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Even more than which form of government accommodation Donald Trump will ultimately end up in – a federal mansion or a federal penitentiary – the question I am continually asked is why a country of some 330 million people is facing a choice next year between a doddery 80-year-old incumbent and a 77-year-old serial indictee.
There’s broad agreement that the 2024 contest will be one of the most consequential elections in US history, not least because democracy is on the ballot, and also an unusual degree of concurrence over the prospective match-up between Joe Biden and Donald Trump. Polls suggest more than 60 per cent of Americans are dissatisfied with that choice. How did this come to pass?
The simplest explanation is that politicians born in the 1940s – a mix of members of what’s called the Silent Generation and Baby Boomers – have overstayed their welcome. Having started to take up leadership positions in the early 1990s, displacing the Greatest Generation who fought in World War II, they have stuck around for 30 years.
Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell, who is showing signs of neurological decline, is 81. The former Democratic House Speaker, Nancy Pelosi, was 82 when earlier this year she finally had to relinquish the gavel. Her then-deputy, House majority leader Steny Hoyer, was a year older. A country we often associate with youthfulness – Thomas Jefferson was just 33 when he drafted the Declaration of Independence – has become a gerontocracy. The average age of the US Senate is 65, a figure we normally associate with retirement.
The elderly have not entirely monopolised power. Barack Obama, though technically a boomer, was 47 when he became president. However, at the end of his eight years in office, he handed the torch to the previous generation rather than the next. Hillary Clinton is almost 14 years his senior.
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Within the Republican Party, the cult of Donald Trump has made it harder for forty- and fifty-somethings to emerge. In a party where QAnon followers such as Marjorie Taylor Greene have become the stars, the few surviving moderate conservatives also stand little chance of cutting through. In a more sensible time, a mainstream Republican such as Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor, would have been better placed to become the party’s standard-bearer.
Haley also reminds us that women, because of the misogyny they routinely encounter, have found it difficult to reach the top. Hillary Clinton remains the only female politician ever to have been the presidential nominee of either major party.
In recent times, America’s political dynasties have failed to produce presidential-calibre heirs. During the 2016 campaign, the limitations of Jeb Bush, the son of the 41st president and the younger brother of the 43rd, were mercilessly exposed by Trump. Robert F. Kennedy Jr, a fringe conspiratorialist now running as an independent presidential candidate, has become the most prominent progeny of the Democrats’ royal family.
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