Why Are the Democrats So Old?

I agree with the point that Katha Pollitt is making in her piece in The Nation. The Democratic Congressional leadership is too old:

Dianne Feinstein is 89. Steny Hoyer is 83, Nancy Pelosi and Pat Leahy are 82, and Bernie Sanders is 80. Ben Cardin is 78, Richard Blumenthal is 76, Jeanne Shaheen is 75, Elizabeth Warren and Ron Wyden are 73; Debbie Stabenow is 72 and Chuck Schumer is 71. And that’s just the Democrats. In total, 46 percent of Senate Democrats and 40 percent of Democrats in the House are 65 or over. (Republicans in Congress are also way up there, but that’s their problem.) Unlike Europe, where leadership is comparatively youthful, America is a gerontocracy: President Biden is 79, and the average age of current Congress members is the highest it’s been in 20 years. That’s not good!

I had to laugh at this:

Half the US population is under 40. With the best will in the world, someone born during the Truman administration can barely grasp what life is like for them.

How about someone born during Franklin Roosevelt’s third term, like Bernie Sanders or Ben Cardin? Or during his second term like Nancy Pelosi or Pat Leahy? Or during his first term, for goodness sake, like Dianne Feinstein?

To be sure there are problems with her analysis. 22% of the U. S. population is under 18 and ineligible to vote for that reason. If what she’s saying is true, is she advocating the elimination of the age requirement for voting or serving in the Congress or is she saying that representative democracy is inherently flawed?

However, she fails to connect the dots. Why is the Democratic leadership so old?

There are multiple reasons. One of them is that like all presidents, Barack Obama picked and chose the parts of the job he cared to do and one of the things he did not care to do was cultivate a new generation of Democratic politicians. Indeed, the 2002 midterms were a bloodbath for younger members of Congress from which the party has yet to recover.

A second reason is the seniority system in the Congress. There are big benefits to serving a long time.

A third reason is that, like many members of the Silent Generation, the Democratic leadership is very insecure. I’m not entirely sure what they’re insecure about. Loss of livelihood? Loss of power? That everything will collapse without them?

The average age of the members of Congress is a full ten years older than that of the members of the Bundestadt, the French Assembly, or British Parliament. There’s a lot less difference between the average ages of Germans, the French, or people in the U. K. and their elected representatives compared with the U. S. We should ask ourselves why.