Age Limits
“Wait ‘till you grow up.” “Someday you’ll understand.”
“Act your age!” “When I was your age”
“I guess I’m past my prime.” “You’re over the hill.”
Who among us hasn’t heard, or said, one or more of these comments? If we live long enough each of them will be worn like shoes that fit our size. For they capture how others have and will judge what we are, aren’t yet, or once were. Perhaps they remind us that we are always on the way to somewhere, or looking back at life from vantage points on roads we have already traversed. When young we long to be older but find ourselves blocked by inability and inexperience. When older, we reminisce about once-valued assumptions now out-of-step with the moods and mindsets of the present age. Sadly it is in those decades between youth and old age that we rarely appreciate how much in our prime we really are. Our preoccupations with jobs, relationships, kids and costs keeping us fixed on just making it through each day in one piece.
From the retrospective glance of my eighth decade, I understand full well how age both empowers us and limits us. We spend our first fifty years aware of the former, and our last decades reminded at every turn of the latter. Not too far along life’s journey we begin to wish for the freedoms, appearances, and status of those older siblings and grown ups whom we copy and idolize. And as our treks around the sun add numbers to our timeline and candles to our birthday cakes, nostalgic tugs take us down paths of appreciation, regret and uncertainty about the ever shortening road that lies ahead on life’s miraculous highway.
Wherever we find ourselves in the passage of time, the way we look upon life’s meaning and values is tempered, colored, and conditioned by our age and “the” age in which we encounter the present. That may be why generations are so easily typified by a particular ethos and outlook. Those fifteen to forty year generational segments in which we find ourselves categorized tell us much about the era in which we come of age which, in turn, so influences how we live out the rest of our days. No matter the slogans and Roman numerals we use to label generations, and no matter how we analyze and sequence them in cycles of historical change*, this maxim holds true: age empowers, and age limits--all of us. And that seems to be the case whether we’re talking about us as individuals or the generations in which we come to life.
In ways both significant and surprising, age has and is exerting its influence on American political leadership in ways rarely seen in the past. The most obvious example is our current geriatric president who is pondering another run at the White House in two years. If geriatric seems a bit off-putting to you, feel free to substitute elderly or senior since all three of these terms are universally applied, by doctors, lawyers, and insurers, to those over 65 years of age. Scrutinized by loyalists and critics in both parties because of his octogenarian state of being, Mr. Biden appears on course to take on his equally elderly predecessor and antagonist in the 2024 election. It brings to mind George Forman slugging it out against Mike Tyson when both were well beyond their fighting trim. Fortunately that fight never materialized, which I hope will be the case for a Biden-Trump rematch. It does make me wonder, however, why anyone would want our country to stage and endure such an unprecedented—and un-presidential—spectacle in the next two years.
My opinion on this comes from two realities that none of us should dismiss or ignore. First is the age of the 46 men who served as our Commander in Chief, particularly how old they were when inaugurated and when they left office. The oldest of our former presidents, Ronald Reagan, whose mental acuity was noticeably diminished by the time he left office, was younger than either Mr. Biden or Mr. Trump will be on Election Day, 2024. As the chart
reveals, most of our presidents tried to handle the myriad responsibilities and decisions of this high office when they were between the ages of 45 and 65. And each of them showed the signs of accelerated aging in their faces and energy levels while in office, evidence of the incredible demands that take a toll on every person we elect to this position. Few jobs on earth exact more out of a person than the presidency of our country, a job that neither the very young nor the very old should be expected to fulfill. It is telling that three of the four presidents who preceded Trump and Biden are, even now, as young if not younger than these two prospective candidates for the 2024 election.
The second was confirmed over my seven-year career as a nursing home chaplain while yet in the sprig of my youthful adulthood. It was this important insight into human aging: we are as older people what we’ve always been, only moreso. I find it to be as true of young adults who take on the grown-up semblance and manner of their adolescent selves, as it is of seniors. Crotchety old geezers were grouchy and complaining in their youth. Happy-go-lucky elders have worn smiles since they were children. There are few exceptions.
So it is no surprise when the aforementioned elderly leaders of our two dominant political parties display the same personalities that have been evident over their long careers in public life. The incumbent is now even more of the career politician he always was, a master at swiveling with the political winds, revising his own record when expedient, and planting his flag of conviction all over the political map. Contrary to what many of his critics like to portray, his performance as president is not the result of diminished capacity but the normal expression of what he has always been, just exaggerated by age and choreographed with shuffling feet and forgetful lapses. At the same time his past and likely future nemesis in 2024 is the same pragmatic, hard-charging business tycoon who continues to be driven by self-glorification and his need to win at all costs, no matter who or what principles may stand in his way. It would be naïve to expect anything less from either of these politicians, both well past their prime. They are now what they’ve always been, only more so.
Why Biden and Trump have such a stranglehold on American politics is beyond my comprehension. It isn’t only a matter of their age, as significant as that is. It is the reality of generational discontinuity between them and the majority of Americans. As this chart illustrates, for the past eight years we have been led by men generationally older than 86% of those whom they were elected to represent. Combine this with the fact the 176 of our 535 members of Congress are over 65 years
of age (half of them in the Senate and 30% in the House), twelve of whom will never again celebrate an 80th birthday, and it is hard to ignore the gap in our political leadership with an electorate whose average age is just under 39. What are we to make of this? At no time in our history have Americans entrusted their future to elders of such advanced years or so removed from their day-to-day life experiences.
I share these observations and concerns from the twilight of a Baby Boomer life. There is no intended nor implied ageism in my words, and no idealization of those of more tender age than myself. My only desire is to raise awareness of the disconnect between who we are as a body politic and who we are electing to represent us, both in terms of age and generational grounding. We’ve long accepted the limitations of being too young to run for a national political office. This was precisely why our founders established minimal age requirements for elected officials—25 years old for the House, 30 for the Senate and 35 for the president. The constitutional “staggered start” to leadership reflected their sense of the relative difficulty and importance of each level of governance. By creating age minimums they tried to insure that those elected would have the requisite life experience to serve wisely and effectively. Yet they left open any reckoning of when such terms in office should come to an end. I suspect they assumed that those in their sixties would sense it was time to step down. In fact that has been the case for all but four of our presidents, Eisenhower (who had just turned 70), Reagan, Trump and Biden.
Given the stretching of human longevity well past what was once considered “old,” it is time that we also set maximal age requirements that reflect the course of normal biological and intellectual decline for human beings. Is it not appropriate and timely for us to engage in a national discussion on setting age limits for all of our elected officials—say 70 or 75 at the time of their election—more in synch with the ages we associate with retirement for most Americans? With all due respect for the service of those Methusalen representatives yet in Congress whose seniority has made them powerful controllers and gatekeepers of the national legislative agenda, it seems fitting and proper that we elect men and women who are more reflective of the age and outlook of those whom they promise to serve. Isn’t that what government of, by and for the people should look like?
________________________
*The Fourth Turning, by William Strauss and Neil Howe (1997) is one of many analytical and predictive studies of generational change and its influence on the cycles of history.
