Death, a necessary end, will come when it will come. So said Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, shortly before learning it was coming for him much quicker than he must have hoped. That tells us something funny about the human condition. Each of us knows the end is inevitable and very near indeed. Dust to dust for everyone from Caesar to Toby Belch. Each of us is hanging on a little longer, pleading “not today.”
In his daring new book Gerontocracy, Yale Professor Samuel Moyn describes how America has made “not today” into a creedal doctrine. The typical refrain is that Americans fail to respect aging, seeing it as repulsively unfair. They push off the visible signs and junctures of aging as long as possible. This has reached such a fever pitch that a growing chorus of utopians peddle the eternal grift of eternal youth for themselves and the enlightened. Moyn echoes many of these complaints but adds a more subtle one to them. Americans do indeed resent aging and fight against it. But the major consequence has not, by and large, been a failure to treat the old with dignity and grace (although he acknowledges that happens a lot). Instead, the ethos of endlessly fighting the inevitable has manifested itself as a society where the old refuse to give up their accumulated power, money, position, and privilege.
For all with eyes to see, the result is easy to observe: we are ruled by a legion of septa- and octogenarians who are often, literally, asleep on the job…Moyn thinks that the struggle against gerontocracy is the major, though often invisible, clash of our time.
For all with eyes to see, the result is easy to observe: we are ruled by a legion of septa- and octogenarians who are often, literally, asleep on the job while captaining the ship of state. Bereft of new ideas and selfishly hoarding a future that they resent will ultimately belong to others, Moyn thinks that the struggle against gerontocracy is the major, though often invisible, clash of our time.
Never Trust Anyone Over 65
Moyn theorizes that the modern world was created by a revolt against gerontocracy, with liberals and socialists often framing their clash with the anciens régimes as simultaneously a struggle against ancient people:
The revolt against gerontocracy made the modern world. The very idea of progress implies a turn against ancestor worship and those aged elites who prize continuity over change. From its start, the United States has been associated with the revolt against gerontocracy—for some observers, the new nation even epitomized it. ‘The youth of America is their oldest tradition,’ Oscar Wilde has a character quip, capturing a deep truth with his witticism, as he so often did. The country’s founding did have conservative and even gerontocratic aspects, but Wilde’s truth is so pivotal as to make it all the more puzzling that the elderly have come back to power in American society of all places.
And yet come back they have. Moyn points out that the symptoms are everywhere. For the past 15 years, America hasn’t seen a President under 70. Kamala Harris, 59 when she ran for the big office, was only able to present herself as the “youthful” candidate of generational change because things had gotten so extreme. Congress is saturated with aged politicians.
For the past 15 years, America hasn’t seen a President under 70.
Texas Representative Kay Granger stayed on until age 81, before disappearing into a nursing home until her term was done. Rep. David Scott, aged 80, died in April 2026 “in the midst of running for reelection for what would have been his 13th consecutive term.” All this despite not having given a speech on the House floor since 2023. Following his death, Slate ran a headline, “You’re Not Imagining It: More Lawmakers Really Are Dying in Office,” marshalling evidence to support that reality. Moyn, for his part, notes that:
While half of Americans are under forty, only one in twenty in Congress is. Almost 120 are seventy or older, and 16 are over eighty. Out of 435 members in the last House of Representatives, only 1 was born in the 1990s, and 64 in the 1980s. In the current House, there is 1 member under thirty, and just 37 under forty; by comparison, that is only 10 more than the number of congressmen named Michael—including Speaker of the House Mike Johnson.
Politics is hardly the only gerontocratic sphere. Undercutting the image of the wealthy as youthful, innovative entrepreneurs, Moyn points out that most rich people are very old. The “pay gap between those over fifty-five and those under thirty-five, however justifiable at the start, has increased by 61 percent between 1979 and 2018. America has the highest amount of wage inequality due to age.” Moreover, older people are staying at these high-quality jobs longer, and when they finally do head for the door, younger people don’t get the same perky career benefits. What were once good jobs get the full neoliberal “flexibility” treatment. Corporate leaders and entrepreneurs are also graying—the “Harvard Business Review concluded in 2018 that American entrepreneurs founded their startups at forty-two on average.” This wealth is then carefully shielded from taxation. All the while, advocacy groups and powerful elderly voting blocs make sure that the minimal welfare state that they largely refuse to fund nonetheless caters primarily to their needs.
Making sure not to let his own profession off the hook, Moyn also turns to academia. Long reviled and caricatured by conservatives as a bastion of youthful, postmodern, meta, neo-cultural race Marxism, Moyn observes that when it comes to their domain, academics are stodgy conservatives who would make Mitch McConnell proud. In 1977, “the number of faculty in their thirties at four-year institutions of higher learning had been about 20 percent. By 1996, it was about 15 percent. Meanwhile, the number of faculty in their sixties shot up correspondingly, with those from sixty to sixty-nine doubling their representation.” The results, according to Moyn, are that faculty are increasingly disconnected from new ideas and that students do not benefit from energetic, contemporary teaching. The result has also been devastating for younger faculty, who are denied opportunities to pursue permanent jobs by very senior academics who remain glued to their (well) endowed chairs and perks. Academia, however much its members may be personally liberal, is consequently a very conservative place.
The “Socialist Way of Aging”
Gerontocracy is as much a symptom of America’s socio-economic system as anything else.
Moyn is an unusually empathetic and typically gentle writer, which is why I was a bit surprised that Gerontocracy is, without a doubt, his angriest book. He is unusually willing to describe the elder grip on power as a symptom of fabulist selfishness on their part—an unwillingness to admit you had your time and it is now the next generation’s turn. But he’s also sensitive enough to understand that these pathologies don’t come out of nowhere. Gerontocracy is as much a symptom of America’s socio-economic system as anything else. He points out how the exposé on the brutal quality of senior living during the COVID pandemic highlighted to many of those getting on in years the stark costs of not keeping wealth and power in their hands. Those costs can potentially mean decades-long winter years of loneliness, irrelevance, terrible healthcare, bad food, and Bingo 5 nights a week.
Moyn proposes that what we need is a “socialist way of aging,” one that offers the elderly major benefits in return for surrendering their senescent grip on society. Retirement should be made more pleasant and lovable for everyone, and the stigma around ceasing to work ought to end. Moyn points out that since the advent of neoliberalism, beacons of capitalism like The Economist have increasingly questioned whether anyone’s “productive” years ever fully, or truly, end.
Moyn proposes that what we need is a “socialist way of aging,” one that offers the elderly major benefits in return for surrendering their senescent grip on society.
Healthcare ought to be provided at a very high level for seniors (and one suspects Moyn thinks for everyone). He even speculates about establishing a series of experimental villages and municipalities that would help the aging maintain autonomy in a dignified way. Moyn references Oslo’s state-established town Carpe Diem for those “with too many senior moments,” which helps even the very old maintain some independence of lifestyle when the end is very near.
Beyond Gerontocracy’s Temptation
Moyn is under no illusions that this will solve all problems. Even aging with dignity still brings with it the terror of death and potential oblivion. Citing the philosopher Thomas Nagel, Moyn speculates about whether the prospect of aging and dying could ever be a positive one. Nagle thought death could probably never be a good thing since death was the foreclosure of every good a human being could acquire. The suffering of death was not the issue so much as this removal of all possibilities of thriving. Moyn is more circumspect. He cites Jonathan Swift’s famous parable of Gulliver encountering the Struldbruggs—those marked from birth to live forever. At first, Gulliver is awed by what seem like Gods, until he is informed that most residents of Luggnagg pity the Struldbruggs. As they age, see their friends and family die, and exhaust themselves, they eventually lose all appetite for existence.
I was also reminded of socialist thinker Martin Hagglund’s deep ruminations on mortality in This Life. Hagglund mused that there would be nothing wrong with extending life further, provided it was fulfilling. But eternal life would inevitably mean all human possibilities were used up, and there would still be an infinite sequence of time left. Hagglund echoes Wittgenstein in viewing death as what gives our life form and texture through the forcible and often-resented imposition of finitude. Without it, we would lose our identity as ourselves; each person running the circuit of all possible modes of life and ceasing to be anything in particular.
I am dwelling on these existential themes because Gerontocracy is, wisely, saturated with them. Moyn has always been an unusually deep social critic, and he is well aware that much of what he writes about is natal to the human condition. He even brings himself into the equation, mentioning that, being in his mid-50s, much of what Moyn is writing about will shortly apply to him. He would hardly be the first intellectual of note to struggle against the spirit of the age and aging. Millennia ago, Cicero—something of the villain of Moyn’s book—was writing manuals about how the sun ought never set on the Roman statesman’s golden years. The temptation to gerontocracy will always be with us, because the instinct for revanchism, for not letting go of what no one will hold forever, is one way to stave off the dread of impotence in the face of annihilation.
The temptation to gerontocracy will always be with us…
Writing this review, I was struck by some generational reflections. For a long time, Millennials got used, as all generations do, to being characterized as the upstart youth. The last time I can remember that happening was at the outset of the COVID pandemic, when I saw a bunch of articles about how Millennial “college” kids were chumming around on the beach and refusing to abide by lockdowns. Even then, my friends and I used to chuckle over that, since we were already in the phase of life where rent eating up half our income was the major issue—not beach closures. We are now well past that. I am 38 years old, and for the first time this year felt genuinely, physically tired at the end of a long semester. As was said, death comes for us all. I have been struck when going to conferences, talks, etc., and encountering plenty of people who are significantly younger than I am. Not too long ago, I was on a podcast with two younger Zoomers who, in a slightly shy tone, mentioned that they had been reading me since “early high school.”
Moyn’s book made me ponder some of these experiences, along with being middle-aged. One consequence is not so much being able to see both sides as being tugged in many directions. There is a part of me that vividly remembers having to work several part-time jobs during my PhD just to make ends meet, working as a landscaper and cashier simultaneously while writing my first book. I will rarely forget the hot irritation I felt when older professionals told me I would be better off dropping those “side” gigs to focus on building out my CV—as though being able to pay for the single room I rented was some kind of luxury. At the same time, I now better understand the feeling of weariness that age brings; not just a physical decline but the pronounced feelings of memory being a heavy thing, which hope can no longer unburden. This feeds instinctively into a yearning to recover what is intensely understood to be slipping away; to deny the obvious by raging against the reality of decline.
I do not resent the gerontocrats. I even feel for them. But I echo Moyn in calling for them to realize that their human, all too human response to mortality is hurting the world around them.
All that is to say, I do not resent the gerontocrats. I even feel for them. But I echo Moyn in calling for them to realize that their human, all too human response to mortality is hurting the world around them. In the long run, their legacy is what will remain of them. And right now, the legacy they will pass on is not a good one. We ought to build a better world for them to ponder while enjoying some well-earned security and warmth.
Matt McManus is an Assistant Professor at Spelman College. He is the author of The Rise of Post-Modern Conservatism and The Political Theory of Liberal Socialism, amongst other books.
Image made using “Capitol Building,” by Gareth Milner licensed under CC BY 2.0. All other images used are in the public domain.
