Too Old To Lead, Too Vain To Quit— Almost No One Is Willing To Leave the Stage Of Their Own Accord

Be Honest: Which Is The Party of Hospice Care?

She thinks she's still indispensable. Click to help Saikat Chakrabarti replace her

I was still in my 50s when I decided to retire. I had all the money I would ever need— not because I was that rich as much as because I’m not that materialistic or status conscious; today I still drive a 2009 Prius, for example. On some level, I loved my job in the music business. Who doesn’t love being in charge, have a six-figure annual expense account, traveling all over the world on the company dime, going backstage, working with some of the world’s most talented artists…? But, even if all the presidents of other labels were older than me and hanging on until they were dead or dragged away close to it. I really did feel it was time to make room so younger people could move up the ladder. 

It isn’t exactly the same in politics, but being in Congress is a very prestigious job. Like in the music business, you get the best tables in restaurants even if you don’t have a reservation and they’ll hold the plane for you if you’re late. Your staff does the dirty work while people fawn over you. Members of Congress don’t want to give up if they can avoid it. Some— also like executives in the music biz— have no other self-identity. That’s sad. I saw it all the time in my industry and see it all the time in the politics biz.

On Friday Helen Lewis took on the whole idea of how members of Congress past their expiration dates can be gently moved along— especially geriatric Democrats. “To a degree that seems bizarre to me as an outsider,” she wrote, “the American party system, particularly on the Democratic side, defers to incumbents. (Since the 2022 midterm election, eight members of Congress have died in office. All of them were Democrats.)… People worry about seeming heartless, or disrespectful, when they note the inevitable effect of time on senior politicians, particularly those who were trailblazers in their youth. Sadly though, the decisions of elderly and sick politicians have demonstrable consequences: Last Thursday, Republican cuts to overseas aid and public broadcasters passed in the House by just two votes. Three elderly Democrats have already died in this congressional session. If your favorite NPR show disappears from the airwaves, then go ahead and blame the Republicans. But spare a moment to regret the choices of the late Gerry Connolly of Virginia, Raúl Grijalva of Arizona, and Sylvester Turner of Texas.”

After reading [Original Sin by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson], I can see why online liberals are so keen to change the subject by complaining that relitigating the Biden age controversy was a distraction from the real abuses of Donald Trump. If I wanted people to vote for the Democrats again, I wouldn’t want them reading Original Sin either.

Yes, a few figures on the left emerge with some credit: Dean Phillips, a former member of Congress who attempted a primary challenge against Biden despite knowing he would get crushed; George Clooney, for writing an op-ed voicing what elected Dems were too chicken to say after the disastrous June 2024 debate; and Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama, for belatedly wielding the hatchet. But overall, the entire party comes off as stale and rotten, unable to advance its goals because it’s tiptoeing around the vanity of its politicians.

The entire premise of the Democrats’ election pitch—democracy is on the ballot; this is the most important election of our lifetimes; the United States is at one minute to midnight before an authoritarian takeover— was compromised by the fact that senior Democrats with their own presidential ambitions stayed silent in the belief they could just run in 2028 instead. Their mouths were saying: We’re heading for fascism. But their brains were calculating: I’ll just sit this one out. That selfish careerism went right to the top. At some point, Biden— or his advisers— began to see his interests and the country’s as indivisible. Only he could beat Trump. Kamala Harris wasn’t up to it. He had earned the right to run again.

… When the origins of America’s gerontocracy are discussed, the usual example is Strom Thurmond, the South Carolina Republican senator who died in 2003 at 100 only six months after retiring from public office. But the rot really set in with the PR campaign for Ruth Bader Ginsburg staying on the Supreme Court despite her advancing age and pancreatic-cancer diagnoses. Instead of facing massive public pressure from Democrats to retire before Obama left office, the liberal justice was rewarded with cutesy interviews about her workout program and indomitable spirit. When I watched Ginsburg’s personal trainer solemnly doing push-ups by her casket in 2020, I didn’t feel moved. I felt annoyed. The mythology of the wizened, unbowed feminist icon, the Notorious RBG, came at a high cost for American women a few years later, when an emboldened 6–3 conservative majority overturned Roe v. Wade. What was presented as perseverance and stamina— or even as a feminist act of judicial girlbossery— now looks like narcissism. The court needs me. No other Democratic appointee will do.

To its credit, Original Sin describes Biden’s deterioration with empathy. One of the terrible side effects of aging is the sense of the world slipping away from you, of your diminishing relevance and irresistible slide into oblivion. (As I’m writing this, Arthur Brooks’ tragic and sobering article on career peaks has returned to the top of The Atlantic’s most-read list, for the umpteenth time.) People see the denial that this decline can provoke in their parents before experiencing it themselves. Throughout Original Sin, Democratic strategists, members of Congress, and staffers confide to the authors that Biden’s memory lapses and freezes reminded them of their mom or dad, and the subsequent struggle to get them into residential care.

In politicians— most of whom thrive on attention, importance and buzz— that defiance is magnified. No one goes gentle into that good night, when the dying of the light also means no longer getting good tables at fashionable restaurants or reporters flatteringly soliciting your thoughts. Original Sin trots through the many, many recent instances of elderly politicians whose allies hid their deterioration from outsiders. The most incredible story remains that of Kay Granger, an 81-year-old Republican from Texas, who missed six months of votes in Congress before she was eventually discovered in an assisted-living facility last December. Her family had put her there without notifying her constituents or the media. She has “dementia issues,” her son said.

Onlookers often assume that such situations are the result of a conspiracy of silence by the media. In Granger’s case, the more banal explanation is that local newspapers, which might once have covered bread-and-butter votes of local representatives, have been hollowed out or closed. No one knew where she was because almost no one was paying attention. In Biden’s case, the facts were out there for anyone who cared to look. Several outlets— notably Axios and the Wall Street Journal— did report on his decline before the summer debate. But reporters were faced by denials from Biden’s inner circle and silence from other Democrats, who feared that they would ruin their careers by publicly stating the obvious. Because no one could see a way to force him out of the race, the story went nowhere.

For Months, I’ve been puzzling over the fact that Britain, where I live, does not have the same gerontocracy problem in its Parliament as the U.S. does in Congress. One answer is surely that we have a prime minister chosen from the lower house, and they can be removed from office without their party losing power. That makes regicide less costly; a British Biden would be handed his gold watch and farewell card without the issue becoming existential for his fellow party members.

Also, Britain has an appointed second chamber rather than an elected one. The average age in the House of Lords is 70, and the oldest member has reached 100. But the Lords sees itself as a revising body— by convention, it does not vote down law proposals that were contained in the governing party’s election manifesto— and has traditionally been the destination for retired politicians looking to use their expertise and wisdom, free from the constraints of campaigning and constituency work. “There’s a joke in the Lords that people here are post-ambitious,” Ayesha Hazarika, a 49-year-old who joined the chamber when she was made a baroness last year, recently told me.

American politics would benefit enormously from an institution like the House of Lords— an emeritus track for those who are not vigorous enough for frontline politics anymore but not ready for a quiet retirement either. As it stands, older politicians in the U.S. face a cliff edge. Either they are still holding office, even if in name only, or they are nobody at all.

In the absence of that emeritus track, what America needs are stronger parties that are able to exert influence on their members for the greater good. The Democrat and Republican establishments are clearly now ghostly shadows of what they once were. Worn away by money and polarization, they are useless husks. The Republicans cower in the face of Trump’s bullying, and the Democrats lack the killer instinct necessary to eject frail and faltering liabilities. Just about the only person I could imagine having the skill and force to change the Democratic Party’s culture is Nancy Pelosi. She is 85.

Lewis may have stumbled right onto something— making the Senate an elected (or not) American version of the House of Lords so that a body that is the antithesis of representative democracy is eased out of making policy. As it stands now, the Senate is a grotesque relic: wildly unbalanced in terms of population, structurally biased toward rural conservatism, and increasingly a retirement home for millionaires, ideologues, and the dangerously out-of-touch. It doesn’t serve as a cooling saucer; it’s a deep freezer. Giving senators emeritus status— honor, access, maybe even a staff and an office, but no consequential votes— could be a way to preserve their dignity while also preserving the country’s ability to function.

But, of course, the bigger shift, and the harder one, is cultural. As a society, we are so steeped in worship of individualism and mythic personal destiny that we refuse to build systems to manage human decline with compassion and clarity. We avoid the very idea that someone can outlive their usefulness— not because it isn’t true, but because it feels cruel to say it. So we get a political class, and sometimes a corporate one,  that clings to power long after it has anything new to offer. And we get voters, staffers and journalists too afraid to tell the truth until it’s too late. If democracy really is on the ballot, maybe it’s time to start treating our elected officials less like saints and saviors and more like what they are: public servants, whose terms— like all human endeavors— should have a beginning, a middle… and an effing end.