Save us from vigorous young leaders. Deliver us from politicians with high testosterone levels and things to prove. When Sancho Panza, Don Quixote’s fictional sidekick, was asked who his ideal ruler was, he sagely replied, “The one who is at home with a broken leg.” Being soft-hearted, I’d amend that to “The one who is on the golf course.”
President Joe Biden’s collapse into senility is horrible to watch. Anyone who has experienced something similar with a family member will know how painful the experience is. Playing out that decline before a global audience of billions is excruciating.
And yet, despite everything, most countries would swap their problems for America’s. In 2007, the European Union’s economy was roughly the same size as that of the United States. Now, it is two-thirds as large. I am not saying that this is a personal achievement of Biden’s, nor of former President Donald Trump’s, nor former President Barack Obama’s. The beauty of the federal system is that it reduces the impact of any single politician. Still, taking everything together, the American gerontocracy — Biden, Mitch McConnell, and Nancy Pelosi are all well over 80 — seems to be holding up well enough.
Rather these leaders, at any rate, than young thrusters with a name to make, such as Chile’s Gabriel Boric, 38, who is frenetically undoing half a century of market-driven growth in his country, or Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed bin Salman, also 38, who decided to make his name by reportedly ordering a hit.
Yes, there are downsides. The underrepresentation of young people at the ballot box and in the legislature probably led, as in other countries, to a stricter lockdown than would otherwise have been ordered.
But, for all that, a measure of perspective, an understanding that things are rarely as urgent as they used to seem, makes for a more peaceable government. You could argue that the long decline wars chronicled by Steven Pinker are, in part, a product of lengthening longevity. One of the reasons medieval Europe was so violent is that teenage kings were leading teenage populations in endless acts of aggression.
No, Biden’s problem is not his age per se. It is his incapacity. Presidents may have only a limited ability to mess up the economy, but they can mess up foreign policy. It would be an immense misfortune, just when America’s enemies are at their most restive, to reappoint a commander in chief who does not know what day of the week it is.
Then again, look at the alternative. Biden would not be the first defunct leader to be propped up by an unofficial junta. It happened more than once in the USSR. Indeed, it happens often in dictatorships, the confused strongman being wedged in place while generals and senior functionaries rush to secure their own positions. I have confidence in the ability of the chiefs of staff and intelligence agencies to keep going, even if they have to carry a bewildered president of the United States with them.
I am less sure of their ability to work around a president who expressly repudiates the Western alliance. Trump’s anecdote about telling the head of a NATO government that he would invite the Russians to invade was almost certainly a lie. Heads of government do not talk that way, and, in any case, other leaders, unlike Trump, understand how NATO finances work.
Still, what a revealing comment. We have never before known a U.S. president who feels no sympathy with other free countries, no sense that they are preferable to tyrannies. Even the supposedly more isolationist presidents generally recognized that a world in which democracies were secure was a world in which the U.S. itself would flourish.
If the U.S. rushed to drop its alliances, it would be inviting autocracies to take its place. The idea that a world dominated by despotism would be congenial for Americans is fantastical. It is not American wars that inflame them, but the American way of life; not the export of democracy, but the existence of democracy, which they fear infects their own peoples with dangerous ideas.
In this sense, it is Trump’s vigor, rather than his years, that is the problem. He thinks and talks like a young man in a hurry. When his critics complain that he is spending too much time on the golf course, they have things precisely the wrong way around. It is not his leisure time that is the problem; it is his neediness, his restlessness, his craving for recognition. America would be safer, and the world happier, if the Donald would act his age.