Whether or not Joe Biden persists in his run for president, America’s gerontocratic crisis will keep on worsening. But high-profile symptoms like Mr. Biden’s difficulties provide an opportunity to confront the issue — a social form of sclerosis that will persist unless and until more power is transferred from the wrinkled to the rest.
Gerontocracy transcends government as a full-scale social phenomenon, in which older people accumulate power of different kinds, and then retain it.
This form of power is both old and new. The term “gerontocracy” was popularized a century ago by the Scottish anthropologist J.G. Frazer to refer to a very early form of government, in which power reposed in councils of elders. Since premodern societies valued the past over the future, and the ancestral over the innovative, it was only natural to allocate authority to those with cumulative experience and nearer the realm of the honored dead.
When the Constitution imposed an age minimum of 30 (and no maximum) on the Senate, that restriction alone excluded roughly three-quarters of the white population from serving. This set up the distant possibility of our present, in which Mr. Biden could become one of the youngest senators ever when he took his seat at age 30, while Dianne Feinstein (age 90), Robert Byrd (92) and Strom Thurmond (100) all either died in office or just months after retirement.
The Supreme Court is also an outpost of elder rule. The Constitution gives federal judges life tenure, so it is entirely up to them when they finally depart, alive or dead. And it is not surprising when they die in the midst of opining on the law: Ruth Bader Ginsburg at 87, William Rehnquist at 80 and Antonin Scalia at 79. At least five federal judges have passed 100 years of age while on the bench.
The Supreme Court was quasi-gerontocratic from the start, like the Senate, only more so. The popular and professional ideology of the judicial role emphasizes even more the association of age with wisdom. And the Supreme Court’s oracular purposes, priestly trappings and mystical rituals make it resemble, more than any other American political institution, gerontocratic clubs like the Roman Catholic Church’s College of Cardinals.
All this makes American political leaders not just prey to senioritis but remarkably unrepresentative. It also indicates the new element in gerontocracy, which is the extension of the life span and the increasingly prevalent assumption of health before death. Indeed, the biggest contributor to contemporary gerontocracy is no doubt the gift of longevity.
The age minimums in the Constitution for elected officials meant that, until the 2000 census, more than 50 percent of Americans were under 35 years of age, the cutoff to be president. Painfully late and slowly, the age minimum for president was becoming less exclusionary, and presidents more representative by age.
But the preservation of life in two stages meant that political officials could live and serve longer, with every incentive to stay. The first stage, a “sanitary revolution” starting in the 19th century, did more to save the young from disease than the old — cleaning up cities and filtering water. And scientists soon developed protections from bacteria and viruses that had been the scourge of humanity. The second stage was 20th-century work on the characteristic afflictions of the elderly. Geriatrics and gerontology were founded. Their work and that of a slew of other specialties extended life spans. Blood pressure pills and statins became normal, as did living longer and staying in office.
William Henry Harrison, who served as president for a month in 1841, was long the oldest man to become president — until Ronald Reagan and our two recent septuagenarians beat his record. Our presidential candidates are good examples, but every branch of government is seeing gerontocracy’s reign. American political leaders started growing older beginning around 1990. The median age of members of Congress was about 53 from 1960 to 1990. In the three decades after, it jumped to nearly 60. While half of Americans are under 40, only 5 percent of Congress is, with almost a quarter of members 70 or older, and 21 over 80.
From the Supreme Court’s beginning, the average age of appointment to the bench has remained roughly the same, but longevity means that justices are staying longer. Before 1970, justices served for 15 years on average. Since then, that number has nearly doubled to 26 years.
These very same facts, however, explain why we must look beyond government for the deepest sources of gerontocracy. After all, power is not just in government, but in those government serves, or at least in those who vote in (and pay for) campaigns.
Whether you look at participating in elections, funding candidates, organizing lobbies, holding real estate or controlling wealth, the older you are, the more power you are likely to exert. Gerontocracy, no less than plutocracy, is a form of oligarchy — and it is no wonder those younger split their time between angling to inherit what the older have and feeling upset that they are forced to do so. The HBO drama “Succession” captured at the level of a family what is increasingly occurring in society, rather than politics alone: the aged holding the reins of authority as everyone else waits for the world to change.
In government, the obvious remedy is an age maximum for office to match current age minimums. And they are not unfamiliar in world political history. Since a 1970 papal decree, certain Catholic cardinals are asked to submit their resignations at age 76 and all are barred from voting in papal elections at age 80. It is not a good look to be compared unfavorably to history’s most intransigent institution, but no limitations of service are awaiting Supreme Court justices. Another fix — no less utopian for the moment — is making the youth vote count for more, on the ground that the old will see fewer of the consequences of the choice.
But the ultimate remedy lies in a cultural shift. Mr. Biden’s struggles dramatize our failure to integrate old age as a definite phase in nearly everyone’s life. In a society in which elderly people are treated as irrelevant and are subject to neglect, those of them holding authority have no incentive to hand over the reins.
Along with the denial of mortality, this explains our unwillingness to age into obscurity, to live a final act different from our youth and our prime. Doing so would require not just Mr. Biden but everyone to acknowledge that our prime passes, and that politics is supposed to prioritize the collective future, rather the indefinite retention of power, which inevitably corrupts — more and more the longer it is enjoyed.
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