Twilight of the gerontocracy

Just before the New Year his brother-in-law came to town and stayed at their house. Ivan Ilych was at the law courts and Praskovya Fedorovna had gone shopping. When Ivan Ilych came home and entered his study he found his brother-in-law there — a healthy, florid man — unpacking his portmanteau himself. He raised his head on hearing Ivan Ilych’s footsteps and looked up at him for a moment without a word. That stare told Ivan Ilych everything. His brother-in-law opened his mouth to utter an exclamation of surprise but checked himself, and that action confirmed it all.

“I have changed, eh?”

“Yes, there is a change.”

And after that, try as he would to get his brother-in-law to return to the subject of his looks, the latter would say nothing about it.

Tolstoy, “The Death of Ivan Ilych”

This weekend I met an old academic mentor and friend for a drink. He’s a brilliant scholar and excellent writer — a somewhat rare combination — who I’ve known for nearly 40 years now. He was 40 when I met him, and he is the same age as Donald Trump almost to the day.

“We live too long,” he told me. He took emeritus status a few years ago, but still teaches from time to time his favorite class, which deals with material that he knows quite literally better than anyone else in the English-speaking world. But now he is very nervous before his classes, because so often he finds himself grasping for a word or phrase that would have come so easily to him just a few years earlier. I’m sure his students still get the benefit of a great class, and he’s sure he made the right decision to retire.

Six years ago I wrote this:

I’m convinced that one of the downstream effects of putting a totally unqualified and mentally unhinged grifter into the White House is that lots of far more modest prudential rules than “don’t make a thieving madman at the head of a cult of personality president of the United States” get much easier to ignore.

One of those rules would be, don’t put somebody in the White House who would be in his eighties for most of his presidency.

I’m genuinely puzzled by how people can’t see what a reckless and absurd thing it would be to do that.

The risks associated with advanced old age — death, dementia, serious illness, and other forms of sudden steep decline in cognitive and physical ability — increase exponentially as people move into their eighties.

It’s a fool’s game to try to guess what the specific odds are of today’s spry 78-year-old becoming a shell of his former self a very few years down the road. Suffice it to say that the epidemiological data for the general population are grim. And of course almost all of us have seen this process up close and personal at one time or another with relatives and friends and colleagues.

The eighties are often brutal years for even genetically lucky people with healthy lifestyles and little day to day stress (a major health risk all by itself) in their lives.

All of which is to say that the idea of electing a soon-to-be eightysomething president is just nuts. It’s a particularly extreme form of the Myth of the Indispensable Man. It’s something I’m convinced seems less than insanely reckless at this particular historical moment in large part because 62 million American voters thought it was a great idea to do something even more insanely reckless, by putting someone like Donald Trump in office.

The question of how old somebody can be and still be considered a good candidate for president despite their age is obviously an open one, but eighty? Or anything very close to that?

Come on.

. . . two points I meant to add but omitted in a rush:

(1) What about re-election? Since the passage of the 22nd amendment every president who has served one full term has gotten his party’s nomination for another term, with the exception of LBJ. Are we seriously going to have an argument about electing someone in his mid-80s to another four-year term? And if Biden or Sanders finesses this by pledging not to run, you have all the disadvantages that come with that.

(2) I don’t think the main risk here is death while in office, or at least not a sudden unexpected death. The bigger risk is loss of capacity/competence, in a system that really has no effective way of removing someone who clearly shouldn’t be in the office any more (see our present situation). An ongoing deteriorating health situation that wasn’t producing an extreme enough result to obviously require the invocation of the 25th amendment would be a constitutional nightmare. The risks of that happening to a president in his or her 80s are again exponentially higher than the risks for candidates even a decade younger.

Reading the thread about Biden’s cancer, I was struck by the willful blindness of a lot of commenters, who simply will not let go of the idea, so utterly discredited by events at this point, that there’s still some sort of question about whether Biden made the right decision in early 2023, when he decided to run again.

Some of the mental contortions in this regard are pretty amazing. For example, the argument that it really doesn’t cut one way or the other than Biden was diagnosed with metastatic cancer four months into what would have been his second term, because that’s what we have vice presidents for. Do I actually have to write out why that’s a ridiculous argument? Apparently so! People in their 80s don’t drop dead without warning very often these days — that’s really not the primary risk at all in this circumstance. What happens if a president decides he’s going to stay in office while fighting the cancer? (From what I’ve read Biden’s odds of living for at least another four or five years are actually pretty good with aggressive treatment). And if you think no president would be that irresponsible, we may very well get to test that hypothesis in real time at some point in the next three and a half years.

And what if Biden hadn’t agreed to do a debate in June, and then had been diagnosed last September, six weeks before election day, with early voting already starting? How smoothly would that have gone? That certainly would have been bad luck, but guess what, eightysomethings have a lot of “bad luck.” That’s the whole point. Your odds of having a serious health crisis when you’re 80 are not 14% higher than when you’re 70, even though 80 is only a 14% older age than 70. They’re more like 300% higher, because health risk grows exponentially with age, not linearly.

Until fairly recently this was generally understood and priced in as a matter of back of the envelope risk/reward political decision making. Ronald Reagan was the first president to spend a day in the White House after turning 70, let alone 80, except that Eisenhower did spend the last three months of his second term as president after hitting that age.

The only compelling argument for Biden running again was that he was more likely to beat Trump than anyone else. This was of course an overwhelmingly powerful argument if it happened to be true, but certainly by early 2024 there was pretty strong evidence that it was going to be false. The “incumbency advantage” in the context of post-Covid elections in developed nations was very clearly an incumbency disadvantage. All polls of the question showed that large majorities of voters, including most crucially large majorities of Democratic voters, didn’t want Biden to run again because they thought he was too old. And they were right: he was too old, for the reasons I laid out in the summer of 2019, when he looked quite unlikely to win the nomination (you could at the time have gotten much shorter odds on Sanders, who as I pointed out should have been disqualified from consideration for exactly the same reason).

The notion that people in their 80s should still be in high political and quasi-political (looking at you RBG) office is absurd. Sometimes you end up getting away with it — Bernie Sanders is still doing good work on his tour with his half-century younger political partner AOC — but it’s a bad gamble, especially in the context of the presidency. This isn’t Monday morning quarterbacking: it’s signing a 41-year-old free agent quarterback because hey Tom Brady. That’s a really dumb argument in the context of football and it isn’t any better in the context of politics.

I feel badly for Biden and his family, of course, but it’s phony sentimentality to not talk about this stuff frankly if you’re not an actual intimate or friend of the person involved, which as far as I know nobody in our little corner of the internet here is. And it wouldn’t be fair to not include in this post the fact that I blinded myself to the correctness of my own prior analysis in 2023 and 2024, until June 26, when that debate performance made that kind of willful blindness impossible to sustain for me, although obviously not for a lot of other people. I was blind because I wanted Donald Trump to be defeated more than anything than I ever wanted in the world of politics, but now I see, and everybody else should as well.