Joe Biden’s re-election bid sparked a debate on the importance of the age of presidents: can an old politician be a danger to democracy? The now-candidate’s 80 years have become a campaign issue, and 70% of Americans who believed Biden should not run for a second term say age is their main preoccupation.
But lo and behold, the alternative is not much better: Donald Trump, whatever his political ideas, is a 76-year-old man. “If Donald Trump were your father, you’d run to the neurologist for an evaluation of his cognitive health,” wrote psychologist John Gartner in USA Today.
The United States is a country divided between the ageing baby boom generation, which continues to have great political, economic and social power and a rapidly growing young multicultural population with much less political and economic clout. The starting points for this divide can be seen in the growing generation gap measured in the attitudes and behaviour of Americans today.
Images of 81-year-old Senate Republican Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, paralysed at a press conference, have put the spotlight on a term that dominates US politics, gerontocracy, and reignited a debate: should there be an age limit on governing?
McConnell is not the oldest of the senators, as the post of honour was held – until she died in 2023 – by Democrat Dianne Feinstein, who was 90 years old. Republican Charles E. Grassley is 89 and former presidential candidate Bernie Sanders is 82. In the lower house, Grace Napolitano is 86, followed by Eleanor Holmes, Harold Rogers, and Bill Pascrell at 85.
Samuel Huntington said “A nation’s interests derive directly from its identity. But without an enemy to challenge it, American identity has disintegrated. Lacking a national identity, America (the US) has been pursuing commercial or ethnic interests as the basis of its foreign policy.
From the beginning, Americans have constructed their identity of beliefs in contrast to an undesirable “other”. Their adversaries are always defined as enemies of freedom and democracy. The United States, perhaps more than most countries, seems to need confrontation with the other to maintain its unity.
The masters of democracy
Democracy in the US faces great challenges: extremism, authoritarianism and misinformation are on the increase. The US is living through a period of political upheaval almost unprecedented in its modern history. For the first time in the country’s modern history, the strength of the democratic system is being questioned, and there is growing preoccupation about the country’s democratic future.
There is also a desire for electoral reforms to guarantee the right to vote and to establish a constitutional right to vote. Also, for the elimination of the Electoral College and direct election of the president; introducing greater proportionality to reduce the representation gap between large and smaller states; limiting campaign spending by reforming the financing system. None of these proposals have the necessary consensus and many would require a constitutional amendment, which seems highly unlikely.
The US used to be held up as a model of democracy in the world. Now the world asks ourselves what direction a country where three major gaps are visible: gender, geographic and generational. Public policies are needed to allow everyone to be in the real or digital public arena, to exercise the right to vote, to lead social initiatives and to balance representation in political institutions. A democracy of white men, with higher education and good jobs manifests a very poor vision of the world.
Inequality between territories is growing: there are first and second cities, as well as urban centres and rural spaces. The territorialisation of inequality will have effects on infrastructures (mobility, education, hospitals, water, waste collection), on the effective organisation of power in the last mile (social solidarity networks or mafias) and on electoral behaviour (populist and anti-globalisation votes).
The generation gap is widening. Young people enter the labour market late and in poor conditions, which delays their social and emotional maturity. Disaffection with the democratic system is growing, as it does not offer solutions to their immediate problems. Digitalisation leaves behind groups of older people who, without digital skills, are dependent on their children for basic tasks (bank, supermarket, health care).
Biden’s intention to repeat his term in office cleared the electoral landscape for 2024 and brought back into focus the battle of the septuagenarians of 2020, who four years after and with the war in Ukraine and the genocide in Gaza, are already older. Battles in Congress over funding and aid for Ukraine, disagreements with Republicans on immigration policy and conflict in the Middle East were among the main challenges for the Biden administration in 2023.
The 2024 presidential election promises a contest that the vast majority of the electorate would have preferred to avoid, with the two oldest presidential candidates in US history. But it is not just the candidates that are old, but the American model of democracy, which is showing signs of age and deterioration by the day.
Economist Michael Roberts points out that the US economy is in relative decline, manufacturing is stagnant, and the country faces the threat of China’s rise, forcing it to wage proxy wars globally to preserve its hegemony. It is likely that 2024 will be another year of what I have called the Long Depression that began after the Great Recession of 2008-2009.
Democracy in peril
That American democracy is in danger is not just rhetoric. Saturday 6 January marked the third anniversary of the attempted coup by thousands of Trump fanatics aimed at disrupting the certification of the presidential election that he lost – and to this day refuses to recognise – by Congress.
More than 140 police officers were injured as some of the extremists sought out lawmakers and even Vice President Mike Pence to hang. Since then, more than 1,230 people involved in the assault on the Capitol have been criminally charged in what is the largest criminal investigation case in the country’s history.
The Department of Homeland Security and other federal agencies have declared that among the most dangerous national security threats to the United States are those posed by extreme right-wing and white supremacist groups, and warn against the possibility of violent acts in the 2024 election cycle.
Last week, the Council on Foreign Relations released its annual poll of US foreign policy experts, only to discover that for the first time in the 16 years of this exercise a domestic issue is among the top three global concerns for 2024: domestic terrorism and acts of political violence.
It cannot be forgotten that Trump is the one who instigated a coup attempt; the one who continues to call members of far-right militias patriots; using fascist rhetoric to threaten his opponents, including Biden in a message where he claims he will use the government to prosecute them… if he makes it back to the White House. Trump is the first presidential candidate to campaign while facing four criminal trials (a total of 91 charges) plus other civil cases.
An editorial in the Mexican daily La Jornada points out that Trump’s lies constitute little less than a call for subversion and reissue the attempt to derail the already flawed US democracy that the former president already carried out after losing the November 2020 election.
Saving the system
And these crusading attacks are what the American public receives, masking the sad reality of a country in crisis. While the president declares that the election contest is about defending democracy against an existential threat from authoritarians, Trump recites that the fight is against the radical left that has seized power and is leading the country into disaster.
Biden emphasised that truth is under assault in America. “As a consequence, so is our freedom, our democracy, our country. An extremist movement led by our former president is trying to steal history now,” he said, recalling the assault on Capitol Hill on January 6, 2021, and warned that this is what he is promising for the future. He proclaimed that the key question is whether democracy is still America’s sacred cause.
Not all Democrats are enthusiastic about Biden: his speech in Pennsylvania was interrupted by critics of his unconditional support for Israel who demanded an immediate ceasefire: another example of how his foreign policy handling of the Middle East and Ukraine could detract votes.
For his part, Trump repeats his message that Biden and the radical left, Marxists, communists, anarchists and, as always, the immigrants who, to use a Nazi-era phrase, “are poisoning the blood of the country, are destroying the nation”, and that this election fight is the no end battle to rescue America.
Moreover, he insists that because he is the sole saviour of the country, his enemies are using the state – the courts, prosecutors, intelligence agencies and more – to nullify him in what he calls the biggest witch hunt in history.
Trump again used undocumented migrants as the centrepiece of his campaign to return to the White House. In philonazi terminology, he demanded the closure of the border with Mexico on the grounds that people from Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa or the Middle East are soiling the blood of Americans.
As the Republican Party primaries (internal elections) to select its candidate are about to begin, he insists that the federal administration is encouraging migrants to enter the US en masse irregularly to register them to vote in the 2024 election. The problem is that many believe him.
Just 28 per cent of adults say they are satisfied with the way democracy works, according to the latest Gallup poll. In 1990, 61 percent expressed satisfaction with democracy. The problem is that in American-style democracy there is no direct popular vote to elect a president.
The American system has never been a full democracy: twice in recent years, the candidate who won the popular vote lost the presidency: in 2000 when Democrat Al Gore won more votes, but the Supreme Court ruled that George W. Bush got more electoral votes, and in 2016, when Hillary Clinton won the popular vote, but lost because of the antiquated electoral college system.
The system ensures that billionaires and big corporations – food, cyber, arms, oil, banking and others – in other words, moneyed interests, continue to have almost unlimited power.
According to former President Jimmy Carter, what once defined the US as a great country because of its political system is now just an oligarchy, with unlimited political bribery being the essence of getting nominations for president or electing the president. And the same applies in the case of US governors, senators and congressmen.
What about renewal?
Where was the renewal of elites in a country that spends its time talking about its youth and its capacity for reinvention? The political discourse remains stagnant and all indications are that democracy, not different governing proposals, is what is at stake. For Biden, the truth is under assault by a former extremist ruler”, but support for Israel’s genocide undercuts sympathy for the White House chief. For Donald Trump, communists, Marxists and migrants poison the country’s blood.
The head of the Senate Republicans, Mitch McConnell, is 81 years old, an age similar to many of his colleagues. Senator Chuck Grassley has 43 years of his 90 years in the Senate, which averages 65.3 years. Yes, the House of Representatives has been getting younger, but its senior leadership remains in more seasoned hands.
In an interview with Fox News, Republican presidential pre-candidate Nikki Haley recalled one of her proposals: that any politician over the age of 75 should have to undergo mental competency tests. “The Senate is now the most privileged nursing home in the country,” she said.
Tired of the government “being run like a gerontocracy” and “youth having little say”, in 2017 the organisation Run for Something emerged to help young people run for political office. As the system is designed today, they explain, there are “so many obstacles” for young people to run for political office. “Our mission is to change politics and build the foundation for a new generation of politicians who do represent the diversity of Americans,” they say.
According to an NBC News poll, seven out of ten Americans did not think Biden should run for a second term. But perhaps it’s not just a problem of politicians, as some film greats don’t even have grey hair anymore.
Hollywood is obviously not the US, but Jeff Bridges and Liam Neeson are still breaking necks there, Biden’s contemporary Harrison Ford is back as Indiana Jones, Tom Cruise is still flying fighter planes, and Keanu Reeves is getting more and more work out of his John Wick films.
Perhaps none of them would even think of globalising war and genocide, of maintaining the Guantánamo concentration camp, financing war in the name of sacrosanct democracy, or continuing to beat up black people. But, fortunately? none of them will be a presidential candidate.
