THE NEXT PRESIDENT WILL BE OVER 70 / GEOPOLITICAL FUTURES

The Next President Will Be Over 70

By: George Friedman


Perhaps the most important thing that has emerged in the presidential election campaign over the past few weeks is that the next president of the United States will be in his 70s.

Several of the remaining candidates would finish their first term in their 80s. The first five U.S. presidents ranged in age from 57 to 61 when they took office. Until 2016, no president was ever elected in his 70s – Donald Trump had turned 70 in mid-June of that year. But in the 2020 election, every viable candidate is in his 70s.

In the Bible, it is said that we are granted by God lives that are “threescore years and ten.” It did not mean that we couldn’t live longer or die younger. It meant that, on the whole, the time after the age of 70 was a gift in which we should prepare for our death. None of the candidates seems to be bearing their mortality at the top of their mind. Nor, more important, is the public regarding age as a liability. The fact that all current candidates are over that age has meaning.

I say this not only because I have passed 70 but because of something that I had thought was unique to me. I do not feel as I had expected to feel at this age. I continue to lift weights, having benched 250 pounds in the recent past, and I know that if I had 90 days without travel I could push close to my old max of 315 pounds. (I say this only because I really have been looking for an opportunity to brag.) There are a variety of medicines on my bathroom counter that abolish some minor curses of old age, but I still have the ability to do the things I did all my life: write, travel, manage a business, offend people.

When I was young, the elders in my family struck me as being ancient, weak and failing. When I look back on them, they were ancient. I have to this point explained the difference between how they lived and how I live by the fact that they had had terrible lives. That might have had a great deal to do with it, but there was more. The shape of human life is changing. Alternatively, the shape of my self-awareness and wishful thinking has replicated the same illusions that my ancestors had.

There is, however, a hard statistical reality. Prior to this election, there was no guarantee that the next president would be over the age of 70. Among the founding generation, George Washington took office at 57, John Adams at 61, Thomas Jefferson at 57, James Madison at 57 and James Monroe at 58. Today, and I hesitate to list these names next to those of our founders, Trump is 73, Joe Biden 77, Bernie Sanders 78 and Elizabeth Warren 70. There is a 20-year age spread between the founders – and most of their successors – when they took office, and the remnants of the current presidential campaign.

The reality is that to some extent we not only live longer but also remain functional longer – at least some of us do. I wonder at Sanders, who had a heart attack and was back on the road a few weeks later. When I was young a heart attack meant the person would have extended convalescence and never be himself again. Sanders remained himself, perhaps more so. It may all be due to modern medicine, or perhaps to the wretched vegetation called spinach that my wife forces me to eat, but the “why” is perhaps less important than what it means.

We are all children of the Enlightenment, even those who loathe it. The Enlightenment believed in progress and therefore also in youth. The world is constantly evolving, and the young will take things novel and alien to the old for granted. They will also create the future. The old, having spoken their lines and added to our knowledge, must now shuffle off this mortal coil and free the young to carry forth the project of perfecting humanity.

The ancients of Greece, China and the rest venerated the old, because having lived through their lives, they had acquired a wisdom that the young could not have. They did not envision man as constantly progressing toward some perfection. They saw the human condition as permanent and therefore the old as the repository of experience and wisdom.

America was to a large extent the product of the Enlightenment, praising equality, democracy and progress. It has always been fascinated by youth. All of us remember our youth fondly, although in fact it might have been unpleasant. We remember it fondly because we were young and had our lives ahead of us, though many of us regret some of the choices we made back then.

That is our personal relationship to our past. But in the United States, the young are venerated because they inherently understand the world better than the old can understand it and, standing on the shoulders of the old, can continue the project of protection. The term "millennial" is uttered with the same awe as "baby boomer" once was.

But in the argument between antiquity and modernity, the virtues of youth are mythologized while the value of experience is dismissed because experience ties you to an obsolete past.

TikTok is now here and only the old and irrelevant use Facebook, and only the hopelessly irrelevant view a smartphone as a dreadful nuisance. Technology is hallowed by the Enlightenment, and old age provides the perspective that much of it is harmful, if not useless, while the young build higher and higher edifices on the ragged foundation of MS-DOS.

In the primaries, some expected that the young would lead a revolution by surging to the polls to support Bernie Sanders. But the young, on the whole, have far better things to do with their precious evenings. Therefore, the same mix of young and old went to the polls, and what emerged from it was a group of 70-year-olds, none of whom seem to grasp their obvious obsolescence. They are all who they were.

John F. Kennedy, young, with a beautiful wife and young children, seemed to represent America in the 1960s. He was what we should be. Yet his presidency, mythologized now, was filled with hubris and error. Ronald Reagan, old, with a fragmented family many of us have, was denigrated as out of touch with reality. Yet when we look back, we see a startlingly successful presidency. Youth does not carry with it insight, and old age does not necessarily mean exhaustion.

I think something is happening to the life cycle, and I try to make certain that it is not wishful thinking on my part. Being a confirmed hypochondriac according to my wife, I am perhaps protected from illusions. But we cannot evade the fact that in the primaries the old crushed the young, and that it is likely that a 77-year-old or 79-year-old will face a 74-year-old to be our next president.

I think this is important, but I must think about why it has happened and why it really is important. So first thoughts emerge.