We seem increasingly to be ruled by the elderly. Does that matter? Simon Wilson reports
Briefing
What’s gerontocracy?
Rule by the elderly. The term was coined in 1828 by Jean-Jacques Fazy, a Swiss republican, in his book De la gérontocratie. He complained that French elites had been “reduced to seven to eight thousand eligible individuals, asthmatic, gouty, paralytic, impaired, and only aspiring to rest”. Yet the gerontocracy currently ruling the modern US seems even more doddery, says Fintan O’Toole in The New York Review of Books. Those 1960s 20-somethings who sang along with Bob Dylan when he warned, “Senators, congressmen/Please heed the call/Don’t stand in the doorway/Don’t block up the hall”, are now themselves octogenarians clogging up a stagnant democracy. In 2020, the US elected its oldest Congress in history; the past two US presidents have been the two oldest yet.
How old are they?
Joe Biden is 81, and if re-elected he’ll be 82 when he begins a second term. By the time he finishes it he would be 86, assuming he survives that long. Donald Trump turns 78 in June, and would be 82 by the time he’s done. Biden is the oldest US president (he was 78 when he took office in 2021). The second oldest, Trump, was 70 on taking office in 2017. This time round, the potential third-party candidates who have publicly mulled running are also seniors: Robert F. Kennedy Jr, 70, Joe Manchin, 76, Jill Stein, 73, Marianne Williamson, 71, and Cornel West, 70. Over in the Senate, notes Edward Luce in the Financial Times, the median age is a comparatively sprightly 65, the age at which US airline pilots must retire. The Senate majority leader, the Democrats’ Chuck Schumer, is 73; and the minority Republican leader, Mitch McConnell, is 81.
Hasn’t McConnell called it a day?
Not quite. In February, following a series of public episodes of memory loss and disorientation, McConnell announced he would indeed step down as leader in November this year, but intends to see out the remainder of his current Senate term to 2027. His older colleague Chuck Grassley, who is 90, recently said he would run again in 2028. The late senator Dianne Feinstein often seemed confused in hearings and interviews, before announcing her retirement at the age of 90. Meanwhile, the Senate’s standard-bearer for the US left remains Bernie Sanders, aged 82. The House of Representatives is more aligned with the US population as a whole: its median age is 58, compared to the
