Dictatorship Of The Old

You get what you pay for, Jack.

Hey. (Photo: Getty)

Joe Biden looked 150 years old last night. So bad that even members in good standing of the Democratic Establishment are publicly declaring that he should step aside for the good of the party. Should he step aside? Unquestionably. Will he step aside? Well, maybe, but I would be less surprised if he just shuffled ahead into his brutal loss in November. After all, a faded elderly man clenching power disastrously to his chest to the great detriment of the public is what our entire system is designed to produce.

Biden is not the only one. Right? There are some noticeable trends. Dianne Feinstein gaping vacantly from her plush seat in the Senate. Nancy Pelosi and Mitch McConnell achieving their greatest power in their 80s, Chuck Schumer until recently the whippersnapper of Congressional leaders at 73. Even my ideological compatriots dream of swapping 81-year-old Biden with 82-year-old Bernie, to take on 78-year-old Trump. Washington is a town in which all must bend the knee to the literal elders, who are long past the days when they could bend their own knees.

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This is not a partisan thing. It is not even a political thing. This is the outcome of any system in which wealth and power naturally accumulate over time, and in which—here is the important part—there is no real mechanism for ensuring that old people don’t come to dominate everything. Let me give you another example of such a system, outside of the world of politics: The United States economy. Compounding interest on investment returns ensures that the people who do have money, meaning the people who therefore have social and political influence, tend to grow ever richer as they grow older. (Those without money are perfectly able to stay broke in their old age, but they are the part of the population that never got a chance to call the shots in the first place.) Because money here buys political power, what you get is an enormous ocean of wealth dispensed by old Adelson types, telling their politicians of choice how to dance, and then, within the parties, old leaders who put in their decades of lowly committee work to ascend to the top determined to stay there until they are plucked from their office chairs and whisked directly to the crematorium.

You can imagine this as a workplace system where advancement is based on seniority and nothing else. If you have ever worked anywhere with old people who are also idiots, you can see the problem here. Age is not directly correlated with wisdom or good judgment, and it is inversely correlated with “being in touch with the world outside of your own house.” In a field like politics, where a keen understanding of the lives of all sorts of regular people is vital, this sort of thing has deleterious effects on all of us. Allowing very old people to be in control of everything warps society in predictable ways. Not least is that things that are important to younger people, like economic mobility and entry level housing and free education and not being thrown in jail for 25 years for youthful hijinks, fall to the bottom of the priority list, and the analytical worldview of political and economic leaders is shaped more by the crazy shit they see on cable news than by walking the streets themselves every day.

Letting the oldest people be in charge is some primitive shit. If that is the outcome that a system produces, it is quite clear that the system needs to be modified in order to produce, instead, something closer to meritocracy. In the case of the economy, it is easy to see that society as a whole will be healthier if younger people, who have not had time to accumulate wealth, are nevertheless able to access quality education and quality housing and quality child care and other such necessities without plunging themselves into debt. The yoke of debt that America forces young people to carry in order to access all of these things ultimately benefits the investment class, made up of older people, at great cost to the young. An economic policy that taxes the free money that accrues to older people via investment gains and subsidizes necessary public goods for younger people who have not yet built wealth is just common sense. The bulk of the political donations from the investment class in America, of course, goes to prevent this outcome. But here, as everywhere, the old rich people are vastly outnumbered by the young and broke. There is hope.

In our political system, it’s trickier. Take a moment for yourself now to sit with the absurdity of the fact that in a nation of 330 million people, our obviously too-old president does not have to step aside, even in the face of the pleadings of his own party, unless he damn well pleases. We can’t tell him shit! An election in which the theme is “Defeat Trump or democracy is over” has been reduced to the entire Democratic Party clasping their hands in prayer that Jill Biden can gently persuade her old husband that he needs to hang it up. We have gotten ourselves into a ridiculous place. Yet precisely because we allow political power to accumulate over time with little accountability other than non-competitive elections, everyone who works within the political system must bow and scrape before these old politicians lest they incur their old wrath. Why was it so hard for Dianne Feinstein’s own staff to close the door and tell her she needed to step down? Well, because they like their jobs and they want to build careers as tiny power brokers themselves. For this meager ambition can a whole country be lost. The same is true with Biden’s own staff. The man that they helped to elevate to the White House because he was seen as experienced and level-headed has now become so experienced that his head has begun to abandon him. But everyone around him is engaged in their own little calculations of the potential price of sticking their necks out to push him off the ticket. In most cases in electoral politics, this dynamic results in everyone deciding to cover their own asses by doing nothing. A disaster for the entire nation is preferable to a professional disaster for a political functionary, in the opinion of that functionary.

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If Biden loses this election, we can all take it as an opportunity to build that mixing mechanism into our system. This process of allowing old people to slowly wash up to the top of the parties and then stay there because of the universal love of power makes almost everyone else in the country worse off. Better is a political party that constantly seeks out younger talent and consciously assembles a leadership team that is representative of the nation demographically, including by age. Organizations that accomplish this feat only do so through a very deliberate and purposeful effort to place a value on such diversity, by taking the time to build a system that identifies and shepherds and supports younger people, instead of just standing back and allowing the (otherwise inevitable) outcome of older people who have slowly built their influence relaxing as long as possible at the peak of their personal success. You not only have to actively pull the young people up—you have to sweep the older people out with equal vigor. That does not mean treating older people as less important than others. That means treating everyone as equally important.

I am a big believer in the power of grassroots politics. In this particular case, though, it will take something more—a reform of the “Washington consensus,” that dreaded amalgamation of the collective greed and fear of thousands of the most detestable white collar people in the country. Washington is not run by Biden and Schumer and McConnell and Miriam Adelson because of the grassroots. “Get those old ghouls out of there” has been a pretty standard point of agreement for regular people of all political persuasions since the beginning of time. What we need right now is a recognition by the class of people who have built their own careers under the current structure that the current structure for political advancement needs to be blown up. Just as our economy could stand to be more socialist, so too do we need to socialize and inject true democratic accountability into the way that we produce our leaders. That means the fundraising system and incumbent protection system and all the other things that have benefited many current elected officials of the Democratic Party need to be reformed. Seriously. That will be a much harder thing to swallow for the political class than “Replace Biden with Gavin Newsom” will be.

If they think this is a one-time problem, though, they will be disappointed. This is the system we have built giving us what it is made for. Either get the courage to fix the system itself, or imagine Joe Biden’s pale face and wide eyes, gazing into your soul from a debate stage, for eternity.

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Also

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