Gerontocracy In America: Are old people ruining American democracy?

Gerontocracy In America: How the Old Are Hoarding Power and Wealth — and What to Do About It

by Samuel Moyn

Published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux

269 pages $30

 

By Jennifer Szalai 

This is a country for old men, says Samuel Moyn in his wilfully provocative new book, Gerontocracy in America: How the Old Are Hoarding Power and Wealth — and What to Do About It. Just take a look at some prominent members of our ruling class, including the octogenarians in Congress running for re-election, often in open defiance of constituents and actuarial tables.

When 81-year-old Joe Biden was still facing off against 78-year-old Donald Trump in the 2024 election, worried observers warned that the country’s future was being foreclosed by elderly delusions of grandeur. “It was sadly on trend to scapegoat old people for exerting a death grip on power,” Moyn writes in his introduction, before proceeding to scapegoat old people for exerting a death grip on power. 

 

But the target of this book isn’t limited to a superannuated elite. What he calls the “oldigarchy” is propped up by seniors who vote in every “boring and off-cycle” election and “enjoy the most governmental benefits by a vast degree.” Moyn says that a mix of democracy, capitalism and longer life expectancy has created “new and insidious forms of elder rule.” He devotes an entire chapter to enumerating threats to the Republic posed by that sinister outfit known as the AARP.

Moyn, a historian at Yale who is in his mid-50s, knows that this argument might sound perverse. After all, the United States was born in a revolt against the Old World. Oscar Wilde, in one of his plays, has a character joke that “the youth of America is their oldest tradition.” 

But the elderly do have their entitlements, like Social Security and Medicare. They also have their paid-off homes and their tax breaks. In 1981, the median age of an American home buyer was a relatively youthful 30; in 2022, it had jumped to a staunchly middle-aged 53. According to recent data, people over the age of 54 are only 37 per cent of the population but hold 71.6 per cent of the wealth. Some of that money is used to finance political campaigns; Moyn cites a study that found that the median dollar poured into American elections comes from a 66-year-old. “The older you are, the more likely you are to have resources that can and do increase your power,” he writes. 

To curb that power he offers a number of proposals, some of them more modest than others. There could be an age limit for voting — or, barring that, a weighting of young people’s votes so that they count more than old people’s. The same goes for donors and politicians, who should be age-limited too. He would like to abolish the Senate, an old institution filled with old lawmakers whose very name comes from the Latin word senex, meaning “old man.” 

A man of the left, Moyn maintains that the cliché is true: “People grow more conservative as they age.” He goes on to admit that the actual evidence for this is mixed — the far right, after all, “often draws from the very young” — but elderly voters tend to be stingier, prioritising stability over growth. 

Moyn wants more progress and innovation — so much so that his socialist utopia is inspired by capitalism’s creative destruction. He praises Silicon Valley for having “youthful workers” who “hasten the future rather than getting stuck in a rut.” Even those of us who don’t yet qualify for a senior’s discount may recoil at such coldblooded rationales. Silicon Valley is now known for its reactionary politics, with ever-ambitious billionaires rejecting anything that might hem in their wealth and power. We live in pretty ruthless times. Might the solution entail more compassion, not less? 

Moyn concedes that “the elder propensity to hoard” doesn’t necessarily come from a mean and rapacious place. Old people are indeed physically vulnerable. Long-term care, which isn’t covered by Medicare, is “frighteningly expensive,” and Americans are understandably terrified of outliving their savings. He wants to ease the elderly out of public life by taking their understandable fears off the table. They need to be guaranteed a “meaningful, universal and well provisioned retirement” — “if only,” he later adds, “to convince them to go along with an inspiring rejuvenation of society.” 

The more he puts the issue in these terms, the more it sounds like he’s making an old-fashioned argument about class. But given his preoccupation with novelty he needs to highlight that he’s doing something new. Referring to, uh, age-old debates over how to have a society that provides for everyone’s needs, he writes: “Nobody to date has proposed doing so by overturning gerontocracy.” 

Maybe there’s a reason for that. It’s only toward the end of the book, when Moyn offers a surprisingly sensitive discussion of the reluctance of our youth-obsessed culture to reckon with mortality, that his treatment begins to sound more serious than an attention-getting provocation. “Americans were invited to see themselves as decreasingly young rather than ever old,” he writes.

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The reviewer is the nonfiction book critic for The Times.

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