Dianne Feinstein’s death exposes our gerontocracy problem
Brad Polumbo
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The death of Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) was announced on Friday. Tributes from Republicans and Democrats alike have poured in, touting the 90-year-old’s decadeslong career and trailblazing as a woman in politics.
This is all well and good. Feinstein’s family is grieving, and whether one agreed with her politics or not, her death should be treated with respect.
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But we still have to be honest. The most powerful politicians in our country shouldn’t be dying from old age while still in office. It’s not just Feinstein. Our political system has a gerontocracy problem, with elderly people clinging to power for far too long and failing the public as a result.
It starts at the top, with President Joe Biden. At 80 years old, he is the oldest sitting president in history, holding perhaps the most stressful job in the world despite his advanced age. And it shows, with Biden often looking befuddled, getting confused, or mixing up his words in public. It’s not a sign of health for our political system that the guy with the nuclear codes regularly forgets where he is and speaks to dead people.
Yet it’s not just the Democratic Party whose leaders are far past their prime. Former President Donald Trump, the GOP’s front-runner for 2024, is 77 and not exactly a paragon of health and vitality.
Meanwhile, one of the most influential leaders in the Republican Party, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), is showing signs of his age, too. In two separate recent incidents, the 81-year-old Kentucky Republican appeared to freeze up in public, not responding to questions and leading some to speculate he’d had a stroke. (The Capitol’s physician ruled out a stroke disorder and cleared him to return to work.)
These aren’t outlier examples. The median age in the Senate is a whopping 65.3 years old.
Of course, not all elderly citizens are infirm, and there is something to be said about the wisdom that comes with age. Yet there are still serious problems posed by the overrepresentation of the elderly in our political class.
For one thing, they often can’t do their jobs past a certain point. Feinstein, for example, was absent from the Senate for nearly three months due to health problems, meaning crucial government nominees couldn’t get confirmed. Then, after returning, she seemed so confused that she told a reporter she hadn’t been gone at all — and was seen during the hearing needing instructions whispered to her by aides for how to vote.
Meanwhile, McConnell, one of the most important people in politics, missed work for roughly six weeks after a fall earlier this year.
While health problems can always happen, there’s no denying the fact that elderly politicians will have more of them than those not old enough to remember the Great Depression. When it comes to the most important and powerful roles in our political system, it’s a serious problem for so much power to be held by people who are so elderly.
There’s also a generational gap that makes having such an elderly political class bad for a democracy. Anyone who’s tried to help their grandmother set up a Facebook account knows that older people often aren’t able to keep up with modern technology. That’s perfectly natural and not their fault — the world keeps changing at an ever more rapid pace.
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Yet the federal government is increasingly inserting itself into the regulation and micromanagement of everything from social media to artificial intelligence — despite the fact that many senators are so old they don’t even know how to use email. It sure seems like something could go wrong when we have people who grew up before color TV trying to write the rules for OpenAI.
Of course, there’s nothing wrong with getting older. It’s a natural and beautiful part of life. The problem is not that our politicians have aged so drastically. It’s that they have clung to power long after they should have ridden off into the sunset.
Brad Polumbo (@Brad_Polumbo) is an independent journalist, co-founder of BASEDPolitics, and a Washington Examiner contributor.