The Messy Mixture of Old Age and Political Power

Over the course of many years covering Congress, I came to a conclusion that most students of the institution didn’t seem to share. I concluded that the primary source of dysfunction and occasional chaos wasn’t the aging veterans who had stayed beyond their competence. It was the volatile young newcomers who arrived full of bold schemes and projects, many of the ideas self-serving and most of them impractical or politically impossible. This wasn’t a matter of party or ideology. It was a malady that existed on both sides of the aisle.

I haven’t spent quite as much time hanging around state legislatures, but what I have seen there has done nothing to change my opinion. All legislative bodies had their share of aging members who dozed off during sessions and had trouble following the proceedings. But they weren’t a huge problem; they weren’t running the place. Less-experienced members made the decisions, for better or worse, and much of the time for worse. It was the fresher faces who agitated loudly for change without explaining what the change was or what the consequences would be.

I know there are a lot of political observers who don’t agree with me about this, but I’ve never come across one quite as strident as Samuel Moyn, a political scientist at Yale whose new book Gerontocracy in America argues forcefully that the excessive political power of the elderly and their enablers is corrupting American government at all levels. Moyn talks about “an aging constituency that controls the political system. … Powerful men and women have had their lives strung out and can cling to the reins of political control longer and longer.”

The author doesn’t just go after the superannuated legislators. He indicts the old people who vote in disproportionate numbers and the rich senior citizens who finance the campaigns of those who deserve to be retired. “If the voters and the wealthy are old,” he writes, “it may not even matter if the politicians are young.” Moyne is a clever and compelling writer, and he offers a whole array of arguments that deserve to be taken seriously. For the most part, though, I just don’t think he’s right. Believe me, I’m not arguing in favor of senility, or of public servants staying on past their sell date. I’m just making the point that old age is far from being the fundamental problem in our political life.

Moyn offers a raft of statistics in support of his thesis. A number of them, somewhat disturbingly, trace back to research that’s now more than a decade old. But let’s leave that aside and take the material he offers more or less at face value.

To start with, we can take a brief look at Congress. Moyn reports that the average age of a senator is now nearly 65, while half of the American population is less than 40 years old. The median age of voters is 52 and rising. Citizens age 18 to 24 are 20 percent less likely to vote than older Americans.

This is especially true in primaries, where a majority of the contests for significant political office are now concentrated. He asserts that the median voting age in primaries across the country in 2024 was 65; in some places it was much higher. In New Mexico, he writes, the number was 71.

OF COURSE, THIS ISN’T MERELY A STATEMENT about the age of voters; it’s a statement about the aging of the American population as a whole. The cohort age 65 and over is now about 19 percent, and headed for 23 percent by 2050. It’s no surprise that as the country ages, the electorate ages. But Moyn thinks an aging electorate is drawn to politicians who are past the prime of life just as they themselves are. He believes the skewed participation numbers produce a less capable and less productive assortment of officeholders.

It isn‘t just the disproportion in the participating electorate that particularly antagonizes Moyn; it’s the disproportion in wealth. According to Moyn’s rather startling figures, in 2019 Americans under 40 years old, comprising 37 percent of the population, held about 4 percent of the nation’s wealth. Those over 54, an equal number, held 71 percent.

Even more consequentially, Moyn argues, senior citizens are using their wealth and political activism not just to elect favored candidates but to promote policies that favor themselves and work against the interests of the young. This means, in his view, obstruction of efforts to reform Social Security and Medicare, both under growing budgetary stress that is only going to worsen in the decade ahead. The elderly pour money into political campaigns, and that money is contributed for the purpose of feathering their own nests, in Moyn’s view.

He cites a 2013 study conducted by the Urban Institute that found senior citizens taking in $7 of federal subsidy for every federal dollar devoted to the young. “The older you are,” Moyn writes, “the more likely you are to have resources that can and do increase your power.” He concludes that “America today is a place where younger people are absolutely and disproportionately silenced in their political representation.”

IF ALL THIS IS REMOTELY TRUE, it raises the question of what we should do about it — or whether there is anything we can do about it. Moyn trots out a diverse collection of remedies, some that are worth pondering and some that can only be described as fanciful.

The most obvious one is term limits. Sixteen states now impose them for legislators; the Supreme Court has ruled them out for members of Congress. But Moyn concedes that this is a clumsy tool. While it does clear away a small number of aged lawmakers who have served too long, it even more commonly removes legislators who won first terms in their 30s and 40s and are at the peak of their powers when forced out in middle age.

If you take a look at the term-limit states, you would be hard pressed to find any whose legislative productivity or bipartisan cooperation have improved noticeably with the disappearance of the most seasoned members. In any case, as term-limit critics have routinely pointed out, we already have remedies in every jurisdiction in the country. They are called elections.

Moyn points out that instead of term limits, legislative bodies might benefit from age limits — mandatory retirement at a certain advanced age. Most states have these limits in place for judges. But Moyn sees this as problematic as well. He admits that they can “cut off too many high-functioning elders.” The state of Vermont currently has a mandatory retirement age of 90 for its judges. So far as I know, this hasn’t detracted noticeably from the performance of its judiciary.

From there we venture into what critics might call bizarre territory. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, a 38-year-old U.S. House member from Washington state, has proposed development of a mental acuity standard for members of Congress. It doesn’t require much acuity to imagine the chaos that would poison an institution whose older members are constantly worrying about how they will perform on mental examinations. My guess is that its predominant effect would be to reduce the number of aspiring legislators who would want to serve in the institution in the first place.

THERE’S ANOTHER SCHEME aimed at tamping down gerontocracy: Go after voting, not terms of service. The political scientist Douglas Stewart offered some of these as far back as the 1970s. He suggested curtailing suffrage for people over age 70, or those who have retired. He talked about denying the vote to citizens over age 55 who move from one state to another.

Moyn believes that the solution might be not to disempower the elderly but to tinker with the franchise to benefit the young. He suggests that young adults age 18 to 25 could be given an extra vote. He discusses reducing the national voting age below the current age of 18. He talks about quotas for youth representation that would require legislative bodies to include a minimum number of young people, perhaps those under 30 or even under 25. But the idea that this would improve legislative performance suggests that its proponents have never spent much time observing an actual legislature.

Enough treatment of radical electoral ideas. The fundamental question isn’t whether we can do anything about geriatric overrepresentation, but whether we ought to. Older people vote in greater numbers than the young; this is something they have the time and the inclination to do. They have more money than young people; this is the natural result of having lived much longer. It doesn’t necessarily suggest malfeasance. People grow more conservative as they age — this has been true since the beginning of civilization. We do have a serious problem of inequality right now in this country. It’s the complex product of societal oligarchy created by the collapse of the old industrial economy and the outsize influence of the financial industry. It’s not primarily a problem of old age.

The philosopher Henry David Thoreau, whom Moyn quotes, wrote that “I have lived some 30 years on this planet, and I have yet to hear the first syllable of valuable or even earnest advice from my seniors.”

Perhaps Thoreau was unusually perceptive. Or perhaps he just wasn’t listening very hard.

Governing‘s opinion columns reflect the views of their authors and not necessarily those of Governing‘s editors or management.