Sep 21, 2022
"Why
Are We Still Governed by Baby Boomers and the Remarkably Old?,"
inquires The New York
Times. "Why Do Such
Elderly People Run America?," The Atlantic wonders. "Gerontocracy Is Hurting Democracy,"
insists New York
Magazine’s Intelligencer.
"Too old to run again? Biden faces questions about his age as
crises mount," The
Guardian reports.
Though these headlines are framed as exploratory
questions, news media seem to have their minds made up: the problem
with Washington is that it’s chock full of geezers. In recent
years, we’ve often heard that U.S. policymaking, helmed at the
federal level by seventy- and eighty-somethings like Donald Trump,
Joe Biden, and Nancy Pelosi, and at the state level by the
similarly aged Dianne Feinstein, Chuck Grassley and Pat Leahy, is
simply growing too old and out of touch with the
electorate.
There’s some credence to this, of course. It’s
certainly true that those occupying the most powerful positions in
U.S. government, on the whole, don’t legislate to the needs of the
public – whether on healthcare, policing, education – the list goes
on and on. But is that really because of legislators' age? Why does
age have to be the focus in this analysis, rather than policy
positions and, relatedly, class interests, which exist independent
of age? Who does it serve to reduce the causes of U.S. austerity
politics and violence to pat, Pepsi marketing-style "generation
gap" discourse? On this
episode show, we detail how "generations" analysis is ineffectual
and, more often than not, misses the mark. We'll discuss how fears
of a "gerontocracy" can – if not in intent, in effect – malign old
age itself, stigmatize the elderly and, above all, distract from
what could be a substantive critical analysis of real, more
profound vectors of oppression such as class, racism, sexism and
anti-LGBTQ currents.
Our
guest in Winslow Erik Wright.