Excerpts from article by Samuel Moyn:
[...] During the 2024 presidential campaign, the revelation of Joe Biden’s decline altered the course of American history, leaving a storied republic on the brink.
The experience brought home the crisis of the country’s aging leadership: our politicians are dangerously old. I bring little news on this front, but the facts are startling nonetheless.
Between 1960 and 1990, the median age of members of Congress was in the early fifties. In the three decades that followed, the median surpassed sixty. Among the effects of this trend has been the on-the-job senility or death (or both) of those who govern us.
Take, for example, the Texas representative Kay Granger. Eighty-one years old in 2024, she chose not to seek reelection and disappeared from the Capitol after casting her last vote that summer, only to be found six months later in a senior-living facility, where she had ended up, without resigning, after experiencing “dementia issues,” as her son put it when reporters tracked him down.
Granger’s is an isolated case only in its absurd extremity. At least half the Democrats in the House who are seventy-five or older—there are nearly thirty in all—are running again this year.
Last year, a seventy-five-year-old, Gerry Connolly of Virginia, bested Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for a leadership role on the House Oversight Committee before dying of throat cancer soon after, which made it easier for House Republicans to pass President Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill, slashing taxes and welfare.
The overrepresentation of the elderly in political office is hazardous beyond the most obvious risks. Political theorists would call this situation a failure of “descriptive representation”: ideally, a political class resembles the people it serves. But it might not concern you who holds political office if they deliver good governance for you and yours.
Indeed, one reason gerontocracy has escaped scrutiny until recently is that it was commonplace to believe that elderly politicians would act benevolently, as the best grandparents do. But the increasing mismatch between the nation’s demography and its leadership is clearly galling to many.