Mitch, Lindsey and the Gerontocracy

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1:07After this weekend, I think it's pretty fair to say that the United States Senate is not in great health. On Sunday, Senator Lindsey Graham died. He'd just gotten back from Ukraine. He'd been scheduled to appear on Meet the Press. Instead, President Trump came on the show to memorialize him. I got a message about one o 'clock in the morning from one of the people at his office that he had passed away. I said, you guys, I just can't believe it. He was like a member of the family to me. It's very tough, actually. It's amazing. And Senator Graham, he was actually the second lawmaker in a month to be rushed to a hospital.

1:51— Concern over U.S. Senator Mitch McConnell's health is growing. — There's now been three weeks since McConnell was admitted. We still don't know why he's there today. — Senator Mitch McConnell landed in the hospital June 14. That's when medics were called to his home to respond to an unconscious individual. — And according to the most recent statement from his team, which they pointed us again to today, he remains in the hospital. The senator released a statement saying he fell, and he acknowledged he won't be back at work anytime soon. Some folks say they've spoken to him on the phone. None of those people are reporters.

2:37Senator Graham is the sixth member of the 119th Congress to have died while in office. and extended absences seem to have become more common too. Sam Moyne, who is an author and professor at Yale Law School, he says, It makes sense. Once you realize the average age of American lawmakers is rising exponentially.

3:02Sam Moyn: It's been a constant drumbeat. And whether it's cognitive decline or death, I think Americans are now very well aware that their politicians are very elderly. Sam's got a lot to say about all this because he just wrote a book called Gerontocracy in America. Spoiler alert, a whole lot of old people do not like it. I haven't even looked at this phone I'm sitting next to, which is full of unsolicited voicemails. Sam wrote an op-ed in the New York Times laying out his case. It was titled, Older Americans are Hoarding America's Potential. And indeed, the comments field on that op-ed are, you know, worth savoring.

3:49Sam Moyn: It's kind of an amazing spectacle. But to Sam, the Mitch McConnell mystery, Lindsey Graham's death, they serve as proof that he's right. Older Americans just can't let go of power. And he wants to talk about how we correct course. Everywhere, but especially in Washington, where he wants to do more than kick out the old folks. It's not good enough to have like high functioning 60 and 70 year olds and block the 80 year olds. If you have one senator in his 30s, very, very few representatives in their 40s and the median age is over 60. I feel like we should talk about the president, too, because Donald Trump is still with us.

4:35but he is the oldest person to have ever been elected president. And it's weird because he was elected right after Joe Biden was driven from the race because he had an extended senior moment during a televised debate. So it was like we said, okay, well, we can't elect that person, obviously. but then the country went ahead and elected a very old person. It's just a strange confluence of events to me. Do Americans love old people or is there something else going on here?

5:13Sam Moyn: Amazingly, Trump even said, well, Joe Biden has given old people like me a bad name because we should know when we lose our mojo that we should step aside. I haven't. So I think Americans must have accepted that given the choices that one old man was better than another. But since Ronald Reagan, we've had older and older presidents, some young ones like Barack Obama. But I think the basic issue is that we do defer to older people. Maybe more important is the electorate is old. So you have a gerontocracy voting gerontocrats into power.

6:02That's interesting. So it's like because older people are more likely to vote, also older people are more likely to win.

6:08Sam Moyn: We know for sure that everything else being equal, everyone wants to vote for someone their own age to represent them. It's just that older people vote a lot more.

6:25Today on the show, how old people have built and kept power and how to win it back. I'm Mary Harris. You're listening to What Next. Stick around.

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10:21Okay, so Sam, your new book, it's called Gerontocracy in America, and in it you argue the U.S. is increasingly becoming a country for old people, or gerontocracy. I'm a little curious why you wanted to focus on this topic, and I also think it's important to say that your focus on this, it's not just politics. It's literally like every element of society. You've written an article about how professors are too old. You yourself are a professor. So you're looking at everyone, right? Basically, I thought a lot about this and I'm as concerned about politicians as the next person.

11:00Sam Moyn: But first of all, no one needs me with Mitch McConnell's hijinks to point out this problem. And it's bipartisan. How old are you, Sam? I'm 54. And so I'm, you know, middle-aged, getting to old age. But I realized at a certain point that it may not matter how old the politicians are if the electorate is old and those who control, you know, wealth in our country in its various forms are old. You know, if Donald Trump should, for whatever reason, not make it till next June, the United States would immediately have the youngest president in his history because J.D. Vance would be younger than Theodore Roosevelt was early 40s when he became president.

11:57That's interesting. You're saying like the older politicians are a symptom, but not the cause.

12:02Sam Moyn: I think they're their own problem, but they might be a more minor problem. And they're definitely a symptom because they get there through these other levels of gerontocracy. So maybe a better analogy is not disease, but the levels of hell. You have the politicians, but then who puts them there? Well, the electorate. And who pays for elections in our country? Well, the donors who are extremely old, even older than the electorate. And who has money? Well, oligarchy, leaving the tech bros out, are old and aging fast. And so it seems like we're embarked on an experiment, not just in this country, of the political consequences of the extension of life, which is a good thing.

12:59Sam Moyn: I want to live as long as they can make it happen, but we shouldn't pretend that there's not a dark side. What's the problem you want to solve for? Well, I don't want to attack entitlements, so-called. I actually think we have too few. Like Social Security or Medicare. Exactly. Medicare. Those are the main two at the federal level. And that means that six to seven federal dollars are spent on American seniors for every dollar that's spent on American children, which is a crime. But the answer to that is not to take away anyone's benefits. It's to add. I think we could imagine an even better welfare state where I have a problem is that older people monopolize elections.

13:51Sam Moyn: They monopolize wealth. They have most of the houses. That means they control the desirable urban cores. They no longer face mandatory retirements, and so many refuse to retire and so create blockages in sectors of the economy. So all that is gerontocratic, and that's what we should face because we should be fairer to younger people, even while, you know, keeping our generosity towards older people when they need care, even being more generous. us. You know what I think about a lot? I think about how the problem of people aging is a self-limiting problem. People will eventually die. And when you talk about this wealth that exists for older people, one thing that is about to happen, the Wall Street Journal wrote about this recently, is a massive wealth transfer where baby boomers will die.

14:55And then all of this wealth and all of the power that it conveys will go to their heirs. And I wonder if for you, that's going to change the conversation and make it not so much about being old or a gerontocracy, but just where this money, this island of money floats to next.

15:16Sam Moyn: You know, we're already in the thick of that, you know, transfer of wealth because a lot of boomers have already passed away. And there's more to come. And as you say, we're in the midst of the greatest wealth transfer between generations in world history. Now, one objection to that is it's just within families that have wealth to transfer in the first place, and that's not enough. But I have a deeper objection, which is that the boomers are just in the right place at the right time to establish this new effect for all future generations, which is that older people have wealth and they make their children wait around until their 60s to get the resources that, you know, the parents have controlled.

16:09Sam Moyn: like houses, but also wealth generally. And to you, does that mean that creates another generation of gerontocracy? Because those people are then in their 60s getting all this wealth. They're incentivized to keep it for themselves. Exactly. And then they'll transfer it, but it'll be to their 60-year-old children. So the question is, when are we entitled, whether within families or on the social level, to access to resources, to launch ourselves. And I think it's way earlier. And no one intended this, but the extension of life has meant that a lot of Americans are waiting for their chance, and yet they get it at the wrong time.

16:54Sam Moyn: That's not to say that older people shouldn't get and keep a lot of what they've accumulated, but we should make them give back earlier, both within families and beyond families. We've talked about how basically our Congress, our Senate are very old at this point. But you talk about how this oldness actually may be baked in. Like you talk about how the Constitution, you think, is a gerontological document, which I just love that phrase. I wanted to say it aloud. Can you explain why? Because I don't think people think of it that way necessarily. Well, the American Revolution, which we just commemorated, was conducted by relatively young guys.

17:44I mean, Ben Franklin wasn't that old, you know, and then he was still around in 1787 when the Federalists got together and crafted our Constitution. And I think it's impossible not to

18:03Sam Moyn: like, see them as gerontocrats. They thought that giving power to the elderly would make everyone better off. They believed that they were embarking on an experiment in having a republic. You know, a lot of people could vote, but only a few could have property and their perquisites needed to be protected. So when there were very few examples in the world, The first thing they did is create a Senate, which is literally named after old men. And for all federal office, they institutionalized age minimums. But not maximums. No maximum. And famously, in the other Council of Elders beyond the Senate, the Supreme Court, they said there's life tenure.

19:03Sam Moyn: And that means you can't force a federal judge to retire absent, you know, horrendous conduct that's impeachable. This sort of goes hand in glove to me with the fact that the founders, they didn't love the idea of democracy. They wanted to have controls on democracy so they didn't get too, quote unquote, out of hand. Is that what they're doing here with this age minimums to enter public service? I mean, I'd say they didn't want to have democracy at all. There's no word democracy in the Constitution. There's no right to vote in the Constitution. And we know the sordid stories, not just of the Senate, but of the Electoral College, which really was about transferring power to an elite cast of notables.

19:54Sam Moyn: And it was absolutely because they thought everyone would be better off if the people didn't rule in the United States. And so it's not surprising that they had these views. But what I was shocked by is just how much faith they put in the elderliness of the ruling class and baked that into the Constitution.

20:22We'll be back after a quick break.

20:48moving and trucks rolling. So his operation runs smoothly, no matter the shift. Call 1-800-GRAINGER, click grainger.com, or just stop by Grainger for the ones who get it done. Hi, I'm Angie Hicks, co-founder of Angie. And one thing I've learned is that you buy a house, but you make it a home. Because with every fix, update, and renovation, it becomes a little more your own. So you need all your jobs done well. For nearly 30 years, Angie has helped millions of homeowners hire skilled pros for the projects that matter, from plumbing to electrical, roof repair to deck upgrades. So leave it to the pros who will get your jobs done well.

21:27Angie, the one you trust to find the ones you trust. Find a pro for your project at Angie.com.

21:36Okay, so you have some proposed solutions for what you see as the gerontological problem we're facing. I think none of them are easy to implement, but it's worth going through them one by one. And I'll start with the one that I think is easiest for people to grasp, which is simply mandatory retirement ages. And you talk about this not just in the political world, but also, you know, in the world of work. First of all, are other places doing this and doing this well? And where does it get sticky? Because I can imagine part of the reason people would not want a mandatory retirement age is that some people do quite well for a long time.

22:15Some people live a tremendous amount of time, and that changes as time goes on, too. People live longer, have been living longer as time goes on. I'm open to a flexible retirement age. As we have fewer and fewer young people and more and more older people, it may be legitimate to raise it. But what we can have is the monopolization of power by older people. And so the question is, what's the best way of keeping that from, you know, getting even worse? Mandatory retirement is widely accepted across the world. And I only advocated in two scenarios. One is in politics, where I think we should have age limits for federal officials, government officials generally, including judges.

23:02Put a number to it. Would you have an age? I'm happy for people to quit at 70, but if you want it to be 75, maybe there's enough high-functioning individuals that we want to give ourselves the option. Why then? Why 70 or 75? Well, it's just going to be an arbitrary line, so I don't have a stake in, you know, when we agree to draw the line. We could start as an experiment drawing it at 80, and if that saves us a lot of trouble, then that might be sufficient, and then we'll go down. Now, I actually think our much bigger agenda item ought to be finding ways to make our political representatives more youthful, because any age limit is going to leave us with most politicians just under it.

23:53How would you even incentivize that? There are youth quotas in Europe and elsewhere where parties, when they put out their slates are... America hates quotas. That's true. He really hates them. I don't know. As far as I know, you think we don't have democracy. So there's a question about whether America wants to look for solutions to having such widespread alienation among those who just don't see their government as representing

24:29Sam Moyn: them. You're talking about like sort of guaranteeing power for young people. But I think some people would ask, why can't young people just beat old people? Like, I live in New York City. We just elected Zoran Mamdani, 34 years old. He's the new mayor. Great. He's a young person in charge. Like, why can't we just have more of that? Well, to me, that sounds like saying, why don't we just win even in games where it's almost impossible to do so because the deck is stacked? Well, of course, that would be great if we could win in an unfair game. But the whole point is that we lose too often when the game is unfair.

25:16And so that's why we change our rules to make they get like and no one would, I think, deny that if we find that, you know, democracy is not representing blacks

25:32Sam Moyn: or women adequately, we should have some discourse about how to address it and fix it. You wrestle a lot with voting. And I think this is probably one of your most controversial takes where you talk about whether votes should be weighted differently based on somebody's age. Like you toy with all sorts of ideas that would give certain people more power. I think this would be so hard to do. Well, we've done it because the voter in Montana has a much weightier vote than I do. Right, but it feels invisible, I think, to most voters. I don't think we're saying it out loud as much. You and I are. I think you're totally right.

26:21Sam Moyn: Well, so let me just concede that many things I propose because I'm a spitballer are unlikely, but the response to a problem can't just be that it's insoluble. So let me just get like very clear that I offer many modest solutions, much more modest ones when it comes to voting. things like stopping how we punish young people for mobility through the kinds of registration requirements that we have, which systematically benefit older voters, institutionalizing mandatory voting, and or providing a holiday for voting because older people either have retired or have power in their workplaces to leave to vote, which younger people do not.

27:14Sam Moyn: One more example of systematic discrimination. Yeah, one idea I've heard, I'm curious how you feel about it, is like, for instance, I think a lot of people who are interested in democracy talk about primaries, how primaries, you know, warp voting. And if you just had a primary day, a national primary day, it would make things so much easier. I think it would solve some of the problems you're talking about, which is like, everyone would know when it is, and so younger people would come. It wouldn't be confusing, all sorts of things. There really are fixes like this that exist that I just think we're not talking about.

27:45I think... Most people actually would be open to having fewer elections because our best political scientist shows that America has way, way more. And the predictable effect of that is that younger people will show up once, but not eight times. And when you look at the eighth election, the median voter is over 60 or 70. and so it's really the rules which because of these like effects need to be changed now it's true i flirt with this more edgy idea and say well wait i'm for equality but equality of what And if I have 80 years left to live and someone else has 10, why should equality mean we get the same vote where the

28:46Sam Moyn: elderly voter gets to dictate a future? I will see and he will not. Yeah, it's interesting because what you're articulating is really, it's a bigger idea that the project we're doing in government is building towards this future. Where right now we're in this place where we're building towards the past, right? We're making America great again. What you're articulating is really that we need to be building towards something, something we probably won't see. And I think that's actually a beautiful way to think of the project of government. It's just we're in such a retro place right now that it feels impossible.

29:27And yeah, the one thing I struggled with in your writing is that I feel like we have an entire cultural system built up around people growing up, people, you know, from birth to age 18, going through a K through 12 system. You know, it's about civic engagement. Here's what you're about to do. You're going to get a job. You're going to do a thing. We have no step down system. We have like, you retire, you fall off a cliff. Maybe you have money, maybe you don't. Things get bad because you get sick. It's just, there's nothing akin to that. And I think that's a real problem because if you're asking people to really reckon with the fact that they're getting older and they need to kind of give some of their stuff up, they have to also feel safe.

30:08And safety comes from those cultural systems that just don't exist right now. I totally agree. I think it's very insightful what you say. I think it's very strange that we do, as you say, prepare people, at least in better schools, for a civic role, but then we don't give it to them until so late in their lives. And that's just writ large when you look at the economy, where we're training people to be innovators, but outside a few local exceptions like Silicon Valley, you enter the corporation and you're infantilized for decades as those in power refuse to get out of the way, and you then succeed them very late.

31:01I also totally agree with you that we are not a culture that accepts transience

31:07Sam Moyn: and the fact that we live life in stages. And in a good society, we wouldn't just equip children and we wouldn't just launch people into the prime of their lives when they have, you know, the creativity and energy to think long term about our collective future. We would also say, what about limits? What about the death you're facing, the decline you're probably already experiencing in ways you're denying? Why not think of the last phase of your life as a chance to reinvent yourself one more time? We'll help you. It's just you can't hoard power and an exchange will invite you to have an amazing retirement if you give back so that younger people in their prime can enjoy their shot.

32:06What are your family dinners like? Like, I don't know how multi-generational your family is, whether you have, you know, living elders, whether you have kids, any of those kinds of things. But these conversations, they get so gnarly at the personal level. I think my views are very reasonable and my family does too. Now they're loyalists, but I've been shocked by the fact that there are some folks who insist they're ageless, they're not subject to decline. Well, are you building this into your life? Are you like, hey, kids or cousins or whoever, I will be transferring this to you. I plan to retire at this time, all that sort of stuff?

32:45Absolutely. I mean, I'm already semi-retired in my own mind, and I'm a hobbyist. And I write books on the side and teach my classes and get a lot out of it, but I don't need to do so forever. There are many ways in which our retirement can involve features of our jobs as long as we, you know, get meaning from them. But we can also diversify our activities over time. And we should, I think, you know, not to impose expectations on anyone.

33:18Sam Moyn: But it's a bad thing for Americans to think that their job is their identity. Do you think that there's a chance that you have a hypocritical moment in 10 or 20 years? uh well a couple of responses if i do it would not invalidate the ideas it would just mean that i'm a hypocrite but more important no i i feel very confident that i will retire on my own schedule rather than inflict my old age on my institution just because the law says i can has anyone reached out about your ideas and said, these are interesting. I want to try to make something lower lift work. I think that many of the things that I mentioned either have been enacted at the state level or elsewhere or are being widely proposed.

34:24And so I would just emphasize that many of the things on my kind of laundry list of solutions are very feasible and easy to just federalize and kind of make part of our national conversation. Age limitation for office is a very common feature across the world. And at the state level, most politicians, especially judges, are age-limited. So it's just a matter of a movement that kind of gets itself together to say we need to make that a federal policy too.

35:09Sam, I'm really grateful for your time and for your book. Thanks for coming on the show.

35:13Sam Moyn: Thanks for having me. Really appreciate it. Sam Moyne is a professor at Yale Law School, and he just wrote a pretty provocative book. It's called Gerontocracy in America, how the old are hoarding power and wealth and what to do about it, go check it out. That's our show. What Next is produced by Rob Gunther, Evan Campbell, Madeline Thames-Ducharme, and Patrick Fort. Paige Osborne is the senior supervising producer of What Next and What Next DVD. Mia Lobel is the executive producer of podcasts here at Slate. Ben Richmond is our senior director of podcast operations. And I'm Mary Harris. Go track me down on Blue Sky.

35:49I'm Matt Mary Harris. Thanks for listening. Catch you back here next time. Thank you.

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