Ron DeSantis and the Revolt Against Gerontocracy
2024 may be a channeling of generational angst.
President Reagan frequently mocked the Soviet Union as a gerontocracy. In his early term, as one Soviet leader dropped dead after another, his innate instincts that the Communist experiment could not survive seemed more and more accurate. He made policy accordingly. Reagan’s contemporaries felt the sense of irony - the President was no young man himself. But he didn’t act old. His vitality mirrored and influenced an America that was regaining its self-confidence after the tumultuous 1960s and 1970s.
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40 years later, the situation is flipped on its head. The United States now looks old, doddering, in cultural decay, and led by an infirm generation desperately using the last of its strength to cling onto power. Examples abound:
Joe Biden is the oldest president at 80. If reelected, he would be 86 upon leaving office. The day before I began writing this (June 1st, 2023), he fell on stage. It was only the latest episode of his failing mental and physical health.
Donald Trump, still the leader of the Republican Party, will turn 77 in a few weeks. In the unlikely event he were to reenter the White House, he would be as old as Joe Biden is now upon leaving office. He is obese and increasingly resembles an angry old man yelling at a cloud.
Mitch McConnell, the Senate Minority Leader, is 81. He recently suffered a fall that took him away from the Senate for a while.
Senator Diane Feinstein (D-CA), who chose not to exercise her right to be President pro Tempore of the Senate (and therefore fourth in line to the presidency), is 89 years old. She was recently unable to fulfill her duties on the Senate Judiciary Committee due to physical and cognitive decline. She announced she would not seek reelection, but later appeared unable to remember her own retirement.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer is the youngest of this group. He is 72.
Only this year did the House of Representatives shake the trend, with the ascension of Kevin McCarthy (58) as Speaker and Hakeem Jeffries (52) as Minority Leader, replacing the 83-year-old Nancy Pelosi.
The above leaders do not have Reagan’s vitality. They are old and act old. Little wonder, then, why Americans are down in the dumps.
Cyberpunk Gerontocracy
Gerontocracy is a common theme in cyberpunk fiction. Old leaders try to use high technology to prolong their lives and even achieve immortality. For example, in Bubblegum Crisis (1987), it is at least questionable if Quincy, the leader of the Genom Corporation, is still fully human, having made use of several bio-robotic body doubles. In the Bubblegum Crisis Tokyo 2040 reboot (1999), Quincy’s fear of death is far more explicit, as he lives in an apparatus that keeps his decayed body alive. He refuses to retire, however, and still wields his worldwide influence. It is a state he would have continued indefinitely had his younger subordinate not had other plans.
Instead, Quincy’s age and ignorance of the situation caused a catastrophe.
The quest for immortality is even more pronounced in episode three of Cyber City Oedo 808 (1990-1). There, the leader of a powerful company, his body decaying in real time, has made a virus capable of bestowing immortality. The price is that the virus turns the infected into a vampire. A trail of murders and human experiments were deemed an acceptable price to create this virus. Had the villain in episode three succeeded with his plan, he would have constantly killed younger people in order to keep himself alive.
Modern medicine has made gerontocracy in some ways inevitable. Longer lifespans mean that people will work for longer and stay in power for longer. With age and experience come wealth. Unfortunately, age also brings stubbornness and, even with our technological triumphs, weakness. The old in power inevitably attempt to benefit themselves at the young’s expense.
Nowhere was this more true than during covid. Old leaders, terrified of the virus, shut down the world in a futile attempt to protect themselves while destroying the economic, educational, and social opportunities of the young.
There is another such attempt in the works: the 2024 presidential election.
Electoral Gerontocracy
There is probably not a single person in the United States outside of political apparatchiks that wants to see a 2020 rematch between Joe Biden and Donald Trump. A poll in late April 2023 revealed that 70% of Americans do not want Biden to seek reelection, including 51% of Democrats. 60% of Americans do not want Donald Trump to run for a third time, either. This poll was the latest of many to show a similar result.
Yet if the polls are right and if they hold (two big ifs), this is exactly what the American people will get. As the incumbent President, Biden will not have a serious challenger. Meanwhile, Donald Trump’s indictment in April strengthened his standing among polled Republican primary voters. More indictments are likely.
A 2020 rematch would be an expression of idiocracy in addition to gerontocracy. Both the Trump and Biden campaigns are banking on one thing: Republican primary voters making the least intelligent choice possible on who to nominate, one based on laziness (name recognition) and impulsiveness (hero worship and the desire for revenge). Unfortunately, it is well within the bounds of possibility that they are right in their assessment of the Republican base.
However, there is another possibility.
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The 2024 Youth Revolt?
The element of revolt is part and parcel of the cyberpunk genre. It’s where the “punk” comes from. A common theme is that as the old power brokers use technology to stay alive and accumulate more power, younger protagonists find ways to challenge their authority. In Bubblegum Crisis, a quartet of young women called the Knight Sabers uses technology superior to Genom’s in order to check its excesses.
This is also the prospect that a Ron DeSantis candidacy offers. At its heart is a simple proposition: America deserves better than a choice between two old men who were not exactly the sharpest tacks in the shed in their best days, let alone now.
Ron DeSantis is young. If elected, he would be 45 years old, the third youngest President behind Theodore Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy. Also unlike his two old rivals, he attended Yale, Harvard law school, and served in the military as a naval JAG officer. He experienced the consequences of the policies that Silent-Boomer rule brought to the United States.
Like the Knight Sabers, Ron DeSantis and his team are tech savvy. In 2016, Donald Trump used Twitter to get free media coverage from traditional outlets. By announcing his campaign on Twitter with Elon Musk, Ron DeSantis is signaling an even more tech-centric, alternative media approach. His approach seems to be to bypass the old media entirely and use a combination of cyberspace and real-world, retail politics to set the agenda.
The approach hiccuped in the campaign launch, as the Twitter spaces shared between DeSantis and Musk crashed in the early going - but it crashed due to interest. In total, millions of people listened, and in a far more intimate way than had it come through the filter of a television interview or from a generic rally in a far away place. This was DeSantis on your phone, talking to you. The announcement signaled a willingness to take risks and innovate, a hallmark of youth.
Because the Democratic Party is saddled with an 80 year old incumbent, it cannot offer a generational shift in power. The Republican Party therefore has an opportunity, if it can get past its own tendency toward gerontocracy. Whether the Republican base will have the intelligence to do so, or if the incentives within the party for making impulsive decisions are too strong, is the question.
It is worth mentioning that in Bubblegum Crisis, even the Knight Sabers can only change Genom’s activities in a minor way. Genom’s concentration of power is too strong, even with the Knight Sabers’ technological superiority. Will art come to life in 2024? Or will there be a forced generational turnover?
The DeSantis campaign against the entrenched gerontocracy is therefore one to watch, even for those who do not support him. The civilizational questions it raises are more interesting than any of the politics.