There is a tendency in some of the more pessimistic corners of American political discourse to liken contemporary America to the late-stage Soviet Union. This is a ridiculous comparison, for all sorts of reasons. With one exception: The way that the Soviet Union seemed dominated by a gerontocracy of old Communist Party hands (Reagan joked that they “kept dying on” him until Gorbachev showed up) does bear a slight resemblance to the political situation of the United States. Duke University sociology professor Kieran Healy recently shared a striking chart showing the increasing median age for a member of Congress:
https://twitter.com/kjhealy/status/1542310342855909377
The chart shows Democrats being guiltier of this than Republicans. Likewise, a recent Spectator editorial focuses on the older Democrats largely in charge, chiefly President Biden himself, though admitting the counterexample of Trump for Republicans (it could have added Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell, now 80, though not markedly changed from 20 years ago in his bearing):
The most powerful person in America not named Joe (no, not you, Kamala) is Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, who clocks in at eighty-two years of age. How long has Pelosi been around? She’s represented California in the House of Representatives for a fifth of the time California has been a state. Her counterpart in the Senate, Chuck Schumer, is a mere seventy-one years young, and no doubt likes to tease her with his spirited whippersnapping.
Also in the Senate is another Californian, Dianne Feinstein, who first came to national prominence when Harvey Milk was assassinated in 1978. At eighty-eight, Feinstein is older than them all, and according to the San Francisco Chronicle, it’s starting to show. She reportedly suffers from memory lapses and has difficulty following policy discussions. Until last year, she was the lead Democrat on the powerful Judiciary Committee.
Elsewhere we find Dr. Anthony Fauci, face of the government’s Covid response, age eighty-one; left-wing insurgent senator Bernie Sanders, voice of the millennial generation, age eighty; and House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, who turns eighty-three this month. How is America’s political pulse these days? It’s starting to feel a bit faint.
The Spectator finds it odd that a country so associated with youth and energy seems so dominated by the old. I think some of this is understandable; people are, as a rule, living longer and healthier lives today, and the strong correspondence between age and wealth that has built up enables the instantiation of existing hierarchies of power. Sometimes, this fact is even to be welcomed; the old have throughout history been looked to for their wisdom and experience. The very name “Senate” arises from “senex,” the Latin word for “old.” Conservatives, in particular, ought to have a reverence for what precedes them. As Abraham Lincoln once put it, “What is conservatism? Is it not the adherence to the old and the tried, against the new and the untried?” Often, the old can be more relied upon to serve as transmitters for proper inheritances, and bulwarks against fads and innovations that one should, in fact, resist. Moreover, many of them are great people, whose presence in one’s personal and professional life is to be welcomed.
But in other times and situations, this can get out of hand, as I think it has in modern politics. Much of our gerontocracy seems not to want to perpetuate proper goods but rather its own particular advantages and desires. (See, e.g., how existing entitlement programs steal from the young to give to the old, the former of whom have long, in my experience, ceased to expect any such munificence when we ourselves retire.) NR’s own Yuval Levin, also editor of National Affairs and director of social, cultural, and constitutional studies at AEI, grappled with this problem as well in a recent New York Times essay.
Yuval argues, without wishing ill of the disproportionately elder people who dominate our political life, that their age has provided an enduring yet faulty framing for our nation’s self-understanding. As he puts it:
Consider what the country’s modern history looks like from the vantage point of an American born near the beginning of the postwar baby boom. Say you were born the same year as Mr. Clinton, Mr. Bush and Mr. Trump, in 1946. Your earliest memories begin around 1950, and you recall the ’50s through the eyes of a child as a simple time of stability and wholesome values. You were a teenager in the early ’60s, and view that time through a lens of youthful idealism, rebellion and growing cultural self-confidence.
By the late 1960s and into the ’70s, as a 20-something entering the adult world, you found that confidence shaken. Idealism gave way to some cynicism about the potential for change, everything felt unsettled and the future seemed ominous and ambiguous. But by the 1980s, when you were in your 30s and early 40s, things had started settling down. Your work had some direction, you were building a family and concerns about mortgage payments largely replaced an ambition to transform the world.
By the 1990s, in your 40s and early 50s, you were comfortable and confident. It was finally your generation’s chance to take charge, and it looked to be working out.
As the 21st century dawned, you were still near the peak of your powers and earnings, but gradually peering over the hill toward old age. You soon found the 2000s filled with unexpected dangers and unfamiliar forces. The world was becoming less and less your own.
You reached retirement age in the 2010s amid growing uncertainty and instability. The culture was increasingly bewildering, and the economy seemed awfully insecure. The extraordinary blend of circumstances that defined the world of your youth seemed likely to be denied to your grandchildren. By now, it all feels that it’s spinning out of control. Is the chaotic, transformed country around you still the glittering land of your youth?
Yuval argues that, as a result of the dominance of something like this narrative in our political life, “our politics is implicitly directed toward recapturing some part of the magic of the mid-20th-century America of boomer youth,” both Left and Right. But he warns against replacing the wistfulness of the elderly simply with the energy and excitement of youth. Useful as those things can be in keeping D.C. and other polities running (the not-joke that Washington is really run by twentysomethings is confirmed by this recent New York Times article), youthfulness brings its own defects. Chief among the imperfections of the young are an impatience with existing forms and institutions, a bias toward novelty, an idealism (in D.C. often West Wing–inflicted) that can jell poorly with reality, and an abiding belief that history began the day they were born. with a concomitant ignorance of history. All such traits help explain why revolutionary movements throughout history have found their most-fervent devotees among the youth, and should make us skeptical of those who sell themselves primarily on their supposed youth or novelty. History — studied properly, not instrumentally — brings humility, another virtue that youth often lack.
Yuval’s preferred solution for a new dominant narrative of our national life would elevate Gen X’ers to supply a civic center between the excitation of the young and the regurgitation of the old. You’d think I, at 28, would resist such a self-interested call by a Gen X’er, but I do not. Younger Millennials and certainly Gen Z still have some maturation to do before they can properly assume control of national life. Gen X seems well positioned to steer it next.
If, that is, older generations ever get out the door.