Are Americans Too Old?
The country you live in is changing. Month by month, year by year, an insurgent group has been taking over. Its members are moving into your neighborhood, casting votes, and pushing your interests aside. These people claim to care about the community, but they’re mostly loyal to one another—and their numbers are growing. If their ascendance has been ignored, that’s mainly because of political correctness: it’s considered rude to talk about them as a group. If you do so, you must adopt a respectful, even reverential tone, observing how hard life is for them, even though they have all the power.
“They” are the old—at least, according to “Gerontocracy in America,” a new book by Samuel Moyn, a professor at Yale Law School. Moyn argues that the oldest Americans, because of their retrograde politics and ever-increasing presence, are profoundly reshaping our collective life. Historically, “elderly Americans have counted among the most oppressed,” he writes, and many still suffer abuse, or struggle in penury. But the bigger picture is that more Americans are living longer, staying healthier, and getting much wealthier as they age. As a result, Moyn says, the country’s fate and character are being determined not by forward-looking people in their youth or their prime but by backward-looking ones in the final third of their lives.
The French have a phrase for stating the obvious: “enfoncer une porte ouverte,” or “to break down an open door.” We all know that there are lots of boomers, and that Joe Biden and Donald Trump are the oldest Presidents in history. Even so, Moyn writes, the extent of America’s transformation has, like aging itself, snuck up on us. His title is a play on Alexis de Tocqueville’s “Democracy in America”: it implies that gerontocracy—rule by the old—is now the country’s essential condition. “Had she won the presidency in 2024, Kamala Harris would have taken office at sixty,” Moyn points out; only in a gerontocratic America could she have presented herself as a youthful alternative.
To really appreciate the “gobsmacking” degree to which the country has aged, Moyn suggests, you have to look at the statistics. In 1980, the median age in America was thirty. (In other words, half of Americans were younger than thirty, and half older.) Today, the median age is nearly forty. There used to be an “age pyramid,” Moyn explains, with a broad base of younger people narrowing to a small elderly population at the top. Now we have an age rectangle—more people are reaching their seventies and eighties—and it could soon become a top-heavy trapezoid, since young people are having fewer children. In 1920, less than five per cent of Americans were older than sixty-five; by 2060, according to the A.A.R.P., the number will be one in four.
The age of the median voter is now fifty-two. In primaries, it is sixty-five—meaning that the oldest voters ordain the choices for the rest of us. “The most common age of donors in recent elections can run as high as seventy,” Moyn reports; since politicians often do what donors want, even younger elected officials are likely to vote older than their age. That’s not to say that there are lots of younger politicians: the median age in Congress is more than sixty. There are four hundred and thirty-five members of the House of Representatives; only one was born in the nineteen-nineties, and only sixty-four in the eighties. Democrats in Congress trend a little older than Republicans, and “at least half of the Democrats in the House over seventy-five are running again in 2026,” Moyn writes, despite the fact that, between 2022 and 2025, eight congressional Democrats died in office.
All of this has made younger voters more cynical and disengaged. And with good reason: there is ample evidence that older people favor policies that emphasize security for themselves over investment in the young. Broadly speaking, laws now make it much easier for older people to buy property and make investments while avoiding taxes. Meanwhile, being healthier, they have kept working into their seventies, occupying positions that might otherwise be filled by those younger than them. The result has been a widening economic rift between the old and the young, with the net worth of older households rising and the wealth of younger households falling. “The age group most likely to own a home in America, at a rate of over 80 percent, is seventy to seventy-four,” Moyn writes. The second most likely group is people seventy-five and older.
There are nearly sixty million Americans over the age of sixty-five. Can we really generalize about their attitudes and opinions? “As the individual life dwindles, playing for time in the face of impending catastrophe is a psychologically appealing stratagem of avoidance and denial,” Moyn suggests. At the very least, it seems reasonable to say that our opinions grow less au courant as we age. Surveys find that, among people aged eighteen to twenty-nine, the most important foreign-policy issue is climate change; among “old people,” Moyn writes, “the biggest issue is terrorism.” We face all sorts of big civilizational challenges—and yet, if Moyn’s analysis is right, the people who are most directly invested in building the future are being dominated by those who indulge the status quo. “Gerontocracies are prone to let long-term problems fester and worsen,” Moyn warns. But the power of older Americans is hardly despotic; it’s democratic, deriving from the principle of one person, one vote. What, if anything, should be done about it?
The story of today’s gerontocracy is ironic, insofar as it begins, in the eighteenth century, with the idolization of youth. “It was Napoleon Bonaparte’s meteoric rise from nothing,” Moyn writes, “that inspired the first widespread hopes that young people could finally disregard their elders and rule worlds.” The term “gerontocracy” was coined by an admirer of Napoleon’s, Jean-Jacques Fazy, who protested the resurgent Bourbon monarchy, which ruled partly by means of a legislature with a minimum age of forty. Arguably, the “revolt against gerontocracy made the modern world,” Moyn writes. To some people, “the very idea of progress implies a turn against ancestor worship and those aged elites who prize continuity over change.”
This attitude found its fullest expression in America, during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Americans were in love with the idea of youthful, upstart dynamism; they agreed with Ralph Waldo Emerson, who characterized “the forms of old age” as “rest, conservatism, appropriation, inertia; not newness, not the way onward.” Young people wanted to stay young; older people wanted to reverse time; and so “anti-aging practices,” including new regimes of diet, temperance, and exercise, “swept the land.” Feminism was anti-gerontocratic, too, striking blows against old men and their old ways. By the turn of the twentieth century, Moyn writes, “the last remnants of the old respect for old people were shredded.” It became possible to call an old person an “old fogy.” Moyn quotes Randolph Bourne, a young radical journalist, who proclaimed, in 1913, that “old age lives in the delusion that it has improved and rationalized its youthful ideas by experience and stored-up wisdom, when all it has done is to damage them more or less—usually more.”
The pursuit of youth involved a lot of sham science. (There was a long period during which breakfast cereal was understood as a key to longevity.) But in the twentieth century, real medical progress resulted in healthier life styles and extended lifespans. “Giving up smoking and taking statins,” Moyn writes, “along with beta-blockers and blood-pressure pills, and coronary bypass surgery if all else fails, not to mention commitment to diet and exercise—all this has been normalized for vast numbers of people.” The Age of Youth culminated, oddly, in the inauguration of a renewed Old Age.
At various points during this process, observers speculated about the political and economic consequences of a great aging. They noticed that many aspects of our society seem to have been designed with shorter lives in mind. Judges, for example, are often appointed for life—and as lives have got longer, so have terms of judicial service. (The average tenure of a Supreme Court Justice has risen from fifteen years before 1970 to twenty-six years today.) For all but a few professions (airline pilot, air-traffic controller), Congress eliminated mandatory retirement in 1986, deeming it age discrimination; between 2000 and 2010, the number of college professors over the age of sixty-five doubled. (During this period, Harvard’s faculty of arts and sciences had more tenured professors over sixty than under fifty.) Academia is now just one of many professions in which younger participants regard their elders “much as a nation of serfs on the brink of the French Revolution saw the noble lords.”
Today, the A.A.R.P., which helped end mandatory retirement, would presumably oppose its return. Yet Moyn believes that it’s possible to reverse the tide on that front, and on many others. “No law prohibits disparate treatment of people at the younger end of the age continuum,” he notes—so why not concede that age does matter, and resume ushering older workers out the door? “Age limits for political office are a must,” he contends; so are reforms to taxes and campaign finance. He contemplates various schemes for “amplifying the political voice of younger voters,” such as requiring everyone to vote (Australia does it) and lowering the voting age, and raises the possibility of “proxy voting,” in which young people are allowed to vote twice, once for themselves and once for those even younger, who aren’t yet allowed to vote.
Despite the sometimes acerbic tone of his book, Moyn’s aim isn’t to stick it to the old: he argues that Americans also need to expand entitlements for seniors, so that they can more comfortably and confidently retire. If seniors are “hoarding” jobs, houses, and income, that reflects the entirely logical fear inspired by the possibility of decades lived on fixed incomes. “Which is where socialism comes in,” Moyn writes. In his view, it will take big changes to create an “intergenerational utopia” in which, to choose just one example, older Americans have access to government-funded long-term care in their homes. In 2060, I’ll be one of the quarter of Americans who are over sixty-five; if you’re not yet part of the gerontocracy, you’ll be joining before you know it. Maybe, instead of inveighing against boomers, the younger half of Americans need to start making common cause with the older people they will soon become.
Is gerontocracy the right diagnosis for what ails us? In an essay titled “Old People Aren’t the Problem,” Nathan J. Robinson, the editor of Current Affairs, argues that Moyn is making a category mistake. Not all older people are wealthy and powerful; in fact, in 2019, seventy per cent of the wealth owned by those over sixty-five belonged to just ten per cent of American seniors. “Wealth is not actually concentrated among old or young people,” Robinson writes. “It’s concentrated among rich people.” He points out that, in modern America, the politician who has done the most to advance progressive ideas is Bernie Sanders, who is now eighty-four years old (and, to all appearances, totally with it). Would the world be a better place if Sanders were mandatorily retired? “The class struggle overlaps a bit with age, but the policies we should adopt have to be aimed around redistributing wealth and power, period,” Robinson concludes—otherwise we’ll just be “exploited by a younger ruling class.”
It could also be that, in a youth-obsessed society, we haven’t learned how to make the most of the perspective that comes with age. Last month, in a paper titled “Aging and the Narrowing of Scientific Innovation,” a group of researchers analyzed the work of more than twelve million scientists who’d published between 1960 and 2020. There are, they explain, two main theories about how scientists age: one holds that they improve, being better equipped by experience to shoulder the “burden of knowledge”; the other sees them as inevitably less creative and disruptive. The analysis revealed a more nuanced picture. While older scientists do grow less likely to produce entirely new discoveries, they also get better at “combinatorial innovation” through the linking of “previously unconnected ideas.” And though a “nostalgia effect” can take hold, with aging scientists citing older and older papers, this isn’t necessarily a problem: in fact, it creates “continuity” within science, introducing younger scientists to old ideas that deserve currency. Science as a whole might skew too old, the study suggests, but rebalancing requires not just empowering younger scientists but better connecting them with older ones. (The authors recommend “intergenerational, flat collaborations.”)
There is no widely accepted word for being ruled by the young. (Juvenocracy?) And yet, for many people—even many young people—the gerontocratic reality that Moyn describes now unfolds alongside the sense that the rush of technology in general, and the überdisruptive potential of artificial intelligence in particular, have put the kids in charge. The project of building A.I. stretches back at least to the nineteen-fifties, but today’s version seems to be helmed largely by people who are in their forties and younger. There’s almost a glee with which the most A.I.-forward thinkers proclaim that the old world, with its requirements for thinking at human scale and speed, will be rendered obsolete by the proliferation of automated reasoning. One of the promises of A.I., of course, is further progress in science and medicine. If artificial intelligence does what it’s supposed to, then people will be living and thriving even longer. We’ll live even further suspended between accelerating technology on the one hand and the conservative impulses created by lengthening lifespans on the other.
The fault lines between young and old are real. I’m in my mid-forties, with two small children, and I live in one of only a few school districts on Long Island where the school budget failed to pass; most of the people I know reasonably assume that it was older voters, wary of even modest tax increases, who voted it down, happy to risk the drastic cuts to programs like tutoring, music, and sports that will occur if a new budget isn’t passed. (On Facebook, there are arguments between parents who want services for their kids and older residents who say those services didn’t exist “back in my day.”) There are vacant lots and empty buildings in town where new housing could be built, but residents, defensive of their property values, keep nixing new development. The status quo rules. And yet it’s not just older people who cling to the past. A mood of retrospection seems to have settled everywhere. In conversation, almost no one will express hope for the future. Maybe one sign that we’re living under gerontocracy is that so many people yearn for the old version of America, in which dynamism abounded and everyone was young.
To defeat gerontocracy, an embrace of the future is necessary. Older people must care about it and want to participate in shaping it, even as they acknowledge the right of those younger than them to take the helm. Those younger people, in turn, have to understand that their own futures include old age; they need to learn from the old, who, when they were young, were the architects of our present. If gerontocracy is a burden on our society—and it seems to be—then one obstacle is that the resistance to it can too easily take on the form of a fight between the generations. But progress can’t, in fact, be reduced to the overthrowing of the old by the young. It depends on the realization that we’re all moving forward in time, separated only by a few decades, and that we all want to leave behind a world that’s better than the one we found. ♦