The Old Guard

In Greek myth, Eos falls in love with Tithonus. She is the goddess of the dawn. He is a Trojan prince, yet still a mere mortal. Eos asks Zeus to give her mate the gift of eternal life—­but, foolishly, she forgets to ask for eternal youth too.Tithonus never dies; he just grows older and older. “Ruthless age,” goes the Homeric hymn recounting his story, is “dreaded even by the gods.” Tithonus becomes more decrepit and wizened with each passing year. Eventually, when he can no longer move, Eos has to shut him away, in a place where “he babbles endlessly, and no more has strength at all.” Eternal life amid the decline of one’s faculties is not a blessing but a curse. “Me only cruel immortality / Consumes: I wither slowly in thine arms,” Tithonus complains in Alfred Tennyson’s rendition of the myth (published in these pages in 1860), in a rare moment of lucidity that emerges from his everlasting gibberish.The story of Tithonus no longer feels so outlandish, because our society postpones death to an unprecedented degree. Unlike immortals, we still pass. But the great majority of us, and not only the bad, now die old. In whatever nursing home he was parked in, Tithonus must have looked much like we increasingly do, as doctors continuously defer our mortality. We are approaching a time when a legion of Tithonuses will live in our midst. We have already felt the social and political consequences.During the 2024 presidential campaign, the revelation of Joe Biden’s decline altered the course of American history, leaving a storied republic on the brink. The experience brought home the crisis of the country’s aging leadership: our politicians are dangerously old. I bring little news on this front, but the facts are startling nonetheless. Between 1960 and 1990, the median age of members of Congress was in the early fifties. In the three decades that followed, the median surpassed sixty. Among the effects of this trend has been the on-­the-­job senility or death (or both) of those who govern us.

Take, for example, the Texas representative Kay Granger. Eighty-­one years old in 2024, she chose not to seek reelection and disappeared from the Capitol after casting her last vote that summer, only to be found six months later in a senior-­living facility, where she had ended up, without resigning, after experiencing “dementia issues,” as her son put it when reporters tracked him down. Granger’s is an isolated case only in its absurd extremity. At least half the Democrats in the House who are seventy-­five or older—there are nearly thirty in all—are running again this year. Last year, a seventy-­five-­year-­old, Gerry Connolly of Virginia, bested Alexandria Ocasio-­Cortez for a leadership role on the House Oversight Committee before dying of throat cancer soon after, which made it easier for House Republicans to pass President Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill, slashing taxes and welfare.The overrepresentation of the elderly in political office is hazardous beyond the most obvious risks. Political theorists would call this situation a failure of “descriptive representation”: ideally, a political class resembles the people it serves. But it might not concern you who holds political office if they deliver good governance for you and yours. Indeed, one reason gerontocracy has escaped scrutiny until recently is that it was commonplace to believe that elderly politicians would act benevolently, as the best grandparents do. But the increasing mismatch between the nation’s demography and its leadership is clearly galling to many.The prevalence of aged politicians is almost certainly increasing the mass abstention of the young from political participation. The older the politicians, the less credence younger constituents give to the idea that their votes matter. They may even start to doubt the basic worth of the political system and let it fail. A study comparing different countries, including the United States, concluded that the bigger the age gap between people and their politicians, the weaker the population’s confidence in democracy.In short, it’s not just that our politicians are old. It’s not just the cognitive or bodily decline they suffer. What’s most important is that such leaders represent an aging constituency that controls the political system.

They are also the visible face of the elderly’s domination of private forms of power, chiefly wealth: aging Americans control the biggest bank accounts and stock portfolios, partly as a result of living long enough to accumulate more and more without giving much away. The government is bought and paid for by members of the oldest generation, and it is organized for their sake. There is no way to separate the age of our elites from their ascendancy. In America today, age is the modality in which class is lived—­with apologies to the late, great cultural theorist Stuart Hall, who said the same thing about race.Our gerontocracy is not the result of a malevolent plan, exactly. It is, more than anything, an accidental byproduct of the legitimate and understandable desire to survive. Another day, month, or year among loved ones: What downside could that have? Once upon a time, such a question would have been rhetorical, but its answers have snuck up on unsuspecting societies. Boomers aren’t distinctively evil (well, some are). Rather, the fact that they are so numerous and the fact that they are aging in an era when life has been extended make the syndrome endemic.America faces a gerontocratic crisis of succession on the scale of society itself. The melodrama of succession—­waiting for the old to make way for the new—­defines not only our politics but also our economy and our culture writ large. But there is still a chance for a reset. President Biden exposed one part of our gerontocracy, as Trump now does, too. Pulling aside the curtain that hides the rest might prepare us to dismantle the system and create something new.At the core of the gerontocracy’s rise is a historical irony. The modern world—­and America above all—­once stood for youth, novelty, and energy. And yet the same modernity that gave us democracy and other forms of progress also prompted scientific advances that prolonged life. Those advances drove a startling demographic transformation that has increased the proportion of elders in our society, unintentionally empowering a caste that has slowed progress. Call it the Great Aging.The age pyramid—­which decreed almost as a law across space and time that the younger the humans, the more of them there were—­has been rebuilt.

There is still a narrowing tip in the upper echelons, because people still die. But below it, the structure is a rectangle, with steady-­state survival of most cohorts, and some younger groups smaller than some older ones. The rectangle is slowly ascending in height, which means that, where there was once a smaller proportion of people over forty, now more than half the population in some countries, and just about half in America, are above that age. Our current median age is nearing forty, up from thirty in 1980 and from the mid-­teens early in our national history. And while the trends in life extension have been irresistible, the coincidence of a declining birth rate with the ongoing survival of the baby boomers is creating an especially lopsided upper age cohort. There were just under five million Americans aged sixty-­five or older in 1920, accounting for less than 5 percent of the population; now there are more than fifty-­five million, making up almost 17 percent of the total.The Great Aging has reshaped the American electorate. Older voters are more and more numerous in both absolute and relative terms, and because seniors everywhere tend to vote at the highest rates of any age group, their de facto power is even greater. Whereas the median age of those eligible to vote in America is about forty-­seven, the median age of actual voters is about fifty-­two. If you filter out presidential elections, when participation is higher across the generations, the median age of voters rises from fifty-­two to about fifty-­five. The numbers get far worse in primaries and special elections, when the younger vote plummets even further but seniors dependably turn out. In 2024, the alarming median age of a primary voter was sixty-­five. In New Mexico, it was seventy-­one. No wonder: nationally, turnout among the over-­sixty-­five set was six times higher in primaries that year than among those aged eighteen to thirty-­four. By the time general elections roll around, old people have already struck their most grievous blow. Around 90 percent of the seats in the House of Representatives are effectively determined by primaries, not by general elections in which one party is heavily favored.The role of older voters is not just disproportionate; it’s getting bigger.

For decades in American politics, those aged eighteen to twenty-­four have been significantly less likely to vote than the average adult; their participation in presidential elections hovers around 40 percent (in 1996 and 2000, it dipped to barely over 30 percent). Meanwhile, senior citizens have increased their share of the presidential electorate even faster than their share of the population has grown. They made up 15 percent of voters in 1968, 20 percent in 1996, and 26 percent in 2020, when Americans fifty-­five and older accounted for a whopping 44 percent of voters in the presidential election.This issue is often brushed aside even more quickly than the problem of aging politicians. After all, whether or not to vote is entirely up to individuals. Young people who don’t vote—­at least those eighteen or older—­have no grounds to complain about disappointing results when they could have shown up on Election Day. Is America today just a case of gerontocracy by tacit consent?That question ignores the relationship between the aging of politicians and the disaffection of the young, who prefer to vote for candidates closer to themselves in age, all other things being equal. We know that the age skew of voters is among the best explanations for the elderliness of our politicians, and it has created a self-­fulfilling prophecy: the young stay home, and then have an even better reason to do so in the next election, because the old vote old politicians into office.There is also the fact that you have to register to vote, and older people are more likely to have a stable residency, which makes this easier. Put differently, younger people, as a group, are punished because of their higher mobility. Retired people have a lot more free time to go to the polls, and older people who are still working are more likely to be in a position to take off an hour to vote than those earlier in their careers. Ultimately, though, the abstention of the young owes less to these practical obstacles than to their alienation from politics itself.America’s shockingly libertarian campaign-­finance laws exacerbate elder power. The nonprofit ­OpenSecrets, which monitors campaign funding, last examined the power of elderly donors during the 2014 presidential election cycle.