire of JFK and his generation to celebrate their own bravery in World War II, and their struggle to create a richer America in the 1950s, Time magazine said that the Boomers were different:

Baby Boomers lack this palpable hunger for acceptance. “Unlike the Kennedy era,” says Nicholas Lemann, author of The Promised Land, “Clinton’s generation has already had its chance to make its tastes the country’s tastes.” Has it ever. Baby Boomers — especially the older ones like Clinton who were born in the 1940s — have been pop-cultural imperialists since before Woodstock; the rest of America, like it or not, has had to endure their collective self-absorption as they metamorphosed from hippies to yuppies to competitive parenting. What is possibly left for them to gain from a Clinton presidency, other than perhaps good government?

What is left for them to gain? Well, the money. When Boomers collectively were, on average, 35 years old, they controlled 21 percent of the nation’s wealth. Millennials would come to control just 3 percent at the same age. And even now in 2022, Boomers who are collectively in their mid to late 60s (making up just 21 percent of the country) are estimated to hold more than 50 percent of America’s wealth. The story was symbolized in the Clintons themselves. They didn’t have an enormous fortune when they left the White House, but within a decade and a half, they were closing in on the Bush family for overall net worth. No oil business necessary, just the hard work of giving speeches for tin-pot dictators and then the tantalizing prospect of a second go-round in the White House.

I want a president who didn’t grow up watching Mister Ed. I want a Senate majority leader who was too young to remember “Morning in America.” I want leaders who understand that the Soviet Union died in 1989. I want people who understand that the old institutions of American life, such as Time magazine, the mainstream newspapers, and the Oscars, are meaningless artifacts of another age.

I want a politician to tell me that he grew up watching Batman: The Animated Series. That he used to write insane things on Internet message boards in college. And that his whole life got delayed by the 2008 financial crisis. They had their “Me” decade. At this point Gen-Xers and older Millennials would take just a “Me” year. Let’s have it by 2024.