We live in a gerontocracy. The oldest Baby Boomers are about eighteen months away from turning eighty. The tail end of the silent generation, just above them. whence many of our current leaders are drawn are already octogenarians. Anyone with true adult memories of World War II is over the age of ninety-five. We all age at exactly the same rate, clocking up another birthday with every trip around the sun but something rather peculiar has happened in recent years. The Baby Boom generation has refused to allow itself or its icons to age.
I refer to this phenomenon somewhat facetiously as ‘The Cher Effect’. Cher has been in the public eye for pushing sixty years. During that very long career, she’s occupied a relatively stable cultural niche and has looked and sounded roughly the same as the decades have rolled along. She was born in 1946 and is emblematic of the first year of the Baby Boom and its message of eternal youth. Cher has had a number of advantages. The first of these is genetics. (The first rule of aging being choose your parents carefully). If you don’t believe me, take a look at a few photos of her mother, Georgia Holt as she aged through her 80s and 90s. She also has an enormous bank account and dozens of off camera assistants. All of this makes her an outlier. Unfortunately, her peer group, believing in an entitlement to the heritage of Ponce de Leon, have internalized this extreme outlier status as being the norm.
This is added to by the very long lived Silent Generation now in their 80s and 90s whom have blown all of the actuarial tables out of the water – which is the reason why long term care insurance is no longer available. It became actuarily unsound when the predictions of life span, especially for those with money and access to health care, no longer held true as they had in the past. The reasons for this continue to be debated but my money is on what is known as the semi-starved rat hypothesis. This was originally discovered in rats but has been shown to hold true in other species including primates. If the young are calorie restricted during their development, life span increases, probably because the developing organism becomes metabolically more efficient. The Silent Generation spent their youth in the Depression and World War II. No one was dying of famine in this country but no one could glut either. A side effect of this phenomenon is many Baby Boomers having a parent or parent in law living to a very great age. And how can one consider oneself old when the previous generation is still there?
The first presidential election in which I was eligible to vote was the election of 1980, in which Ronald Reagan beat Jimmy Carter, beginning a major trajectory towards social conservatism which continues to this day. Ronald Reagan was born in February of 1911, making him 69 years of age during that campaign season and at the time of his inauguration. He turned 70 several weeks later. I remember the discussions at the time amongst pundits and the general public about how he was really too old for the job. After all, prior to Reagan, the US had only ever elected two presidents over the age of 65, William Henry Harrison (who died of pneumonia after only a few weeks in office) and James Buchanan (best remembered for being replaced by Abraham Lincoln). Joe Biden is the first president to serve in his ninth decade and if Trump is reelected this fall, he will become the oldest inaugurated president ever, being about four months older than Biden was at the time of his inauguration in 2021.
No one has been talking about the age issue in presidential politics this time around until a few weeks ago when an 81 year old and a 78 year old squared off in a televised debate and it did not go in the ways the pundits had predicted. This geriatrician did not see one candidate that was really too old for the rigors of the job on that night, he saw two. I know a bit about the normal changes that age brings to the body and brain after the age of 75 and while older adults are can be capable and vital human beings, they do not have physiologies that are the same as adults in the 40-60 age group. They generally require more time to process cognitively, they deal less well with stress, both physical and psychological, they take longer to recover if knocked off their balance point, and they are often in the early stages of the multiple chronic diseases of aging.
Serious discussions should have been held in both parties several years ago regarding the rigors of campaigning and the physiologic capabilities an individual executing the office of POTUS should have. They weren’t. Apparently no one could do the elementary school math that would show what an individual’s age would be at a certain date in the future. So now we have one party rallying around a deeply unpopular individual of dubious qualifications who, to all appearances, does not enjoy the most robust health, and who will become the oldest man ever to be inaugurated to the office while the other seems content to commit political suttee, immolating itself at a time when the changing of candidate is not really possible given the structure of the laws regarding elections and the political system.
But they aren’t the only ones. Mitch McConnell (82) has just announced his imminent retirement. Nancy Pelosi (84) continues to plug away in her role. Clarence Thomas (76) shows no signs of vacating the bench. Bernie Sanders will shortly turn 83. Even the maverick third party candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is over 70. The entrenched gerontocracy, occupying senior leadership, prevents promising younger leaders from moving up, representing newer generations and newer ways of viewing the world. The Millennials, as large a generation as the Baby Boom, has entered its forties with most of its emerging leaders blocked off from top positions, likely for another decade or two as the older Baby Boom start proclaiming in a year or so that 80 is the new 50 and 90 is the new 60 a decade after that.
This geriatrician can tell you that 90 is not the new 60 and never will be. That is wishful thinking. And just because you want to believe it is not going to reverse all of the changes to physical and biochemical processes that come with this messy business we call life over time. The gerontocracy will ultimately be handled by a combination of demography and chronology but what remains to be seen is how we are going to adapt and adjust to the inevitable.
Life, The Universe, and Everything 