ONE GENERATION HAS DOMINATED AMERICAN POLITICS FOR OVER 30 YEARS / THE ECONOMIST

Gerontocrats ascendant

One generation has dominated American politics for over 30 years

How have they become so entrenched?

When barack obama became president in 2009, it appeared not just to be a changing of the guard, but the end of an era. 

Men born in the 1940s had occupied the White House for the previous 16 years; now it was the turn of a new generation. 

Mr Obama was born in the 1960s. 

His watchwords were “hope” and “change”. 

He had complained, in one of his many memoirs, about the “arrested development” of American politics, stuck in the “psychodrama of the Baby Boom generation”. 

It was time to move on, he wrote, from the stale feuds initiated on the college campuses of the 1960s.

Yet Mr Obama’s tenure turned out to be not a break with the past, but merely a brief respite from it. 

The two subsequent presidents, Donald Trump and Joe Biden, were both also born in the 1940s. 

And since they are the two main candidates in this year’s election (at least for now), one of them is likely to be president for another four years. 

Even if Mr Biden withdraws his candidacy, Mr Trump is currently the favourite anyway. 

That means their generation could end up locking up the presidency for most of the period from 1993 to 2029—getting on for 40 years.

Both Mr Biden and Mr Trump would be well into their 80s by the end of another term. 

Mr Biden launched his first presidential campaign in 1987. 

At the time this newspaper labelled him the “voice and conscience of the baby boomers”. 

Mr Trump published a bestselling business book that year and also toyed with a presidential run. 

Most countries that still have political figures lingering from that era are dictatorships. 

Mr Biden had to withdraw from the race in 1987 after plagiarising a speech by the leader at the time of Britain’s Labour Party, Neil Kinnock. 

He was born in 1942, like Mr Biden, and retired from public life 20 years ago. 

What is it about the equivalent cohort of American politicians that has made them so determined to cling to power for so long?

Among rich countries, America is relatively young. 

Its 333m people have a median age of 38.8, lower not only than that of Britain, Germany and Japan, but also than that of China, Cuba or Thailand. 

Most of its corporate bosses are in their 50s. 

The average age of its super-rich is falling, thanks presumably to fortunes made by whippersnappers in it. 

That hints at what a dynamic place America is, churning out new technology, cultural fads and commercial innovation at a pace that is the envy of the world. 

Yet its politicians are far older than the norm (see chart 1)—and unlike those in other developed countries, they are getting ever older (see chart 2).

This peculiar dichotomy, the subject of our new, six-episode podcast, “Boom!”, is puzzling and distressing to many Americans. 

Messrs Biden and Trump are the two most unpopular candidates ever to have contested a presidential election. 

Even many of their contemporaries are troubled by their generation’s continued hold on politics. 

They were born at a moment of triumph for America, at the close of the second world war. 

Yet they are bequeathing younger Americans acrimony, as the two main parties accuse one another of wrecking democracy.

Bad start

As Mr Obama insinuated, the upheaval of the 1960s was the formative political experience for many in the generation born in the 1940s. 

The government’s deliberate disguising of the difficulty of the Vietnam war alienated people like Chuck Hagel, a former senator and secretary of defence (under Mr Obama), who was serving in the army at the time. 

“It got me because of the dishonesty of it…it was a huge mistake,” says Mr Hagel. 

Margo Alexander, a student at the University of California, Berkeley at the time who went on to work on Wall Street, agrees: “We started to lose faith in the government because of Vietnam.”

It was not just the war. 

There was violence on the domestic front too: civil-rights activists were often beaten and sometimes murdered, culminating in the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr in Memphis in 1968. 

Bobby Kennedy, a possible Democratic nominee for president and an anti-war icon, was shot dead that year, too. 

Anger consumed America. 

“We wound up burning our own neighbourhoods down,” recalls Richard Smith, a black activist from Wilmington, Delaware, where he befriended an Irish guy called Joe Biden, who worked as a lifeguard at the neighbourhood pool.

These events prompted different reactions among different groups. 

On one side were student activists. 

By 1968 there were nearly 7m undergraduates in America, 47% more than there were prior to the passage of the Higher Education Act three years earlier. 

So vocal were their protests and so widespread was the view that Lyndon Johnson, the president, was old and infirm (although, at 59, he was 22 years younger than Mr Biden is today) that he called off his campaign for re-election. 

That gave half the Biden-Trump generation the conviction that they had the power to overhaul politics in their image.

But others regarded the upheaval with horror. 

Mr Johnson’s retirement sparked a crisis at the Democratic National Convention, which was held in Chicago in August that year, just as this year’s convention will be. 

There was violence on the streets outside after the mayor banned “anti-patriotic” protests. 

There was disgruntlement inside, too, as party elders helped secure the nomination for Hubert Humphrey, the vice-president. 

The chaos alienated voters, who sided with the Republican candidate, Richard Nixon, in November. 

This pattern, in which the right denounces the left as dangerous radicals and the left dismisses the right as unthinking reactionaries, pertains to this day.

The tumult of 1968 also rewrote the rules of presidential politics, quite literally. 

The Democrats sought to avoid future rifts in the party by allowing ordinary voters to pick the presidential nominee in state primaries and caucuses. 

The intention was to force candidates to build a broad coalition within the party and forestall any complaints about the winner’s legitimacy. 

The Republicans followed suit. 

But the flipside of this democratisation was that party bosses lost control of the nomination process, which ultimately fuelled partisanship, paved the way for populists and so hastened the demise of the centrism that had prevailed since the second world war.

Another factor shaping the politics of the children of the 1940s was America’s unparalleled prosperity. 

From their childhood to their mid-30s the economy grew by an average of 3.7% a year. 

Real (ie, after adjusting for inflation) incomes grew even faster and unemployment was low. 

Jon Corzine, who ran Goldman Sachs before becoming a senator and governor, explains how his wages as a banker astonished his father, a Midwestern farmer. 

“He asked whether I was working for the mob when I got my first bonus.”

The average distance Americans travelled in cars each year rose rapidly between 1962 and 1972. 

Mr Biden won admiration at the University of Delaware thanks to the fancy cars his father, a second-hand dealer, lent him on weekends. 

The president still keeps a 1967 Corvette in his garage. 

Doug McAdam, a sociologist at Stanford University, argues that this period of plenty allowed the Biden-Trump generation the luxury of getting involved in politics, something prior generations had less time for.

Even now that they are older, these Americans are still more involved in politics than is the norm. 

More than three-quarters identify with a political party, whereas barely half of their grandchildren’s generation do. 

They are also avid consumers of news: the median age of the audiences of cnn, Fox and msnbc is 67, 68 and 71 respectively.

Their generation have influenced politics not just because of their engagement, however, but also because of their sheer numbers. 

Between 2010 and 2020 the share of Americans aged over 65 rose from 13% to 17%, or from 40m to 56m people. 

Given their higher propensity to vote, these pensioners wield both growing and disproportionate clout in elections.

All these factors have exacerbated the political feud currently consuming America. 

Mr Obama was right: America’s political class was still fighting the battles initiated in the 1960s. 

But he did not foresee that his own election would further stoke the conflict. 

Loathing the new president became an organising principle on the right. 

Conspiracy theories about him flourished. 

The idea took hold that he was a radical leftist in the 1960s mould—an activist from Chicago, of all places. 

Dick Armey (born in 1940), a former Republican leader in the House, says, “I think Barack Obama was raised to hate America.”

What the left depicted as progressive politics, hoping to bring the promise of America to those left behind (universal access to health care, for example), the right attacked as dangerous socialism that aimed to change the country fundamentally. 

Just as in the 1960s, accusations of racism and Marxism were tossed about.

The most prominent proponent of the conspiracy theory that Mr Obama had been born abroad and so was not eligible to be president was Mr Trump. 

The Republican Party had become something of an empty vessel by this time, having presided under George W. Bush (born 1946) over a disastrous war in Iraq and a calamitous financial meltdown. 

Mr Trump, who first made a name for himself as a property tycoon by taking over a derelict hotel, used America First nativism to take over the shell of the gop.

In 2016 the Democrats, for their part, picked a standard-bearer from the past. 

Hillary Clinton (born in 1947) had been a lightning rod during the presidency of her husband, Bill, as his administration’s champion of the sort of health-care reform that Mr Obama ultimately secured. 

In the 1960s she was a student activist, of course, and she had spoken about her generation’s search for “more immediate, ecstatic and penetrating modes of living”. 

She owed her nomination in part to name recognition, which had become more important in the competitive primary system.

Mr Trump’s narrow, lucky win in 2016 only made things worse. 

His gaping loss in the popular vote—Mrs Clinton won 3m more votes—made Democrats feel that he was in some sense illegitimate. 

In light of the shocking result, they reinterpreted Mr Obama’s presidency as being a failure because he was not bold enough. 

The initial frontrunners in the Democratic primaries in 2020 were from the left of the party: senators Bernie Sanders (born in 1941) and Elizabeth Warren (born in 1949). 

It took another child of the 1940s to unite the party’s moderates: Mr Biden.

Mr Trump’s refusal to accept his loss means that this repetitive saga of recrimination and retribution continues. 

It is heartening, however, to see the names mooted as potential replacement candidates should Mr Biden bow out of this year’s race. 

Kamala Harris, the vice-president, was born in the 1960s. 

So were Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, J.B. Pritzker, the governor of Illinois, and Raphael Warnock, a senator from Georgia. 

Gina Raimondo, the secretary of commerce, and Gretchen Whitmer, the governor of Michigan, were born in the 1970s. 

A new generation beckons.