The French have a phrase for stating the obvious: “enfoncer une porte ouverte,” or “to break down an open door.” We all know that there are lots of boomers, and that Joe Biden and Donald Trump are the oldest Presidents in history. Even so, Moyn writes, the extent of America’s transformation has, like aging itself, snuck up on us. His title is a play on Alexis de Tocqueville’s “Democracy in America”: it implies that gerontocracy—rule by the old—is now the country’s essential condition. “Had she won the presidency in 2024, Kamala Harris would have taken office at sixty,” Moyn points out; only in a gerontocratic America could she have presented herself as a youthful alternative.
To really appreciate the “gobsmacking” degree to which the country has aged, Moyn suggests, you have to look at the statistics. In 1980, the median age in America was thirty. (In other words, half of Americans were younger than thirty, and half older.) Today, the median age is nearly forty. There used to be an “age pyramid,” Moyn explains, with a broad base of younger people narrowing to a small elderly population at the top. Now we have an age rectangle—more people are reaching their seventies and eighties—and it could soon become a top-heavy trapezoid, since young people are having fewer children. In 1920, less than five per cent of Americans were older than sixty-five; by 2060, according to the A.A.R.P., the number will be one in four.
The age of the median voter is now fifty-two. In primaries, it is sixty-five—meaning that the oldest voters ordain the choices for the rest of us. “The most common age of donors in recent elections can run as high as seventy,” Moyn reports; since politicians often do what donors want, even younger elected officials are likely to vote older than their age. That’s not to say that there are lots of younger politicians: the median age in Congress is more than sixty. There are four hundred and thirty-five members of the House of Representatives; only one was born in the nineteen-nineties, and only sixty-four in the eighties. Democrats in Congress trend a little older than Republicans, and “at least half of the Democrats in the House over seventy-five are running again in 2026,” Moyn writes, despite the fact that, between 2022 and 2025, eight congressional Democrats died in office.
All of this has made younger voters more cynical and disengaged. And with good reason: there is ample evidence that older people favor policies that emphasize security for themselves over investment in the young. Broadly speaking, laws now make it much easier for older people to buy property and make investments while avoiding taxes. Meanwhile, being healthier, they have kept working into their seventies, occupying positions that might otherwise be filled by those younger than them. The result has been a widening economic rift between the old and the young, with the net worth of older households rising and the wealth of younger households falling. “The age group most likely to own a home in America, at a rate of over 80 percent, is seventy to seventy-four,” Moyn writes. The second most likely group is people seventy-five and older.
There are nearly sixty million Americans over the age of sixty-five. Can we really generalize about their attitudes and opinions? “As the individual life dwindles, playing for time in the face of impending catastrophe is a psychologically appealing stratagem of avoidance and denial,” Moyn suggests. At the very least, it seems reasonable to say that our opinions grow less au courant as we age. Surveys find that, among people aged eighteen to twenty-nine, the most important foreign-policy issue is climate change; among “old people,” Moyn writes, “the biggest issue is terrorism.” We face all sorts of big civilizational challenges—and yet, if Moyn’s analysis is right, the people who are most directly invested in building the future are being dominated by those who indulge the status quo. “Gerontocracies are prone to let long-term problems fester and worsen,” Moyn warns. But the power of older Americans is hardly despotic; it’s democratic, deriving from the principle of one person, one vote. What, if anything, should be done about it? [...]
Is gerontocracy the right diagnosis for what ails us? In an essay titled “Old People Aren’t the Problem,” Nathan J. Robinson, the editor of Current Affairs, argues that Moyn is making a category mistake. Not all older people are wealthy and powerful; in fact, in 2019, seventy per cent of the wealth owned by those over sixty-five belonged to just ten per cent of American seniors. “Wealth is not actually concentrated among old or young people,” Robinson writes. “It’s concentrated among rich people.” He points out that, in modern America, the politician who has done the most to advance progressive ideas is Bernie Sanders, who is now eighty-four years old (and, to all appearances, totally with it). Would the world be a better place if Sanders were mandatorily retired? “The class struggle overlaps a bit with age, but the policies we should adopt have to be aimed around redistributing wealth and power, period,” Robinson concludes—otherwise we’ll just be “exploited by a younger ruling class.” [...]
The fault lines between young and old are real. I’m in my mid-forties, with two small children, and I live in one of only a few school districts on Long Island where the school budget failed to pass; most of the people I know reasonably assume that it was older voters, wary of even modest tax increases, who voted it down, happy to risk the drastic cuts to programs like tutoring, music, and sports that will occur if a new budget isn’t passed. (On Facebook, there are arguments between parents who want services for their kids and older residents who say those services didn’t exist “back in my day.”) There are vacant lots and empty buildings in town where new housing could be built, but residents, defensive of their property values, keep nixing new development. The status quo rules. And yet it’s not just older people who cling to the past. A mood of retrospection seems to have settled everywhere. In conversation, almost no one will express hope for the future. Maybe one sign that we’re living under gerontocracy is that so many people yearn for the old version of America, in which dynamism abounded and everyone was young.
[ed. I'm old, and old people drive me nuts. But the slow, steady transfer of accumulated wealth over the next couple of decades will have a big impact on these issues. Will descendants act any differently?]
