Gerontocracy in America: How the Old Are Hoarding Power and Wealth—and What to Do About It by Samuel Moyn. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 288 pages.
Here is the first paragraph of Samuel Moyn’s book on gerontocracy:
For two centuries, Democracy in America, published by the Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville starting in 1835, has been the most famous book about the United States. It deserves to stay that way. But it might need an update.
What do these sentences mean? Do they mean anything? Of course, I get the joke—or what is meant to be a joke. Tocqueville wrote a book called Democracy in America; this book is called Gerontocracy in America. But I fail to understand how a riff on a famous title, an old marketing tactic in publishing, constitutes an “update.” Is every new book about the changing conditions of American society an “update” on Tocqueville? A charitable reviewer might surmise that Moyn has been dabbling in AI-enhanced writing, but I suspect something more prosaic: He just has nothing to say.
But let’s keep going, just for fun. I pass over in silence Moyn’s assertion on page 4 that Tocqueville was writing “at the dawn of modernity” to examine his description on page 5 of modern America. We are in a time of acute crisis, Moyn writes, when rule by the old threatens the very integrity of our democracy. This has been a problem for a while. But most people only began to worry about it after the 2024 presidential election, which, Moyn tells us in his unlovely idiom, left “a storied republic on the brink.” Joe Biden faltered on the debate stage and quit the race; Donald Trump, the eventual winner, had his own share of senior moments on the campaign trail. Everyone freaked out. Now, it is becoming commonplace to blame the old for all of the country’s problems. Or, as Moyn puts it: “As the dudgeon over the loss in 2024 became high, it was sadly on trend to scapegoat old people for exerting a death grip on power.”
I could keep translating Moyn’s torrent of cliché into plain American, but for brevity’s sake, I’ll stick to the cliché without the translation. Here is Moyn on Yusuke Narita, a Japanese economist who proposed mass suicide for the old: “He won a cult following online—and an equal amount of cancellation.” On the American Association of Retired Persons: “Where the NRA’s guns kill people, the AARP reflects, like a mirror, American society dying through conservative sclerosis.” And on a miscellany of historical and contemporary figures: Aristotle, “a biologist who spoke truth to elder power”; Balzac,“the anti-capitalist novelist who trolled old misers”; and Ross Douthat, “newspaper conservative.”
So, the author is a poor stylist who sounds like a chatbot. Nothing exceptional in that. Why read this book at all? In my case, I can tell you why I picked it up. The May issue of Harper’s contained an excerpt (or rather adaptation) in which passages, artfully stitched together, approached coherence. Whoever performed the surgery did admirably. He or she deserves a raise.
But I am getting far afield. Here is Moyn’s thesis, or argument, or proposal, or—well, whatever this is, which is as close as we get to reading what the book is about:
A fundamental imperative is therefore at stake. Americans must transcend gerontocracy if we are to realize our collective aspiration to innovation, as well as achieve other important goals such as intergenerational equity, fair political representation, and even an existential acceptance of limits as we age.
Make of that what you will. (What could it possibly mean for an “imperative” to be “at stake”?) Moyn certainly doesn’t become any clearer once he gets into the details. A few pages later, he says that “age limits for political office are a must,” possibly an interesting idea. But he quickly devolves into activist argot: “Other fixes range from amplifying the political voice of younger voters and disrupting the stranglehold of the old people’s lobby on our politics to policies that facilitate intergenerational wealth transfer.” He concludes: “The schemes I offer seek to advance ‘intergenerational equity,’” a bit of jargon he mercifully leaves unexplained.
I am harping on style not because (or at least not only because) I am persnickety. I am trying to think about this problem from the perspective of an old person. How would you feel if someone came up to you and told you that you were going to be forced to retire, compelled to give up public office, banned from making political donations? Pretty poorly, I imagine. But what if this same guy said all of these things in a rude and offhand manner? Would you be persuaded then? Certainly not.
Yet this is what Moyn is up to, the art of unpersuasion. In his discussion of term limits, for example, he drops this sentence: “Oh—and eventually, abolition of the old man’s titular branch of government, the Senate, is a must.” There’s something unsettling in this glib posturing. The Senate, whose name, as Moyn points out, derives from senex (Latin for old man), is an institution with functions beyond providing work to old men. These days it is an ailing body, in need of reform. A lot of people, young and old, have been saying as much for decades. But to dismiss it with the flick of the wrist seems rather, well, juvenile.
Worse, though, is Moyn’s apparent obsession with whether or not something is a “good look.” The Supreme Court being made up of elders is “not a good look.” Neither is voter disenfranchisement, though that doesn’t stop Moyn from proposing something like it. Most bizarre, however, is the idea that it was “not a great look” for Cornel West to perform in the Matrix movies. (Apparently his role advanced gerontocratic ideals.) The issue here, though, is not whether or not these things are good looks or not good looks, but that “look” is the criterion of judgment at all. To determine something’s worth by whether the public greets it with approbation or opprobrium is shallow, unthinking.
Underlying Moyn’s analysis is the belief, which he assumes his readers share, that there is no life after death. He refers repeatedly to this concept as a reason why the old refuse to get out of the young’s way. It makes sense: If there is nothing beyond this life, why not cling to it as long as possible? Other authors might—in fact, other authors have—used this question as a starting point into an inquiry about why every culture seeks to dignify death and dying. But not Moyn. He would prefer that old people make peace with death and oblivion. Or, as he says: “Reform must reckon with the life course, registering the inevitability of decline and disappearance.” This way, he explains, if you can call this explaining, “our policies can reflect a collective aspiration to social movement and progress rather than repetition and stasis.”
It’s a shame Gerontocracy in America is such a mess. There is a good book to be written on the topic, which Moyn is right to identify as serious and pressing. This yet-to-be-written good book could even be structured like Democracy in America. What a wild ride that would be! A gentleman sociologist travels through a strange country, interviewing the old, observing their customs, and then sitting down and constructing a grand theory of American culture based on his journey.
But Gerontocracy in America is not that book. This book, as the jacket copy tells us, is what happens when “a leading social critic identifies our least-discussed major crisis, and sets out to solve it.” He fails. To quote the author, it is not a good look.
Nic Rowan is managing editor of The Lamp.
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