Time For Generational Change in the Democrat Party
Revolt against the Gerontocrats
Democrats are clearly wedded to seniority as the basis for their power. That makes the party appear as if beholden to old power to hold onto their incumbency, which is not a good look in a change election. And isn’t every election a change election nowadays? But, specifically, look at who was at the top of the ticket in 2024, until the last few months of the election of course. Never underestimate the scale of the unforced error of Joe Biden’s age in the Democrat's loss last November. Biden’s “world historic bad debate performance” led to his exiting the race — thanks, in part, to pressure by Pelosi, aged 84. As strange as it sounds, an 84-year old “Speaker Emerita” who has represented California's 11th congressional district since 1987, pressured an 82-year old President to get out of the race because of age and effectiveness. Nancy Pelosi has since blamed Biden, adding insult to injury, for not dropping out sooner.
And we have yet to have a full reckoning from and of the former President’s bodyguard of liars. His cohort of courtiers, with resumes garlanded with ivy, who preferred to preserve their place in the Presidential cosmology instead of performing their patriotic duty and informing the general public of Joe Biden’s relationship to the real world. But such a duty comes with costs, dear reader. It comes with the loss of status and prestige. For if they snitched an open primary might result and the prospects of their upwards social ascent might be impeded. And so the people that knew of the President’s frailty remained mum. Class will tell …
The administration officials who knew, up close, that the President’s “bad days” were something the voting public ought to have been made aware have largely escaped any sort of blame. They have all exited stage left, into the smoke and mirrors. Gore Vidal used to call us “The United States of Amnesia” because with all the dynamic energy that animates this 250-year old democracy, we have but the attention span of a child-nation and are easily distracted. And that is how voters, particularly irregular ones, come to the mistaken impression that the economy was better under Trump, for example.
Here we are. So officials like former National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, who delivered the PDB to Biden every morning, almost certainly knew that the President was sometimes inchoate, but said nothing. “Now that Trump has in fact won again, the scale and culpability of Biden’s blunder has to be measured,” Jeet Heer wrote in December. “That culpability belongs not just to Biden alone but also to the larger Democratic establishment and the enablers on Biden’s staff, all of whom were essential in the sickening farce of a frail, failing, and flailing man clinging to the most powerful position in the world.” They don’t seem to be losing too much sleep over it.That’s because reckoning has not yet happened (if it ever will). The inner circle of liars have not only escaped democratic scrutiny, but now, chief among them, Jake Sullivan considers it one of his core obligations to help former officials “land very well.” Charmed, I’m sure!
One needs look no further than the composition of the House and Senate leadership to see the hideous strength of the gerontocracy in action, and its enablers — the courtier staffers. Nancy Pelosi, in particular, seems quite blind to the irony of her bashing the former President on the age issue. Saikat Chakrabarti, aged 39, former chief of staff for Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, announced that he would run against Pelosi, should she seek re-election in 2026. And should Pelosi seek re-election — and she has already filed a Statement of Candidacy for the 2026 midterms — it will be her 19th term in office.
We cannot fail to add here that Nancy Pelosi is still mentally sharp, sharp enough to still have Minority Leader Jeffries’s ear. Though again it could be argued that she has too much to Hakeem Jeffries’s ear, and is influencing him to pursue a calmer and safer route — the route of septuagenarian Establishmentarians — as opposed to a raw political brawl favored by the younger and the more Progressive. But in Pelosi’s defense, again, it would be entirely disingenuous to attack Pelosi’s Establishmentarian bona fides without noting, among her hard-won victories over the years, the role she played — giving blood, sweat and literal tears — to pass ObamaCare. Millions of Americans owe her much, but because we are the United States of Amnesia, it is unlikely that she — or Obama, for that matter — will receive their full measure of thanks during their lifetimes from the working class for their contributions to better lives.
Yes, Nancy Pelosi is sharp. And this is clearly how Pelosi sees the matter — as not about chronological age, but, rather, the ability to win fights and serve effectively in office. We get it. That having been said, how is breaking a hip in Germany a signal of superlative legislative vigor? How will this affect her votes? He access to constituents? What does this signal regarding generational change? Democrat leadership in the Legislative branch is controlled entirely by septuagenarians, pure and simple. Charlie Mahtesian says in Politico in a piece called The Triumph of the Gerontocracy:
It’s true that several Democrats leapfrogged more senior members to claim posts as ranking members on key committees like Natural Resources and Agriculture. But those changes were low-hanging fruit — a matter of pushing out enfeebled or ailing members. The argument for installing Rep. Jamin Raskin (D-Md.) as the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee was likewise hard to deny. Raskin is a former constitutional law professor and one of the most dynamic voices in the Democratic Caucus. Installing the 62-year-old over 77-year-old Rep. Jerrold Nadler in the arena where some of the highest stakes battles of the next four years will take place — on issues like executive powers, immigration, abortion rights, and the independence of the Justice Department — was a no-brainer, especially since he will be going head-to-head with combative GOP Rep. Jim Jordan, the committee chairman.
Yet it’s revealing that even after the ouster of three 70-somethings from ranking spots on committees — Reps. Raul Grijalva (D-Ariz.), David Scott (D-Ga.) and Nadler — top Democrats on 10 different committees in the next Congress will be over 70 years old. Two of them are octogenarians, including 86-year-old Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.), who will be ranking member on the House Financial Services Committee.
The GOP House chairmen these Democrats will be up against aren’t exactly spring chickens. But Republicans will have half the number of 70-plus-year-olds serving in the top spot.
The average age of the House of Representatives is 58; the new Senate's median age is 64.7 years, according to Pew, down from 65.3 at the start of the 118th Congress. Further, of the 435 members of the House of Representatives only one is in their 20’s. There’s more: NJ Congressman Frank Pallone (D-6th), aged 73, serves as the ranking Democrat on Energy and Commerce. Richard Neal, at the tender age of 75, will lead Democrats on Ways and Means. Rosa DeLaurio, who serves as Ranking Member of the House Appropriations Committee, is 81. It is time for generational change in the Democrat Party leadership, particularly in this new age of social media and the attention economy, where the caution of the courtier is profoundly disadvantaged.
There is the quixotic tale of NY-14 Congresswoman Alexandra Ocasio Cortez’s thwarted quest for the House Oversight Committee Chairmanship. So much of this battle to update the Democrat party involves the AOC-versus-Pelosi behind the scenes battler. The Congresswoman had made a very strong case for her Chairmanship of the House Oversight Committee, a particularly powerful gig, considering the amount of corruption that follows Trump. AOC gets social media (3.5m TikTok followers); she is Progressive; she is attractive. "In the 119th Congress, Oversight Committee Democrats will face an important task: we must balance our focus on the incoming president's corrosive actions and corruption with a tangible fight to make life easier for America's working class," she wrote in a letter to colleagues in December. It came, of course, to naught.
At age 35, AOC would have been the youngest committee leader in the House, a vivifying message to the young, with whom Trump has made ominous inroads. But old power, as it often does, thwarts the ambitions of the young. It is a story as old as the Shakespearean succession of kings, or, even older, to the way our ancestors the great apes rule one another. 74-year old Gerry Connolly defeated 35-year old Ocasio-Cortez, by a 131-84 margin. The margin, age-wise, between the two was 39 years (Or, interestingly enough: the age of Vice President JD Vance). “Of course, Connolly would not be elected if it was not for 84-year-old Nancy Pelosi whipping votes from her hospital bed in Luxembourg after she fell and broke her hip at a Battle of the Bulge anniversary (an event she was alive for),” acidly notes Gabriel Schmick, Opinions editor at the Clark University student newspaper, The Scarlet.
This young man clearly has a future in political punditry.
“On a rainy night in early April, Elon Musk brought his young son X Æ A-12 — whom everyone calls X — to the Lobster Club for a party for a PBS documentary screening. ‘The younger Musk wandered around the restaurant wearing a Tesla shirt,’ while his father schmoozed with guests, the New York Times reported, under a headline that read ‘Partying on a Tuesday With Elon Musk and His 3-Year-Old.’ The photos from the party show a cheerful Musk leaning in to chat with the film’s executive producer Kathryn Murdoch. Had Tesla shares tumbled after disastrous first-quarter results? Did the market-research firm Caliber say the day before that the Tesla CEO’s right-wing rants and public feuds were likely ‘contributing to the reputational downfall’ of the brand, hurting sales? Yes, it had. But how adorable did Lil X, as his father has also called him, look in that photo? The message, intentional or otherwise, was clear: This was not the erratic, share-tanking shitposter you’ve heard about, but a cuddly dad who has it all. Nor was it the first time that X, Musk’s eldest son with the singer Grimes, had been carted around the way children his age might clutch a stuffie. What’s weird is how little flak Musk gets for this behavior, which often gets chalked up to charming eccentricity, Musk being Musk.” (Irin Carmon/NYMag)
“Russell Vought is that wispy Little Man. And his first order of business as Director of the Office of Management and Budget was demolishing protections for financial service consumers. If you’ve never heard of this man, don’t feel bad. He’s been floating around Washington for a very long time, barely visible, like a transparent sea worm. (More about him later in this week’s edition of Freak of the Week.) He’s a conspicuously sanctimonious right-wing tool, the author of parts of Project 2025. And last week he was confirmed to his enormously powerful position over the strenuous but ultimately ineffectual objections of Senate Democrats. The OMB director is the President’s budget-maker and budget-enforcer, empowered to ensure the myriad agencies are spending money in line with the President’s goals. If you had that job, would your to-do list maybe start with the biggest and most corruption-eaten budget in American (and maybe human) history, the $900 billion Defense budget? No. Vought’s first order of business was to dismantle a small agency with a truly noble purpose: to protect financial service consumers from predatory lenders, credit card grifters, mortgage sharks, and other financial miscreants.” (Nina Burleigh/American Freakshow)
“The other day, JD Vance sought to reconcile President Donald Trump’s ‘America First’ vision with the tenets of Christianity. Vance argued for a ‘Christian concept’ that orders our ethical obligations in a series of concentric circles, starting with love of family, then out to love of neighbor, then to community and nation, and only then out to the rest of the world. Vance claimed the left has ‘inverted that,’ casting Trumpism as more faithful to the allegedly Christian notion he’d outlined, because it puts ‘American citizens first.’ This was sharply criticized online, leading Vance to defend it by citing the concept of ‘ordo amoris.’ That means ‘order of love’: Even if we are called upon to love all people, the practical limitations on the help we can offer others directs us to prioritize aid to those nearest to us. Now another authority of sorts has weighed in on Vance’s defense of Trumpism: Pope Francis. In a remarkable letter, Pope Francis condemned the Trump administration over ‘mass deportations’ and even indirectly criticized Vance’s use of ordo amoris to defend Trumpist nationalism. I am not qualified to judge this as a theological dispute. However, godless secular liberals can learn a lot from this argument, because it exposes some ugly truths about ‘America First’ Trumpism—and about the high-minded-sounding justifications that Vance is using to paper them over. In his response, Pope Francis recognizes that nations and communities must defend themselves from serious or violent criminal migrants. But he condemns the broad conflation of undocumented status with ‘criminality,’ a clear rebuke of Trumpists who tar all migrants who illegally cross our borders as criminals by definition.” (Greg Sargent/TNR)