Late last year, the cartoonist and illustrator Barry Blitt (whose work has graced the Chronicle recently) raised some hackles with a New Yorker cover, “The Race for Office,” depicting Donald Trump, Mitch McConnell, Nancy Pelosi, and Joe Biden shuffling along in running clothes while leaning on wheeled walkers. Blitt’s illustration, one angry reader wrote, “makes an unexamined connection between physical condition and mental capability. On the contrary, walkers enable many people to pursue their work and interests.”
Whatever one thinks about the ethics of Blitt’s kind of caricature, though, the advanced age of our political leadership has become impossible to ignore. The most recent exemplum: The special counsel Robert K. Hur declined to bring charges against Biden over mishandled classified documents in part because, as Hur said, Biden appeared to be a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”
Samuel Moyn, in an acerbic squib for Granta, puts the situation bluntly: “The presidential contest in the United States this year is likely to pit two decrepit men against each other.” This drift into gerontocracy, Moyn says, represents a betrayal of the ideals of enlightenment modernity, in which, for instance, “the French revolutionaries explicitly targeted the empowerment of the elderly.” He goes on: “If modernity has meant challenging the elderly, demanding that they share their power and resources, then our postmodern age is one of their most successful re-enthronements.”
Along with government, academe is Moyn’s exemplary gerontocracy in the modern United States. “Universities,” he writes, “have become senior centers and care homes, while a whole generation of younger scholars and intellectuals have been blocked from progressing in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis.”
