Too Old To Lead

Too Old To Lead

This is not a partisan piece. Trump appears in it, but that’s a function of age and behavior, and the second follows from the first. Biden appears in it too. So does a Republican senator from Kentucky, a Democrat from California who died in office, a retired Supreme Court justice who spent her last years publicly disintegrating, and a sitting federal appeals judge who is currently suing her own colleagues to keep hearing patent cases at 96. The pattern doesn’t sort by party registration. It sorts by the number of years since someone graduated college.

We are living in a gerontocracy, and it is not simply a cultural complaint about out-of-touch elders. It is a physiological one, and the two compound each other in ways that rarely get discussed in the same paragraph. An electorate fed a diet of social media and opinion dressed up as news, poorly schooled in civics, history, and what the press is even supposed to do, has lost some of its capacity to notice when a leader has stayed past th…