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In last week’s thread Cirrus addressed the gerontocracy that is due to characterize the upcoming presidential elections (and characterized the two latest ones) in the US, and drew obvious parallels with the late history of the USSR. This reminded me of a comment by phoneosaur on the old subreddit 4 years ago, which I found fascinating enough in order to save it. Either way, this generated a bunch of replies last week, but I think some relevant points were not made.
First I’d bring up the following argument from the old comment:
My hunch is that the "establishment" in each era resorted to increasingly elderly candidates because the pipeline of ideologically reliable young people stopped flowing. The establishment become reluctant to hand power to a new generation when that generation has ceased believing in the legitimacy of the power structure.
Cirrus mentions something that might first read like the opposite, but pretty much seems to point out the same problem:
I don’t think it’s a stretch to compare those Accords with modern-day Wokism currently afflicting Western European culture. The older generation of leaders will roll their eyes. But they signed on to it. The next batch of younger idealist leaders—the Gorbachevs of our future—will take Wokism seriously to the detriment of our national integrity.
I think both of them are definitely onto something, so I’d draw a different parallel to illustrate what I think is going on. In the USSR, what Brezhnev, Andropov and Chernenko all had in common was that they lived through Stalin’s terror as youths, and the Great Patriotic War as young adults. They had multiple common points of reference, which all made them politically cautious. They remembered the horrors of the past, and had understanding of the limitations and problems of the regime they served. Sure, they repeated the usual platitudes about the final victory of socialism, the supremacy of Marxist-Leninist thought, proletarian solidarity etc., but they didn’t take most of this seriously, and were wary of appointing younger cadres – after all, they, not sharing the common understanding and experience of the elders, not being humbled by terrible past events, and potentially being real believers or, alternatively, heretics, may end up enacting reforms that destroy the system, doing things that just don’t work out, being naïve idiots, or hotheaded, or just selling everything out to the enemy. This is just speculation on my part, admittedly – anyway, we know that the gerontocratic party leadership did eventually appoint a younger reformer of “merely” 54 years of age, when the economic and social crisis of the system became obvious.
In the US, the people in the highest political positions are mostly Boomers who lived through the political upheaval of the Johnson and Nixon years and the pre-1973 era of prosperity as young adults. (The Senate’s median age is above 65 years, and has been steadily rising for a while.) For them, these years, the good times, are basically a point of reference as a period of normalcy, and they remember the activities of revolutionary leftist movement as something to be avoided. And they are probably nostalgic for the Reagan/Clinton years. They will, of course, repeat platitudes about civil rights, restorative justice, empowering minorities, the future being female and whatnot, but they won’t tolerate anything that directly disturbs the peace of middle-class suburban normalcy, and won’t give power to true believers of social revolution. After all, they don’t want to rock the boat.
This reminds me of a different observation I’ve seen here from a Gen X-er (I can’t find the comment), namely that X-er voters are reluctant to vote fellow X-ers into political power, because there’s too high a chance that they’ll turn out to be dangerous radicals and true believers. So this isn’t a sentiment limited to just Boomers, probably.
All in all, it seems that in periods of political and economic uncertainty and stagnation, the elderly can remain in power easily, because people will want to stick with the Devil they know, and not risk future upheaval and collapse by giving power to politicians that are untried and untested.
There’s something to this, I think- the young are much more extreme in both directions than their elders- but the ‘where’s the dividing line?’ Aspect is possibly relevant and it’s less than universal. Like let’s take the turn to the right for young men; they’re disproportionately extremely moderate conservatives. On the other hand the leftward turn for young women seems genuinely left of ‘normal’ leftism.
Even my boomercon father notes regularly that ‘the old dinosaurs like Nancy pelosi are keeping the squad and AOC in check- apres lui, la deluge’. But at the same time, Jared Golden is influential within the democrats, is not currently undergoing fossilization while still alive, and is fairly moderate and normal. For some reason the weirdos are the younger people in a position to take over when our current leadership inevitably dies even in the presence of relatively normal ones.
Populism vs donor class politics.
A lot of younger Americans think health care is too expensive and has to become substantially cheaper. A lot of young people aren't enthusiastic about forever wars. A lot of young people think housing costs are unsustainable. A lot of young people would be skeptical of NSA spying. These issues cut across the left/right divide. Both a rightwinger and a leftwinger can agree that wall street is becoming parasitical and is sucking money out of the real economy. The boomer elite believe in the system, the younger party members see the system as broken and want to change it.
The situation is a bit like the situation in France in the 1780s. Older members of the elite believed in the system, a lot of young people didn't. That doesn't mean the youngsters agreed at all on how the situation was to be fixed.
This sounds correct to me, as I'm a younger right-winger and those are points of agreement for me with the left wing. I think with health care, with social order, with institutional trust, with dating and relationships, I think young lefties and righties both see the same problems. They just often disagree profoundly on how to fix them.
Though I do wonder how much the NSA weighs on your average zoomer normie, who seems to treat spying by the government and corporations as a fact of nature because they've grown up surrounded by it.
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