Some candidates for office favor democracy, others seem to have a yen for autocracy, but what we actually have appears to be gerontocracy. By its design the judicial branch is geriatric since Supreme Court justices are appointed for life.
The 118th Congress is the third oldest in American history, and the Senate is unquestionably the oldest. The average age of its members is 64 and 54 of 100 are over 65. They include majority leader Mitch McConnell at 81 and the oldest member Chuck Grassley at 89. They and several others have a tendency to look out of touch with reality.
Of course, the age issue is most prominent in the case of the executive branch. The average age of the 45 presidents when elected is 55. President Biden is the oldest in history, having taken office at 78. Trump, the second oldest, was elected at 70, and Reagan, the third oldest, was elected at 69. All the rest were in their 40s, 50s, and 60s. Reagan left office at 77 and was showing signs of cognitive decline.
if Biden wins reelection he’d be 82 to 86 in his second term. Trump would be 78 to 82. Republican partisans have argued that Biden is too doddering to remain in office, but Trump is hardly a model of physical and mental health.
It can be argued that it is blatant ageism to say people are unfit for office solely on the basis of how old they are. Many older persons with a lifetime of experience carry-on with great success. Warren Buffett at 92 still appears both shrewd and lucid, though he’s been prudent enough to entrust much of his empire’s operations to younger men.
Given the Biden/Trump age issue, some medical experts have run the numerical odds of their survival and have concluded that Biden has a 67% chance of living to 86 when his term would end. Trump would have a 73% chance. Of course that still means there’d be a 30% chance of their Vice Presidents ending up in the Oval Office before 2028.
Perhaps the most persuasive argument for appointing, or electing, younger Supreme Court Justices, Congressmen, Senators, and Presidents is that the gerontocracy is not representative of the electorate in a country whose average age is 38. The mindset of the remaining survivors of the Silent Generation and the Baby Boom (born between 1928 and 1964) may not be adapted to a changed world in which the GenX and Millennials (born 1965-1996) are taking over.
Congressional hearings on cutting edge issues of climate change, technological innovation concerning communications, privacy, warfare, espionage are often embarrassing since the older members lack the expertise to operate their iPhones, let alone write legislation to regulate the cyberlandscape we now inhabit.
The poet Randall Jarrell once said that people of an older generation who were fond of writers like Longfellow and Whittier were baffled by a generation of younger bards.They often asked him what they could do to understand them. To which Jarrell said the only answer was: “You must be born again.” And that also may be the only useful advice to give the antiquated members of my own generation that we keep entrusting with power.