Discussions of Biden’s Age Are a Distraction From the Actual Problem
Generational differences explain some of the malaise, but the primary problem is—and remains—ideological. Lots of people in establishment media would like us to ignore this.
I’ve been railing against the trap of generations discourse for years, not because I don’t think it’s a factor, but because I don’t think it’s a terribly important one. Or rather, it only becomes a useful metric after one calibrates for issues of class, race, anti-LGBTQ currents, sexism, and, above all, ideology. When all of these factors are accounted for, then, all things being equal, it’s logical that one factor contributing to our political crises is the result of what some critics call a gerontocracy—basically, the same people have been in power for too long, and invariably this results in a ruling class that’s out of touch and marked by inertia and indifference to the needs of voters.
While it certainly doesn’t have to, this line of argument very often drifts into ageism, reproduces and mimics capitalist obsession with youth, and obscures far more important issues that reinforce our broken politics—namely, that of our decades-long neoliberal consensus that created and continues to aggravate the conditions for Trumpism. I touched on this topic briefly in a post last week, but would like to expound on it, given that it’s become a recent point of discussion with a new poll showing age is a major factor in a renewed effort to convince Biden not to run in 2024.
Michelle Goldberg at the New York Times today wrote a piece subtly titled, “Joe Biden Is Too Old to Be President Again.” In it, she hand-wrings and flatters Biden, but ultimately determines his problem is that he's too old to be a viable Democratic nominee in 2024. Citing a recent poll showing 64 percent of Democrats think Biden shouldn’t run again due to his age, Goldberg insists Biden should step down and announce he’ll be a one-term president.
Goldberg is not alone: Increasingly the Democratic Party’s horrible poll numbers and gloomy prospect for the midterms and beyond are being chalked up to too many old-timers running the Party. But, as I read more and more of these takes, it’s becoming clear this line of argument, while superficially attractive, obscures more than it elucidates. To wit, at the close of her piece, Goldberg clearly shows how little she understand the nature of the problem, writing:
There are plenty of possibilities: If Vice President Kamala Harris’s approval ratings remain underwater, Democrats have a number of charismatic governors and senators they can turn to. Biden said, during the 2020 campaign, that he wanted to be a “bridge” to a new generation of Democrats. Soon it will be time to cross it.
This mentality, that Democrats can just plug in any “charismatic governors and senator” and have a better show at winning in 2024, is the exact thinking that got us into a situation where we’re 28 months away from a full-blown Republican takeover of every major political institution. It shows there’s little interest in building a sustainable or robust political coalition, or creating bigger moral narratives to counter the Right’s dark vision of nonstop attack on trans people, education, black activists, and immigrants. The goal is to simply survive, hoping to effectively trick the electorate into delivering you 50.0001 percent of electors because a candidate has a winning smile and a beautiful family.
In her analysis, Goldberg makes zero mention of bill failures, ideological incoherence, corporate interests constraining policy options, unpopular austerity, and a failure to deliver on major promises. No, it’s just that Biden’s old.
If we cannot properly name the problem, we have no chance of solving it.
This is all especially grating to see from Michelle Goldberg, who achieved her coveted perch at The New York Times, in part by serving as the anti-Sanders laundromat for the Clinton primary campaign in 2016, running Red Scare oppo at Slate under the thin auspices of Deep Concerns About Potential GOP attacks. A role she dutifully performed again for the centrist wing of the Party in 2020 while at The Times, even rehashing the exact same “Sandinista” line that no one cared about four years prior:
Right when the progressive wing of the Party was beginning to coalesce around Sanders in February 2020, Goldberg explicitly lobbied for Sen. Elizabeth Warren in the New York Times, which she’s well within her right to do. But when she casually disclosed midway through her column that her husband did paid consulting for the Warren campaign, it seems as if this endorsement, belated as it was, was consistent with a pattern of unglamorous Party hackery and left-discipling.
Other pundits than Michelle Goldberg, of course, have been making the argument Biden is too old. Even some on the progressive wing of the Party. And, on an intuitive level, one can see the appeal: It vaguely seems true. But there are institutional incentives, as evidenced by the focus on age by Party hatchet people like Goldberg, to turn the conversation into one of The Lame Olds, rather than ideology. Indeed, as @wideofthepost noted, the young voters who are abandoning Biden in swaths are not citing his age, but his policies, for doing so. It’s the eldest demographic of voters most concerned with Biden’s geriatric properties.
The reason this explanation may be attractive to some is there’s likely a correlation, even if they have the causation backwards. To the extent gerontocracy is an issue, it’s the logical byproduct of conservative, neoliberal capture of our politics, not the cause of it. Put simply: It makes perfect sense that those in the Democratic Party who most dutifully serve the donor base, punch left, lower expectations, ignore activists, dote on Israel, shred any faint remanence of ideological commitment, and embrace liberal imperialist conventional wisdom, more broadly, would be far less likely to get weeded out, lose elections, or get primaried. It makes sense, then, that those least willing or incentivized to tackle existential problems of climate change, inequality, systematic racism, and the corruption of federal courts would be the most likely to simply… stick around. But, as I noted last week, simply replacing neoliberal dinosaurs who outlasted their more ideological, left-wing colleagues with a young whippersnapper from the increasingly deep bench of conservative Democrats brought up from McKinsey or spooksville won’t do much to address the fundamental issue that the Democrats have no coherent message and are hostile to class politics.
And this is the primary risk of centering age as the issue at hand. How we diagnose the problem will inform the subsequent next step to correct course and determine who ought to replace Biden. And if it’s just a brighter, cheerier, more photogenic centrist with no coherent moral vision, working on behalf of austerity, endless war, and an unwillingness to buck norms, then nothing will have been solved—other than the person delivering their concession speech to Ron DeSantis on November 5, 2024 will being doing so more eloquently.