A gut check on ageism

Thinking about the Democratic primary, it's hard not to find myself making unwanted generalizations about age and aging. I don't want to thoughtlessly repeat personal and social biases against old people and about our place in this big, churning, multifaceted thing that is the United States. Yet the current contest pushes to front of mind three aspects of the meaning of age that I think worth differentiating and considering.

• Most obviously, there's what advancing age does to the personal capacities of individuals. This is hard to talk about intelligently because each person ages -- loses health, energy, and sharpness -- at a different rate. It's ageist nonsense to assume all old people are the same or suffer stereotypical disabilities. For some, money helps slow ageing. But we do all age at some point.

• Then there is the cultural and social fact that lived collective experience creates age cohorts whose social reference points are different. What does that mean? Well, those of us who came up during the Vietnam war had very different experiences of the meaning of citizenship from the World War II generation before us or the Evil Empire or 9/11 or Endless Wars generations after us. And that's just the environment "out there." Our cultures, our media, our economic trajectories, even our intimate relationships are all partially distinct in different age groups -- this is just true and it means we often interpret the world around us differently.

• Additionally, we more and more live in an unacknowledged gerontocracy. It's not just that we have a 73 year old president seeking another term and three leading Democrats who are also in their 70s. Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi, who is the most effective Democratic political leader, is 79, though we rarely comment on this. Senator Mitch McConnell, who is as potent on the other side, is 77. This feels unhealthy. The median age of the country -- half are younger, half older -- is 38. Energetic, inventive societies have historically been much younger, as have been many (most?) dynamic political leaders. Much of world may be better off with a less bumptious, expansive U.S.A. -- but there are losses, not least among our own younger citizens who the old folks are blocking from taking up the challenges of our time.

These reflections were triggered by a superb profile by Olivia Nuzzi of former Vice President Joe Biden. She deals as gracefully as I've read anywhere with the age issues this primary and its lusterless leader present.

There’s the basic fact of his oldness and the concerns, explicit or implicit, about his ability to stay agile and alive for four more years. This was true of Biden, who is 76, even more than it was true of Bernie Sanders, who is the oldest candidate at 78, up until Sanders had a heart attack while campaigning in Nevada earlier this month. (It’s not true at all of Elizabeth Warren, who is 70 but seems a decade younger. And it’s not exactly true of Trump, who is 73 and really just seems crazy, not old.)

... The activist wing of the party is a lost cause to Biden just as he’s a lost cause to them. When they show up at his speeches to confront him or protest in support of the Green New Deal, something I’ve witnessed twice in New Hampshire, he attempts to formulate what he surely believes is a respectful response, and yet they don’t think it’s enough, because nothing that he says could be enough because of who he is. Can you blame anyone under the age of 30 for their cynicism, for their hostility?

... Age isn’t just a weakness for Biden. There are a lot of old people in America, and many of them really like the former vice-president. They don’t see a doddering, out-of-touch, exhausted man, as the 20- and 30- and 40-somethings who cover the campaign and dominate social media do. They look at him and see, well, a statesman from the popular recent administration who has moved to the left as the party has, if not quite as much as his younger rivals. These are the people that really vote in elections, and, to them, that all seems pretty good. ...

I am no Biden fan (I'm more a Warren fan). But I'm not a fan of ageism either. Maybe one of the accidental benefits of this strange season is that many of us will be forced to ponder age in a more nuanced fashion. So be it....One other line from this profile that I can't resist raising up:

Inside the campaign, the Biden brain trust seems to exist more to comfort the candidate than to compel him ...

I've been in a lot of such meetings -- this is the signature of a losing campaign. When you admire your candidate but can't push the race over the top, it can become almost unavoidable to devolve into soothing the person who is going down to humiliating defeat.