The Democratic Gerontocracy Forgets the Lessons of Its Youth and Maturity

Here’s another way to look at why Republicans swept the 2024 elections: It’s the fault, only partly, of course, of the gerontocracy of the Democratic Party.

Going back through history, it’s hard to find a time when a party’s leadership was so far along in years. The founder presidents retired in their mid-60s. Andrew Jackson retired at 69, Abraham Lincoln was murdered at 56, and Ulysses S. Grant retired at 54. Theodore Roosevelt died at age 60, Franklin Roosevelt at 63.

Quite a contrast with President Joe Biden, older when he was inaugurated than Ronald Reagan was on his last Air Force One flight home to California. Biden, born in 1942, was installed as the Democratic nominee in 2020 by then-House Majority Whip James Clyburn (1940) and was pushed out of the 2024 nomination by the still very active former Speaker Nancy Pelosi (1940).

So far as has been reported, neither Clyburn nor Pelosi tried back in 2022 or 2023 to persuade Biden not to run for reelection, though both must have had some awareness that aging was diminishing his powers. It’s not an easy thing to do: A century ago, Chief Justice William Howard Taft said his hardest duty was to tell the 80-year-old Justice Joseph McKenna he must retire.

Also not stepping in were the similarly aged near-majority of senators from the 19 states counted as safe Democratic in this election: Richard Blumenthal (1946), Ben Cardin (1943), Tom Carper (1947), Richard Durbin (1944), Mazie Hirono (1947), Angus King (1944), Edward Markey (1946), Patty Murray (1950), Jack Reed (1949), Bernie Sanders (1941), Charles Schumer (1950), Jeanne Shaheen (1947), Elizabeth Warren (1949), Peter Welch (1947), and Ron Wyden (1949). (Cardin and Carper did not seek reelection this year.)

All seem to be in fine physical and mental condition, so far as I know, but each must be aware of the decline of many of their contemporaries. As one of the latter (born in 1944), I’m aware of how many of them, as well as Biden, have political roots in the years dominated by Vietnam and Watergate.

From Vietnam, they took the lesson that America must extract itself from seemingly unwinnable military commitments. You can see that impulse in Biden, who opposed military aid to the flailing South Vietnamese in 1975 and who pressed for what appears to have been an overhasty withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021.

It’s also visible in the records of these and many other Democrats who opposed, with equal vehemence, the Gulf War resolution in 1991 and the Iraq War resolution in 2002, though the former is now regarded as uncontroversial.

From Watergate, they retained the idea of driving a Republican president out of office for his misdeeds. The failure of the pursuit of Reagan over Iran-Contra in 1987-88 did not prevent them from pursuing against President-elect Donald Trump the Russia collusion hoax first hatched by the unsuccessful campaign of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (1947).

These same senators harshly and, in my view, justifiably criticized Trump for failing to prevent the Jan. 6 assaults on the Capitol, and for casting a pall on the legitimate transfer of power. But they themselves collaborated in or passively enjoyed the anticipated political benefits of undermining the legitimacy of the transfer of power from former President Barack Obama (1961) to Trump, on grounds which turned out, predictably in my view, to be utterly baseless.

They were pleased as well to bless, or at least say not a word against, the kangaroo court prosecutions of Trump in Manhattan and Atlanta, and the documents possession charge, which was brought against him. But not against Biden for the same offense or against Hillary Clinton for creating an email system far more penetrable by the nation’s enemies than Trump’s Mar-a-Lago or Biden’s Delaware garage. Trump’s election by a clear plurality is evidence that most American voters regard this Democratic lawfare as illegitimate and unworthy of respect.

Some of the blame for Democrats’ across-the-board defeat this year is that the Democratic gerontocracy has forgotten some of its own successes over the years. Plainly, one reason that younger Hispanics and blacks switched to Trump is Democratic misgovernance of central cities and whole states, misgovernance that has even caused California, with its great climate and beauty, to lose population. You have to really misgovern to get people to flee California.

Forgotten now by Democrats, it seems, were the crimefighting and welfare-reform initiatives of the 1990s, initiated by Republicans such as Rudy Giuliani in New York and Tommy Thompson in Wisconsin but imitated and adapted by many Democrats across the country, not least former President Bill Clinton (1946). Instead, the Democratic gerontocracy bowed down to demands to defund the police and denounce America as an inherently racist nation. Voters had something to say about this last week.

The other reforms the Democratic gerontocracy forgot were the changes in the presidential nominating system, which began just as many of their political careers.

I sat in the audience at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago and checked down the list on the proposal for a commission to reform the delegate selection rules. It was the one roll call the Lyndon B. Johnson convention managers lost, as New York liberals and Michigan United Auto Workers loyalists cast decisive yeas.

The delegate selection process has been criticized and tinkered with, but it replaced a system that was only a husk, dominated by party leaders with no real accountability to the wider electorate. At least in versions of the new system, Democratic and Republican voters have had a chance to assess competing candidates and make their choices.

Until recently, that is. The Democratic gerontocracy has allowed the bypassing of the system, as Obama discouraged Biden and effectively installed Hillary Clinton as the nominee in 2016, and as Clyburn effectively ended the process by endorsing Biden in the black-majority primary in his home state of South Carolina.

Then, after this year’s June 27 presidential debate, we saw Pelosi maneuver Biden out of the race on July 21, with Biden three hours later endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris, Pelosi’s fellow San Franciscan, whose political career was launched by the still-vibrant Willie Brown (1934). Did Obama collude with Clyburn in 2020 to install Biden, or with Pelosi in 2024 to oust him?

That’s unclear, but Obama is the only president since Woodrow Wilson to stay on in Washington after his term, in a mansion 2.4 miles from the White House. How much influence he has been wielding is a subject only Tablet’s David Samuels, in his interview with historian David Garrow, has explored, but perhaps the journalists who wrote hundreds of thousands of words about the nonexistent Russia collusion hoax might want to take a stab at it.

It’s unlikely the Democratic gerontocracy will be able to block the voters from deciding the party’s presidential nomination in 2028—the first one in 20 years. It’s unfortunate, however, that neither party has developed an alternative to having vice presidential nominees chosen by a single person.

Often in the past half-century, both parties have made good choices. But it’s increasingly hard to say that of Obama’s choice of Biden in 2008, Biden’s choice of Harris in 2020, and Harris’ choice of Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz in 2024. The Republican gerontocrat Trump, disruptive as he may be, did better in picking then-Indiana Gov. Mike Pence in 2016 and Ohio Sen. JD Vance in 2024.

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