How about a little age diversity in politics?
Andrew Cohen SUNDAY OP-ED Andrew Cohen is a journalist, professor and author of Two Days in June: John F. Kennedy and the 48 Hours That Made History. This originally appeared in the Ottawa Citizen.
Say what you will about Donald Trump, he’s giving old age new life. Seniors everywhere should rejoice.
Trump will be 72 in June. He is the oldest elected president in the history of the United States. (Ronald Reagan was a stripling of 69 when he took office in 1981.)
Trump represents the opposite of a youth movement; in a manner of speaking, his presidency is a senior moment. But age is not his claim alone. In 2018, age defines America’s political class, and does not necessarily mean wisdom, experience or prudence.
Hillary Clinton was 69 on election day. Sen. Bernie Sanders, who was alive when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, was 75. Former vice-president Joe Biden was 75 when he left office in 2017.
Clinton isn’t running again in 2020, but Biden and Sanders might.
No one can accuse other leading Democrats of youth. Elizabeth Warren will be 71 in 2020. Sen. Tim Kaine will be 62. Oprah Winfrey will be 66.
The Democratic leadership in Congress is old: House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi is 77 and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer is 67. Neither has presidential ambitions, but they want to run Congress, which is why Pelosi, in particular, is running in November’s midterm elections. She wants to be Speaker again.
Republican Mitch McConnell, the Senator majority leader, will be 76 in February.
Trump is comfortable with his contemporaries. John Kelly, his chief of staff, is 67. Attorney General Jeff Sessions is 71. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross is 80. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson is 65.
Trump’s cabinet of plutocrats is said to the wealthiest ever named. With an average age of 62, these are the golden agers of the new Gilded Age.
Of course, age is no guarantee of anything. Nor is youth. John F. Kennedy was the youngest elected president in history, an avatar of generational change after the greying or ailing Dwight Eisenhower, Harry Truman and Franklin Roosevelt. Lyndon Johnson called him “the boy.” JFK was decades younger than contemporary world leaders Nikita Khrushchev, Charles de Gaulle and Harold Macmillan.
JFK had a disastrous first year but become a successful, beloved president. He was fresh and innovative (the space program, the Peace Corps), with a capacity to learn.
Trump, leading a gerontocracy, has also had a disastrous first year. He is historically unpopular and shows no capacity to learn.
In Canada, it is a government of the young. Justin Trudeau is 46, and many ministers and staff are his age. His youngest minister is 30 and recently gave birth. His elders — Ralph Goodale, Marc Garneau, Jim Carr — are also among the best of his ministers (even if Stephane Dion, who was dropped, was one of the worst).
As age rules Trump’s America, youth rocks Trudeau’s Canada. Irresistibly, Trudeau is Minister of Youth; novelty and youth are his brand, trumpeted endlessly on social media. A variation on his father’s dictum in 1968, he wants “new guys (and gals) with new ideas.”
The rap against his government is it’s ageist. Partisans and authorities over 50 seem unwelcome. A youthful minister told me: “I just wish the baby-boomers would get out of the way.”
The problem is they aren’t, at least not demographically. Canada’s median age is 40, but the number of those over 65 is sharply increasing. These people outnumber Canadians under 14 for the first time, and seniors are more likely to vote than young people.
Still, youth defines this government. Young ministers are free to make mistakes, and they do. Often it’s because no one of political experience and institutional memory — read: age — is there to step in.
Trump’s America and Trudeau’s Canada turn conventional wisdom on its head. Trump’s sexagenarians and septuagenarians aren’t always prudent or cautious; Trudeau’s young titans are not always daring or innovative. In electoral reform, for example, they’re pretty conservative.
As one government needs new blood, the other needs some grey matter.