(By request, from Dmitry Orlov, reblogged here without apology or permission. Go buy his books or support his blogging on boosty, or feel free to complain about the errors in his opinionated prose on your own pages or in the comments)
Many people around the world gaze in wonder and amazement upon the assortment of geriatrics atop the great American pyramid of power—the withered witches Nancy Pelosi (82), Maxine Waters (83) and Dianne Feinstein (88), the living cadavers Chuck Grassley (88), Jim Inhofe (87), Richard Shelvy (87), as well as quite a few others, and the obviously senile Joe Biden (80) who sits atop it all. How does a pile of oldsters, all of them obviously well past their prime, manage to control a great big empire, the biggest (strictly in budgetary terms) military power on Earth and the sacred keeper of the Holy Dollar Printing Press?
The people old Biden commands aren’t spring chickens either: Lloyd Austin at the Pentagon is 69, Janet Yellen at the Treasury is 76. If you look at the various powers behind the throne, there’s the Yoda-like Kissinger (99) and the moneybag George Soros (92).I don’t mean to be ageist, but it is simply foolish to ignore the toll time takes on our brains, as well as the rest of our bodies, as we age. It is not just our limbs that become less flexible (check if you can still touch your nose to your big toe) but our thinking becomes ossified as well. Our learning ability dwindles over time: short-term memory shrinks, long-term memory decays and receptivity to new concepts and ideas declines. We become emotionally attached to the past, comforted by our memories, shocked by an increasingly unfamiliar present and fearful of an unpredictable future.The political science term for such a system of government is gerontocracy. It can take many forms.
Its most benign form is the council of elders found in many traditional societies, who accumulate authority through experience and reputation and wield power through the unconditional respect that must be given to old people in traditional societies. In places where centralized authority is weak, repressive, remote or nonexistent, tribal elders are often called upon to help resolve conflicts that would otherwise give rise to violence, and political authority naturally accrues to those with a successful history of conflict resolution.
Obviously, this is not the case in a young country like the US: 236 years is a blink of an eye in historical terms compared to 6000 years for India, 4000 years for China, 2500 for Persia and 1000 years for Russia. Nor is gerontocracy a natural outcome for a system of representative democracy: why would young people ever choose their great grandparents to be their elected representatives? Also, why would crusty old greyhairs be a natural choice in a country undergoing rapid change that in a single generation experienced the end of the Cold War, the rise of new China and Russia, the development of the internet and now the proliferation of artificial intelligence applications and robotics? Obviously, something has gone seriously wrong with the succession of political authority in the US if old people can’t retire from power and younger people aren’t allowed to advance and take their place.The most malignant form of gerontocracy is rule by an oligarchy of the aged. Imagine a small clique of elderly men and women tenaciously clinging to power, protected by a powerful police state and many layers of yes-persons (the woke version of yes-men), shielded from any negative or unexpected news that might undermine their already shaky grip on reality. This characterizes the current state of the American democracy reasonably well, but leaves some questions yet to be answered.
Such as: Why are these oldsters afraid to retire? Why aren’t younger people allowed to take their place? How distorted is their image of the world and what are the consequences of that? and, finally, How long can this possibly go on and how is it likely to end?Starting from the end and working toward the beginning of this list of questions, we have the wonderful and relatively recent example of the slow decline and sudden fall of the USSR. World War I exposed the rotting hulk of the Russian Empire and its dysfunctional monarchy was replaced with a bourgeois democracy which failed spectacularly within half a year and was replaced by the Bolsheviks, who were Marxist communist revolutionaries. A civil war ensued, which the Bolsheviks won. It then fell upon Stalin to quell the revolutionary fervor of Trotsky and his followers, mostly by simply having them all killed, and to reorient the ideology from world revolution to building socialism in just the one country he ruled. In this he succeeded beyond anyone’s wildest imagination: industrialization, World War II victory, the atomic bomb, the space race and various other stunning Soviet achievements are mostly to his credit. But he certainly wasn’t picky about his methods—he didn’t have that luxury—and after his death this allowed his legacy to be very much tarnished by the likes of the very stupid and incompetent
Nikita Khrushchev and the compulsive liar, eclectic prose stylist and anti-Soviet propagandist Alexander Solzhenitsyn. The Soviet system, although effective for its time, had a congenital defect: it had no ability to renew itself. After Khrushchev was summarily dismissed while on holiday came the overly cautious Brezhnev who opposed even the most necessary reforms. Then came a procession of near-corpses: Andropov with his faulty kidneys and his insane wife; Chernenko who wasn’t quite alive throughout his 13-month term in office. And then came the young, charismatic, popular Gorbachev who destroyed the country in five years and is now the most reviled person in all of Russia, comparing favorably only to Hitler.
I will spare you the thumbnail sketch of American history and simply note that the US went from a post-World-War-II industrial powerhouse with top-notch science and engineering to a country full of ignorant, lazy, slovenly people that just prints money, scares the world with its aircraft carriers into using that money for foreign trade, and imports most of what it needs, including intelligent, educated people. And now the money-printing business is failing too, with the share of the USD in international trade having shrunk from nearly 100% to barely a third. But the crusty old gerontocrats don’t know that the world has changed and the yes-persons who surround them won’t tell them that the money-printing affair is almost over, that the aircraft carriers no longer frighten anyone and that the intelligent, educated people are leaving.Reasoning by analogy, we might think that once Americans manage to get someone young into the White House, it will take five years for the USA to collapse. Supposing Joe Biden croaks tomorrow, how long would it take his VP Kamala Harris to destroy the country? She would have two whole years to do it; would she manage? No wagering, please! Instead, let us answer the other questions.Why are the American gerontocrats so tenacious in clinging to their offices even as they struggle to fight off Death’s cold embrace? Why were the Soviet gerontocrats so loathe to let in new blood by retiring? Perhaps it was because they and their families enjoyed lives of exorbitant privilege, walled off from hoi polloi in special compounds. They had their own special apartment buildings, clinics, hospitals, sanatoria, schools for their children and shops in which they could buy luxury goods, living in a different universe from the citizenry of their land. Perhaps it was because this entire edifice of exorbitant privilege was build on a foundation of lies, corruption and theft that negated the very premise of a just and egalitarian socialist society. Or perhaps it was that the new blood would naturally have to be their own flesh and blood—their own precious children, that is, to whom would go all the cushiest jobs, except that their children weren’t turning out so well. They were unfit to serve in any capacity, being a special-bred race of overprivileged, pampered, psychopathic assholes. And so their only choice was to cling to power until death’s kiss because the alternative was the kiss of death for the entire Soviet institution—as it in fact happened.
It’s not that unusual in countries around the world for the new president to be the son of the old president. In Syria, when old al Assad died, young al Assad took his place; in North Korea, the great leader Kim Il-sung was succeeded by his equally illustrious son Kim Jong-il, who was succeeded by his grandson Kim Jong-un, who isn’t turning out to be too shabby either, what with his nuclear-tipped hypersonic missiles that can hit California (whereas the US ain’t got none). And let’s not even bring up Muḥammad bin Salmān Āl Su’ūd, who is quite a lively character too; he is there because his country is a kingdom in which his daddy is king. But that sort of family succession works well in honor-based polities; in privilege-based polities like the USSR and the USA, that just doesn’t work.
Imagine Hunter Biden strolling into the Oval Office, crack pipe in his teeth and a couple of underage Ukrainian prostitutes in tow, ready to accept lavish presents from foreign officials in exchange for huge chunks of the American pie. Imagine his crackhead buddies infesting the halls of Congress and enriching themselves through insider trading by buying defense company stocks the day before they sign huge defense contracts, then selling them the day after and pocketing the difference, then getting massive kickbacks from the defense contractors via their employees’ political campaign contributions—all perfectly legally, by the way! Imagine the State Department and the Treasury being restocked with cousins and uncles of the Ukrainian prostitutes in exchange for some very special, extra-kinky bedtime favors.
Mind you, all of these things are happening even with the old guard still in office—the giveaways of huge chunks of the American pie, the insider trading, the kickbacks, Ukrainians all over the place and all the rest—but with the difference that the old guard knows how to be secretive and cautious and how to hush things up when there are leaks, which are traits that develop with age and experience, whereas the young guard won’t know better than to flaunt their wealth and privilege, party like there is no tomorrow (which for them there probably won’t be) and very quickly burn down the house.And that’s the optimistic scenario. The pessimistic scenario, which is similar to what Gorbachev put into motion in the creaky old USSR, is a plague of reformers. The environmentalists would ban all internal combustion vehicles, all power plants and all cows (because they fart). The sound money maniacs would reintroduce the gold standard (only to discover that the Chinese and the Russians now own most of the gold). The libertarians would get rid of fire departments and just let everyone buy their own fire hoses and fire extinguishers. And the wokesters would fire all men who aren’t gay and green-light the careers of handicapped obese black trans lesbians.Now let’s combine the two: the degenerate, sociopathic scions of the old guard usher in the barking-mad reformers as a cover for their crimes. Now they’ll be burning down the house from the top even as the reformers undermine the foundation.
Gerontocracy is bad; but what’s worse is when the gerontocrats start joining the crowd invisible and are replaced by troglodytes of every stripe. The American gerontocrats are all of a single very numerous generation—the Baby Boomers—and they fit quite neatly under a bell curve. If we wish to test this hypothesis, then timing the collapse of the USA is mostly an exercise for an actuary. Perhaps Gail Tveberg the actuary would like to take a stab at it? Let’s ask her.