Front Burner - Is the U.S. a gerontocracy?

Episode Date: September 25, 2026

The United States is getting older, and so, increasingly, are the people charged with governing it.The average age of a U.S. senator is 64-years-old and in the House it's 58, according to 2025 numbers. Dozens of elected officials are in their 70s and 80s. Presidents Joe Biden and Donald Trump both turned 80 in office. As a result, Americans have seen questions about the age and capacity of their leaders become a central feature of the national conversation. What happens when the people at the top don't leave? And at what point does an aging society become a gerontocracy? Samuel Moyn is a political theorist and professor at Yale university. He's the author of several books, including 'Gerontocracy in America'. He's our guest today.For transcripts of Front Burner, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts 

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This is a CBC podcast. Hi, I'm Matthew Amha. In for Jamie. The United States is getting older, and so increasingly are the people charged with governing it. The average U.S. Senator is now in their mid-60s. Congress includes dozens of elected officials in their 70s, and in recent years,

Americans have seen questions about the age and general capacity of their leaders become a central feature of the national conversation. Last week, 84-year-old says, Senator Mitch McConnell returned to the Senate after spending three months away following a fall and period of hospitalization. Videos of his reintroduction to public life have been difficult to watch. He appears to be in serious cognitive decline. But the phenomenon that we'll be talking about today is much bigger than politics or Washington. And while older Americans vote more and donate more to campaigns, they also hold a disproportionate share of the country's wealth and increasingly hold

positions of professional and institutional authority. And that raises a series of difficult questions. What happens when the people at the top don't leave? Or when there exists a gap between a nation's demography and its leadership class? And at what point does an aging society become a gerontocracy? My guest is political theorist and professor at Yale University, Samuel Moyne, and he's the author of several books, including gerontocracy in America. Hey, Samuel, thanks so much for coming on the show.

Thanks for having me. So why don't we begin just by setting things up a little bit here. Can you tell me exactly what is meant by the term gerontocracy? Sure. It just means rule of and probably buy-in for the old. And it's like the word democracy, which means rule of by and for the people. It's just nowadays older people have a lot more power than the less old. I mean, there are really plenty examples of an increasing.

Germanly gerontocratic America. The country has had success of presidents in their 80s. I know it may not look like it, but I've been around a while. But I want to just wish you a happy birthday, and you don't have to wish me a happy birthday, because I'm not happy about that birthday that I'm having. That's a number that I never thought really too much about. It's not a number I like.

The median age for federal judges is also now something like 68 years old. In that time, though, there have been debates over the mental fitness of both Joe Biden and Donald Trump as well. The public watched Ruth Bader Ginsburg die while serving on the U.S. Supreme Court. When you think about the question of gerontocracy in the United States today, what do you think are the greatest examples of that? Well, Americans are now very familiar with the aging of the political class through the examples you mentioned. I'd say that even if we're concerned just about our politicians, we should be concerned not just about cognitive decline or outright. death, but also about how unrepresentative they are even when they're healthy, because half of Americans are 40 or under, but next to no serving politicians are. I think there's one under 40 in the Senate and not for long, and very few in Congress. And so there's like a mismatch between the people and their aged representatives, and that could have profound consequences. But I'd actually argue that

if we want examples of gerontocracy, we have to look beyond our politicians at the age of the voters, which is as old or sometimes older than the age of politicians on average, and even more important, that who holds wealth in all of its forms, which could include jobs and housing. And those are, again, glaring examples of how older people in America have a lot more than what some might think. of as their fair share. I mean, I can't help but wonder, like, what are the conditions that actually function to turn an aging population into a gerontocratic one? Like, what exactly is it that happened, whether demographically, politically,

or institutionally, to produce some of these particular outcomes? Yeah, it's a great question. You know, fundamental is just the extension of our lives. And that has to happen for gerontocracy to really take. hold. Of course, for most of human history, there were old people, old men in power, but they were always term limited by death, and most of them died young, not old. And so we had a kind of natural control over how long people could rule. Of course, there were always old people and super agers go all the way back. I think in America, if we're talking about politicians, what's essential

is that we have very few contested races in elections, and we also have incumbency advantages. And so if you get elected once, even young, you can stay indefinitely, and our politicians are doing so. When it comes to judges, our Constitution itself gives them life tenure. And so they have absolutely no requirement to leave, and no one can make them. I know that we've just kind of mentioned him earlier,

but just to return for a moment, given how contemporary the example is. I mean, Senator Mitch McConnell is 84 years old. He's been in the Senate for more than four decades. Well, after a three-month absence, Mitch McConnell was wheeled back into the Senate chamber. I wasn't sure I may have you would be here today. So I'm glad to see you. Time to get back to work. You finish the job, but it's top.

But I guess the question that is top of mind, I think, for those that are watching these videos of his reintroduction into Congress, are, you know, what exactly is supposed to happen when an elected official becomes seriously ill or potentially incapacitated or, you know, no longer appears capable of performing the duties of office, but does not resign? You know, we have an amendment to deal with the prospect of an infirm president. And of course, that's on top of the fact of an earlier amendment, which limited the president to two terms. And so what's astounding is that we've never done anything for the rest of the political class. Of course, we'd now have two successive presidents who were elected in the first place as very old men. But at least we knew that they were term limited. And we had something to do if it turned out that they couldn't serve. And, you know, there was a lot of discussion about that, especially in.

Donald Trump's first term when some people felt that maybe some folks around him ought to like maybe trigger that, that amendment for what happens when the president is sick. When you look at Congress and especially at the courts, there's no remedy for the cognitive decline of someone in those positions. And maybe we ought to create one. The most obvious thing would be age limits or term limits, but we could also have forms of capacity. testing or ways of transferring power. If someone is sick like Mitch McConnell for a period that we think might be, you know, a few weeks or months, we could have a system of transferring his job to someone else, just like the constitutional amendment was passed to transfer the duties of the

president to the vice president. And that's happened when presidents have undergone like, you know, their colonoscopies and they formally transferred president while they're under to the vice president. These images, whether we're talking about Donald Trump, you know, falling asleep during meetings at the White House. Secretary Rubio, have you been at more than one meeting where President Trump has fallen asleep? That's false.

That's false. I've never seen him fall asleep. On the contrary, the guy doesn't sleep, which is a big problem because he calls me at two in the morning. Joe Biden's now famous disastrous debate performance in 2024. The, with the COVID, I'll excuse me. with dealing with everything we have to do with, look, if we finally beat Medicare. Whether it's images of Dianne Feinstein being led to the Capitol in a wheelchair or now McConnell,

who we've talked about a couple of times. So these are images that kind of find virality online and in some sense become the public's evidence of the problem that we're here to discuss. Why is it, you think, that this body of evidence, as it were, has not yet inspired. more change or even urgency on this question? Well, you know, the fact is that a vast majority of Americans support some remedy. And age limits in particular are very popular. They poll very well. But we do have a situation where it seems as if, first of all, the very folks who would

take action are the old politicians. if they wanted to be responsive to the American people. But even if they did, they would have to aim for a constitutional amendment because one of those councils of elders, the Supreme Court, has deemed it necessary to have a constitutional amendment to add to the credentials for political office, like the qualifications. And so it's not as if just a bare majority of the Congress people could pass a new law about that. They'd have to like propose an amendment and it would have to be ratified by three quarters to the states and so forth. When building a business, you need tools that work as hard as you do. With Shopify.com, you can create a stunning site with no coding necessary.

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There's a misconception that everybody in our generation wants things handed to them. Which is so unfair. A lot of the circumstances that other generations got to, to have. We simply do not have. So when Dissuredan asked me to go out and hear directly from young people, I was all in. Because between sky high rent, $10 latte's and the AI revolution, got a lot to impact. We went out to see what Gen Z's reality actually looks like, and we made a web series out of it. It'll be on CBC gem. It's called Countess In. And honestly, I think you guys are going to love it. You have talked about this demographic transformation ongoing as the quote, great aging.

You know, the resulting gap between the age of the population and the age of its political leadership. one of the political science might refer to as a lack of descriptive representation. Yes. What are the inherent dangers of that gap, though? I mean, particularly for a society that believes itself dynamic and innovative and future-minded, now confronting things like artificial intelligence and climate change, what are the material implications of having such an old political class? Absolutely. So, I mean, descriptive representation just means that you have people like you representing you. And some people think it's a value in itself. And that's why we've talked a lot in our time about having, in particular, more African-Americans serving in Congress. And my only point would be it seems that there are a lot of young people who are alienated from the political system increasingly because they see that their rulers are old. But then there's a separate set of concerns, which would be about what we can predict a gerontocracy to,

kind of favor in policy terms. And there, the concern isn't that like the people aren't being represented as young, but that their priorities as young people in policy are being ignored. And maybe a great example could be concern about climate change, which relatively younger people always rank much higher as a priority than relatively older people. On the very reasonable grounds that the older you are, and this is not just the politicians, but the voters, the less concern you're going to be about long-term problems. National debt could be a similar issue. And so the argument against gerontocracy here is that it's the interest expressed by voters that if they're just, you know, not reflected in the political system that are being shortchanged.

And, you know, maybe last and maybe most edgy, you alluded to this, we could worry that to the extent we have too much power vested in old people, whether as politicians or as voters, well, we are likely to have, you know, less kind of change. And we're going to have more nostalgic forms of desiring change rather than thinking about the medium or low. long-term future where we could try new things, including experiments that haven't been tried before. I want to talk a little bit more about some of the broader implications related to this great aging. But first, the reporter Astrid Hernan over at Vox, who we had on this show earlier this year, sat down recently with South Carolina, Senator Jim Clyburn. Clyburn, for some of those listening, is a incredibly influential force within the Democratic Party, especially as it relates to Black America and kind of black politics generally. Clyburn is 86 years of age and has been in Congress for three decades now. When asked about his use of LLMs like Chad GBT or Claude, the senator responded.

Believe it or not, I didn't know what that wasn't about a week ago. Which way? Chap, GPT or whatever it is. You didn't know until a week ago. Wow. I mean, I'm jealous. You've got yourself in the bubble. That may sound strange, too.

I don't know. I didn't know what that was. When asked how someone with such limited knowledge of such a broadly important issue could be expected to lead, he responded by pointing to his staff and saying, quote, I know how to legislate, I know how to build relationships, and I hire people to bring knowledge into the game that I can put to practice. Like, I wonder, just given so much of what we're talking about today, do you understand that kind of arrangement to be a reasonable division of labor in government? Well, not really. It's, of course, very legitimate to note the limits of your expertise and knowledge and rely on others. And, of course, a lot would turn on turning to the right experts. And that's, yeah, that's a big problem to solve because we often find that Congress people who have to turn to experts could turn to the wrong. ones. And that's why there are lobbyists who are also telling them what to do. And sometimes they're taken very seriously. But where I think Clyburn might fall short is the idea that people like him

don't have their own policy views that they're acting to effectuate. Or, you know, they, to the extent that they are, you know, going to outsiders, it shouldn't be on every issue and they have to in the end understand at least themselves to some extent what the problems are and not just think of themselves as like, you know, lawmakers who know how to solve any problems. And so it's not a very persuasive response to me. It really is, I think, another testament to being out of touch and probably a dodge in the face of being increasingly out of touch. What I'm curious about as well is why this particular kind of question around age may not have necessarily proliferated into Canada or like across Europe in the same ways that it manifested in the United States.

Today, the average age of UK, German and French parliament, I believe, is around mid to late 40s, while the average age of the Canadian House of Commons is in its early 50s. Why is there such a disparity when compared to a body like the U.S. Senate, for example, or even Congress generally? In the U.S. Senate, I mean, the average age is closer to 66 years old. Well, in fairness, the Senate is literally named after old men. But, you know, that's a little flippant because the real answer has to do with the way that Americans have chosen to organize elections and really their political life in general. So I mentioned that maybe not just the great aging, which is happening in Canada, too, and Western Europe isn't the sole culprit. just a kind of background condition. And what's really making it bad for the, you know, election of politicians is how many uncontested races there are. And, you know, I mean, maybe above all the

incumbency advantages that basically mean that in the United States very differently than in other countries, if you win once, you're enormously more likely to win again and again. Last, I would note that there's only private campaign finance in the United States, and the studies show that that's also gerontocratic. So you have older people of means, in effect, buying the seats over and over for older politicians, which is constrained much better in other countries where there are more public forms of campaign finance. I guess this kind of gets into another phenomenon that you've referred to. And you kind of hinted to earlier, which is the gerontocracy of the electorate, right? And the fact that older Americans vote more consistently, are disproportionately represented among political donors, and tend to receive a greater share of government benefits.

In your work, you also cite all kinds of research showing that the median dollar donated to an American election comes from a 66-year-old. And in some primary elections, the median voter is actually considerably older. You've also written about the rise of a so-called gray lobby. And I guess to that end, can you talk to me about an organization like the AARP and how important they have been in translating some of this kind of demographic weight of older Americans into political power? Well, the AARP is not, there's no other organizations like it, not just in America, but in world history. and where younger people who are, you know, still the majority of the population under 50, have no age-related advocacy group, whereas the AARP for those over 50 in this country boasts, like by some measures, the biggest membership and the best funding for its lobbying arm

of really any other such organization that pursues policies and, you know, advocates for causes. And so like the the first issue is just this disparity where it's not just among politicians, but just in impressing for outcomes, young people don't have an organization for them, really 50 and under and 50 and over have one of the most powerful and maybe the most powerful that's ever existed. And then if you ask what it does, well, I think it's mainly committed to like stasis, meaning it's a status quo organization, in part because it's so large that it just doesn't want to rock the boat, but sometimes keeping things the same is the problem. And what it can do is not so much demand results as just represent in the minds of politicians. the voting power of older people, which, as you mentioned, is sometimes over 70 in median age in some jurisdictions like New Mexico in 2024. And so the ARP has done some things like advocated for the abolition of mandatory retirement that have increased the importance of gerontocracy. But maybe its bigger effect is just kind of, you know, kind of threatening any politician. that would dare even think to cross older voters

who themselves are so important because they turn out when others don't. I know there are some that have engaged with your work and said that the phenomenon that you're describing isn't necessarily generational inequality so much as it is an example of oligarchy. Yes. That wealth is concentrated.

among a relatively small minority, some of them young, some of them not. You know, they might point to the 40 and 50-something-year-old Silicon Valley class of billionaires, you know, like the kind of Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Elon Musk's. What would your response be to that? Like, why this specific focus on age when discussing the distribution of class power? Well, you know, I'm not against focusing on oligarchy, and I am, but what I don't think we can do is pretend that age is irrelevant to it. So if we ask, like, what, how does one become an oligarch? Of course, there are many ways.

But being old is helpful, in part because we've created a system where you can reap the benefits in class terms of aging, including through privileges like tax immunity, especially like when it comes to important assets like your house. And if when we look across the global landscape, it's not just an American issue, at who the billionaires are. You know, Elon Musk was briefly a middle-aged trillionaire, but no longer. If we look at all the billionaires of whom there are many, many on the global stage, only 10% are under 50. So 90% are 50 or under, which is exactly the age represented by the ARP. and of those almost half are over 70.

So like 40% of billionaires are 70 or over, and almost all are over 50. So it seems as if it's not an accident that we have aged wealth. And if that's true, then we can't pretend that our oligarchy isn't an oldigarchy and that we have to study how age plays into the making of these kinds of advantages and power and wealth. And that's what I've tried to do. I guess in thinking about some of the broader implications of these questions around age brings us to maybe meditate for a moment on this question of succession, right?

Like this idea that we're living in a society in which the old aren't just living longer, but many are remaining in positions of wealth and authority and influence for longer. And therefore younger generations are perpetually waiting for the opportunity to inherit them. You know, and this is a phenomenon, of course, it's happening in the workplace and our economy and in our culture more broadly. Some listening might, you know, think about figures like Ruth Bader Ginsburg or even some of the discussion around Joe Biden. How do you think that we should understand this as a broader problem of succession across American society? And, I mean, what ultimately is it that happens to a society when the people at the top simply refuse to leave? It's really the essential question.

I'm so glad you asked it because it's not. not just about our politicians, but really about, you know, those who keep their houses till the end of their lives or those who hoard their wealth. And they're like other versions of the same phenomenon where there's like a waiting game that, you know, those who are younger have to play sometimes until they're quite aged themselves. And the question I want to ask is, should we think more openly about how it's fair and best for our futures collectively, not just individually, to organize a more orderly kind of succession. And that would involve giving people power and resources earlier than we do now precisely when they need them and they're in position to, you know,

reap the maximum advantage from them for themselves and indirectly for everyone through their own innovations. And so this has to include making sure that folks in power who really can't imagine losing their sense of relevance and significance because of their job or because of their political office are given alternatives. And indeed, I would argue for a cushy, meaningful retirement rather than feeling like they were treated as unimportant. But in the end, they have to make way. They will because of their deaths, which eventually come. But maybe if we'd let them wait, like with Ruth Bader Ginsburg, we'd not only have to reap the consequences of their delay, we also maybe haven't organized an ideal last stage of life for those that we do care about.

And so I've advocated for just, you know, a little more open discussion of what would be the best way within families on a social scale to think about how we transfer resources earlier than we tend to now. Samuel, thank you so much for coming on the show today. Thanks for having me. That's all for today. Frontburner was produced this week by Joyita Shengupta, Kevin Sexton, San McNulty, Mitchell Stewart, and Mackenzie Cameron. Our YouTube producer is John Lee. Our music is by Joseph Shappelson. Our senior producer is Imogen Bertrand. Our executive producer is Nick McCabe Locos. And I'm Matthew Amha, filling in for Jamie. Thanks so much for listening.

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