Are the Elderly Holding America Back? 

“In America today, age is the modality in which class is lived,” writes Samuel Moyn, the Yale University professor of law and history, in his new book, Gerontocracy in America. As he acknowledges, the phrase is a riff on Marxist cultural theorist Stuart Hall’s famous statement that class is lived through race. The repurposing is pithy and striking—though it’s also quietly evasive. Is Moyn saying that age is another modality through which class is lived? Or is he saying that age has superseded race and other factors as the mode in which class is lived? If he is borrowing an important analysis of white supremacy for his analysis of gerontocracy, then doesn’t he have an obligation to make the relationship between the two clear, rather than simply rhetorically gesturing to Hall’s authority—especially now, as Donald Trump’s Republican Party attempts to reverse the Civil Rights gains of the 1960s, and of the 1860s as well?  

Moyn, who has been celebrated by some leftists for his scathing critiques of liberalism, never really confronts these questions. That’s because while Gerontocracy in America draws arguments and framing from the long-standing and ongoing American fight for multi-racial democracy, its heart is elsewhere. Moyn believes that certain people are entitled to more rights than others; his argument is not a call for equality for all but rather a demand to restore a natural order that he believes science and modernity have usurped. As a result, though the book claims to stand on the side of youth and progress, it often seems oddly conservative—and oddly disconnected from our current crises. 

Specifically, Moyn argues that the crisis engulfing us is not a long-simmering fascist backlash, but a demographic time bomb caused by extended life spans. The infamously dour 18^th century English economist Thomas Malthus worried that a growing population would outrun the food supply. Moyn, instead, argues that improved health care has “lengthened our years and increased the proportion of elders in our society, eventually and unintentionally empowering a caste that has slowed progress.”  

Older people, Moyn says, have long enjoyed reverence and the financial advantages of age: higher salaries, accumulated wealth. But now that people regularly live into their 70s and 80s, he argues, they can hoard ever more money and status. Older people are also, he argues, more conservative, more focused on keeping what they have than on pursuing change. “The most inspiring project of modernity itself [is] under threat,” he warns, painting a gothic picture of a world in which “societies are increasingly built around caretaking and compassion.” 

The idea that caretaking and compassion have gone too far reads as tone deaf at best and as grossly reactionary at worst in Trump’s America. Still, beneath the confused rationale, Moyn does identify real generational inequities and policy failures tied to the outsized power of older people. 

Housing is one striking example. The “average age of the median homebuyer leaped from barely thirty in 1981 to fifty-three in 2022,” Moyn points out. Young people struggle to afford new homes in part because educational costs have skyrocketed in recent decades (an issue Moyn oddly doesn’t discuss) and in part because older homeowners organize relentlessly to prevent new builds. Moyn cites a Massachusetts study that found speakers at town meetings were overwhelmingly over 50, even though the average age of the population was 30. These entrenched, older homeowners often embrace NIMBY politics, preventing construction and leaving young people unable to buy or even rent near where they work. 

Moyn also singles out capital gains and inheritance taxes, which are tilted to let older people hoard wealth. He also points to a weak safety net and health care system, which exacerbates often severe inequality among the elderly themselves. Medicare does not cover long-term care, so older people can live in fear of being unable to afford the resources they need to age with dignity. Hoarding becomes a rational response to a state that refuses to take collective responsibility for its people’s health. 

When it comes to national political power, though, Moyn’s case is less convincing. For example, he argues that gerrymandering allows established legislators to draw maps favoring incumbents, giving power to those with seniority and, therefore, age. But he completely ignores the fact that Southern states are not redrawing their maps to disenfranchise young people. They’re redrawing maps to disenfranchise Black people—and to retire Black congressmembers of every age forcefully.  

Similarly, Moyn argues that the U.S. Senate is a bastion of gerontocratic privilege, and approvingly cites The New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie, who has forcefully argued that the Senate is unrepresentative and undemocratic. But Moyn ignores the fact that Bouie does not primarily excoriate the Senate for being old. Bouie excoriates it for amplifying the power of small, mostly white states at the expense of larger, more diverse ones.  

Bouie’s argument is also a partisan one—it is Republicans, an increasingly fascist party, who benefit from the white supremacist status quo. Moyn—who has downplayed the threat of Trump in the past—tends to treat Biden and Trump as equivalent examples of gerontocracy, rather than acknowledging that the GOP’s partisan project uses every antidemocratic lever available, including many of those which Moyn identifies as hardening gerontocracy.  

Moyn does occasionally mention racial injustices; he notes (correctly) that younger generations in the U.S. are more diverse, and that this has supercharged generational resentment and antipathy to the idea of younger people gaining power. But his efforts to overwrite racism with ageism, and his discomfort with partisan realities, are telling. They suggest that, despite a couple of mentions of intersectionality, Moyn is not working in the register of racial justice, disability justice, LGBT rights, or multi-racial democracy. In the middle of a fascist crisis, Moyn’s book is not really anti-fascist 

Instead, Moyn’s argument is, at its core, an appeal to a natural, quasi-religious notion of social order. Older people, he insists, should not have power because younger people are less conservative, more vital, and are in the political and social vanguard of history. He approvingly cites “neoliberal economist” Tyler Cowen’s worry that Americans have “stopped creating” alongside right-wing Ross Douthat’s concerns about the U.S. becoming a “decadent society.”  

Yes, these are conservative voices—and the idea of “decadence,” with its echoes of Nazi rhetoric directed at Jews and queer people, is particularly disturbing in this context. But Moyn insists that “A liberal or radical politics that does not put creativity in our prime at its center and core has lost its way.” Older people, he insists, aren’t invested in the future, since they know they will die soon. (Has he ever met a grandparent?) Instead, the elderly should “cede the stage to others” so we can embrace “a collective aspiration to social movement and progress.” 

In pursuit of these ideas, Moyn proposes policies aimed at limiting older adults to their proper role and sphere. He suggests reinstituting mandatory retirement ages in many professions, including political office. He suggests (rightly in my view) that we should lower the voting age. But he also argues that the elderly should be denied the vote after a certain age—or, less harshly, that their votes should be weighted to matter less. He flirts with suggesting that older people should have certain kinds of health care rationed or restricted. And the Yale professor justifies these measures not just to align society with his vigorous, progressive vision, but as a kindness to the elderly, who he believes must learn to accept limits and to age more gracefully. Doubtless, they’ll be touched.  

Moyn acknowledges that critics have associated some of these views—unfairly, he believes—with eugenics. But after raising that specter, he does little to dispel it. If you believe that vigorous people are more progressive and more valuable, where does that leave those with disabilities? If you argue that those near the end of life should be eased out of jobs and office, does that mean we should force Black people to retire earlier, since their life expectancies (as Moyn notes) are shorter because of systemic racism? Do we really want to open the door to manipulating vote weights based on identity, given the historical three-fifths compromise and the current white supremacist attacks on voting rights? 

Just because you can see a slippery slope in front of you doesn’t mean you have to slide down it, of course. But Moyn seems oblivious to the downsides of declaring one group inconvenient, decadent, and retrograde.  

And sometimes he seems all too ready to get on the slide himself. In a brief, nervous aside about COVID-19, Moyn claims that “Keeping the oldest alive was certainly prioritized—and perhaps over-prioritized”—a shocking statement given the fact that (as he says in the same paragraph!) over 300,000 Americans over 85 died during the height of the Covid pandemic.  

Moyn does not acknowledge how the Trump administration justified its own inaction by repeatedly insisting (falsely) that COVID-19 only really killed old people or those with preexisting conditions, and therefore many public health measures were unnecessary.  Nor does he mention some on the right’s suggestion that grandparents and the elderly should be willing to die to end lockdowns and improve the economy—rhetoric that dovetails chillingly with Moyn’s argument that old people (and the disabled) need to move out of the way for the good of progress. Nor does he mention current Health and Human Services secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr and his horrific efforts to delegitimize vaccines, not least the Covid vaccine developed under Trump himself. Neoliberal realists and left vanguardists can, it seems, agree that the weak are dead weight. 

Certainly, many of Moyn’s suggestions—ending gerrymandering, campaign finance reform, higher taxes on the wealthy, more housing, and addressing the long-term care needs of the elderly—could help us get to a brighter future. But such policies need to be grounded in universal benefits and a rejection of hierarchies of human worth, and an honest analysis of who the current fascist movement is targeting and how Moyn’s failure to engage with race and disability, and his refusal to assign Republican blame, make Gerontocracy in America feel divorced from our current moment and needs. It is not a book that will age well.