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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.
Neoreactionary internet denizen Jim has an old post where he coined the term "generational loss of hypocrisy", and I wish it was used more widely. His given example sucks, which is probably why. I'll try to convey some other examples without waging the culture war or consensus building, and feedback is welcome if I fall short:
Yes, that's basically the main thing I was trying to get at, at least as far as the US political class and the Brahmin class is concerned - admittedly whatever parallels with the USSR are to be found here aren't that clear-cut in my opinion.*
I'm not a regular reader of Jim and not that familiar with his views, so I won't try defending them, but I would point out that his fundamental argument does still stand in this case. That is, the ruling class in bygone days all "politely pretended women were not like this", but they also put all sorts of social, legal, religious etc. mechanisms in effect to curb women's opportunities to be like this, so that no naive man ever realized that they are like this. One of the decisions this entailed was not permitting women to serve as guards in men's prisons, because duh, not all of them will end up helping some prisoners escape due to sexual attraction, but some of them will. Those mechanisms are long dismantled by now, but the polite pretension still lingers on, which is why there are prisoners successfully escaping with the help of their sex partner female guards.
In basically the same way, I'm sure the ideology of feminism, women's liberation and gender equality used to be propagated and continued for decades mostly by powerful men who, by today's feminist standards, were objectively sexists, rapists and phonies. But this state of affairs was never going to last; eventually the true believers gain power.
Other than this, I agree with your points.
*Gorbachev and his supporters were, I guess, true believers as well in the sense that they all grew up in late-stage socialism (heh), and thought it's stable and mature enough for it to be reformable and to be able to evolve.
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