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In Greek myth, Eos falls in love with Tithonus. She is the goddess of the dawn. He is a Trojan prince, yet still a mere mortal. Eos asks Zeus to give her mate the gift of eternal life—but, foolishly, she forgets to ask for eternal youth too.
Tithonus never dies; he just grows older and older. “Ruthless age,” goes the Homeric hymn recounting his story, is “dreaded even by the gods.” Tithonus becomes more decrepit and wizened with each passing year. Eventually, when he can no longer move, Eos has to shut him away, in a place where “he babbles endlessly, and no more has strength at all.” Eternal life amid the decline of one’s faculties is not a blessing but a curse. “Me only cruel immortality / Consumes: I wither slowly in thine arms,” Tithonus complains in Alfred Tennyson’s rendition of the myth (published in these pages in 1860), in a rare moment of lucidity that emerges from his everlasting gibberish.
The story of Tithonus no longer feels so outlandish, because our society postpones death to an unprecedented degree. Unlike immortals, we still pass. But the great majority of us, and not only the bad, now die old. In whatever nursing home he was parked in, Tithonus must have looked much like we increasingly do, as doctors continuously defer our mortality. We are approaching a time when a legion of Tithonuses will live in our midst. We have already felt the social and political consequences.
During the 2024 presidential campaign, the revelation of Joe Biden’s decline altered the course of American history, leaving a storied republic on the brink. The experience brought home the crisis of the country’s aging leadership: our politicians are dangerously old. I bring little news on this front, but the facts are startling nonetheless. Between 1960 and 1990, the median age of members of Congress was in the early fifties. In the three decades that followed, the median surpassed sixty. Among the effects of this trend has been the on-the-job senility or death (or both) of those who govern us. Take, for example, the Texas representative Kay Granger. Eighty-one years old in 2024, she chose not to seek reelection and disappeared from the Capitol after casting her last vote that summer, only to be found six months later in a senior-living facility, where she had ended up, without resigning, after experiencing “dementia issues,” as her son put it when reporters tracked him down. Granger’s is an isolated case only in its absurd extremity. At least half the Democrats in the House who are seventy-five or older—there are nearly thirty in all—are running again this year. Last year, a seventy-five-year-old, Gerry Connolly of Virginia, bested Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for a leadership role on the House Oversight Committee before dying of throat cancer soon after, which made it easier for House Republicans to pass President Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill, slashing taxes and welfare.
The overrepresentation of the elderly in political office is hazardous beyond the most obvious risks. Political theorists would call this situation a failure of “descriptive representation”: ideally, a political class resembles the people it serves. But it might not concern you who holds political office if they deliver good governance for you and yours. Indeed, one reason gerontocracy has escaped scrutiny until recently is that it was commonplace to believe that elderly politicians would act benevolently, as the best grandparents do. But the increasing mismatch between the nation’s demography and its leadership is clearly galling to many.
The prevalence of aged politicians is almost certainly increasing the mass abstention of the young from political participation. The older the politicians, the less credence younger constituents give to the idea that their votes matter. They may even start to doubt the basic worth of the political system and let it fail. A study comparing different countries, including the United States, concluded that the bigger the age gap between people and their politicians, the weaker the population’s confidence in democracy.
In short, it’s not just that our politicians are old. It’s not just the cognitive or bodily decline they suffer. What’s most important is that such leaders represent an aging constituency that controls the political system. They are also the visible face of the elderly’s domination of private forms of power, chiefly wealth: aging Americans control the biggest bank accounts and stock portfolios, partly as a result of living long enough to accumulate more and more without giving much away. The government is bought and paid for by members of the oldest generation, and it is organized for their sake. There is no way to separate the age of our elites from their ascendancy. In America today, age is the modality in which class is lived—with apologies to the late, great cultural theorist Stuart Hall, who said the same thing about race.
Our gerontocracy is not the result of a malevolent plan, exactly. It is, more than anything, an accidental byproduct of the legitimate and understandable desire to survive. Another day, month, or year among loved ones: What downside could that have? Once upon a time, such a question would have been rhetorical, but its answers have snuck up on unsuspecting societies. Boomers aren’t distinctively evil (well, some are). Rather, the fact that they are so numerous and the fact that they are aging in an era when life has been extended make the syndrome endemic.
America faces a gerontocratic crisis of succession on the scale of society itself. The melodrama of succession—waiting for the old to make way for the new—defines not only our politics but also our economy and our culture writ large. But there is still a chance for a reset. President Biden exposed one part of our gerontocracy, as Trump now does, too. Pulling aside the curtain that hides the rest might prepare us to dismantle the system and create something new.
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