The issue is not electing people... it's re-election advantage. Incumbent candidates rarely lose, especially in Congress... and power is addicting. This leads to the current situation where U.S. Congress median age is pretty far on the cognitive decline curve - https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/01/30/house-get... . I think there were multiple issues that took down USSR, but aging leadership with inflexible thinking that was not capable of keeping up with times was probably complicit in most of them.
> The issue is not electing people... it's re-election advantage.
The fix for that isn't age limits, it's term limits. Which would also help with many other issues that are caused by politics being a lucrative career.
After seeing how term limits work in the California state legislature, I stopped being a fan of them.
The first (small) problem is that it caused unneeded intra-party drama. Effective assembly members would end up forced to seek a "promotion" into the state senate if they wanted to stay in politics. This often meant challenging members of the same party. This ends with people constantly fighting their "allies" to scramble up the greased pole, rather than doing more useful work.
Of course, that can happen even without term limits (politicians are the ambitious sort) but they definitely accelerate the effect.
The worse problem is that all of the legislators are now short-timers. But do you know who aren't newbs? The lobbyists! Since they're now the only ones around with deep experience, they invariably get even more involved with crafting laws.
This actually dove-tails into the other problem with the lobbying industry: the revolving door from legislator to the lobbying firm. Even without term limits this happens all of the time. It's very common for a retiring US House member to immediately get a lucrative job lobbying their former colleagues. However in a term-limited legislative body this only gets worse. Not only do lobbyists become more powerful, but term limits provide a guaranteed flow of politicians needing a new job.
So, if you find yourself as a newly-elected politician in such a system and you actually want to make a difference, probably your best bet is to immediately find some lobbyists to get sweet with. They are the only ones with the experience to make the political machinery work, and they're probably your future employer as well.
So at least in my observation, the ultimate effect of term-limits is to transfer power from democratically elected representatives to well-funded special interests. By un-entrenching the politicians you're accidentally making another group even more entrenched.
By contrast, I think the very top legislators are ones that become a true expert in their field of interest. Imagine somebody who has been working on, say, education policy for decades. They know every policy detail, all of the stakeholders, all of the experts. In a world of term limits, how will such a person ever emerge?
All of the above is specifically about legislative term limits. I believe the case for executive term limits is much stronger.
> all of the legislators are now short-timers. But do you know who aren't newbs? The lobbyists!
Sounds like a reason to outlaw lobbying.
> I think the very top legislators are ones that become a true expert in their field of interest.
They're not actual experts in the actual field. They're experts in working the system to favor partisans of the field. Not the same thing.
An actual expert in an actual non-political field would be doing productive work in that field. The real root problem is that we expect politicians to be "experts" in anything other than making sure the government does the limited things it's supposed to do, and nothing else--we want to use the government as a tool to solve whatever problems we see, instead of as an umpire whose sole job should be protecting everyone's basic rights and stopping there.
If someone is doing a good job why wouldn’t we want to keep them around? If a 30 year old is elected to congress I don’t see why they couldn’t serve for 40 years if they are competent.
The problem comes when that now 70 year old is supposed to foster an urgent and relevant response to problems of the current 30 year old generation. They may be a well respected leader with an impeccable service record, but how can they possibly be effective when they don’t know how to use a smartphone or think cookies refer to the things they in the jar in the kitchen, or think AI is that thing that calls you Dave?
Right. For that matter it would be nice if we had decent tools for gauging all of activity, competence, attendance record, record of inserting garbage into bills, sponsoring useful bills, defending bills against garbage, etc.
As far as I know voting record is reasonably available BUT bills are mostly not single issue and are very convoluted so that for any given bill it can be hard to tell whether you would have voted for or against.
Part of the issue is that you haven't shown the 30 year old to be competent when s/he stood for the first election. (Now I think of it, you haven't shown a 70 year old to be incompetent, but that's another issue.)
If you have rules that are not based in competency, but on a simple feeling you have that group of people X, are not competent to do job Y. That's just not going to go well for you. Age minimums as conceived by the founders, for instance, were based in competence. A desire for people to have experience. Even then, they were not draconian. As evidenced by the fact that someone 35 years old could be President of the US.
If you were arguing in favor of competency testing, people might get behind you. But you're arguing in favor of a blanket ban. Which is another matter entirely.
> If someone is doing a good job why wouldn’t we want to keep them around?
Because they won't keep doing a good job. The longer a politician stays in office, the more they are corrupted. The only solution is to keep them from staying in office too long.
> Congressional politics is closer to a complex game than a cognitive exercise. A game that is only learned and won with experience.
None of that means the game actually accomplishes what government is supposed to accomplish. The actual result of the game is a huge bloated bureaucratic government that (a) does a poor job of what it is supposed to be doing, protecting everyone's basic rights, and (b) also does a poor job at all the other stuff that gets piled on top by legislators looking to make a mark and get re-elected and having to pander to special interests to do it.
As the saying goes: if it isn't worth doing, it isn't worth doing well.
Was this response supposed to be relevant to the age question under discussion? Because that was the context of my response.
Second, my response both implies that the game and the government are indistinguishable and that what it is supposed to accomplish is as much a question that comes with experience as is the knowledge of how to play.
The output of a system is always its purpose, which is an upscaled cognate to the maxim that there are no mistakes in politics. The key to overcoming cognitive dissonance is to understand that this may not align with your perception of that purpose nor your perceived interests. Such is Life.
The evidence is that the current crop aren't doing a good job though; and despite that they have shown remarkable staying power. The last 50 years of political leadership have led to ... vast amounts of capital being built in China, Trump leading in the polls [0] and while civil war looks unlikely it is an option that comes up from time to time in the discourse. Happily the US population has had lots of practice from a series of disastrous foreign expeditions that may have achieved nothing (or the achievements are too unpolitic to talk about, maybe). The US Congress has a lot of trouble pointing out the genuine wins they have presided over if their popularity polling is a guide.
The 2-term limit on presidents seemed to do great things, more limits on the congress is probably a good idea. There are 333 million people in the US, even if the candidates are drawn from the top 10,000 instead of the top 1,000 the results would be good in practice.
[0] Love him or hate him, symbolically the man isn't an endorsement of the status quo.
I honestly don't understand? Clearly the problem is incumbency, why are we going after age? It doesn't make much sense.
The law is clearly unconstitutional and would be overturned without a change to that document. And a change to that document won't happen.
But we can make laws to diminish the power of incumbency that would be in complete compliance with all constitutional parameters. I'm not even talking about the constitutionally questionable things like term limits. (Which, clearly, we could also try since people don't care about the constitutionality of the laws apparently.) I mean, why wouldn't we?
Why are we nibbling around the edges? Let's go for the jugular.
there’s a different between a 40 year old wanting to serve 20 more years and a 70 year old doing the same
No there isn't.
Both these people will put your society into a world of hurt. They want to serve 20 years. I can guarantee that ain't for the benefit of the poor and downtrodden, any more than the district they draw up for themselves to achieve their dream is for the benefit of its constituency.
Age is a problem and it’s not ageist to say so. What we’re talking about here is not a world where a 24 and a 56 year old cannot both play on the same ball team. We’re talking about elderly people. Your grandparents. I love the grandparents of mine that are still alive but my god are they nowhere near fit to lead a freaking country. One still uses the term “the gays”, one is losing their coherence in small ways, one has serious health problems which are the dominating factor in his daily routine. Seriously. I’m not saying you’re subhuman scum if you’re old. I’m saying maybe you’re past the point of political effectiveness and relevancy.
If you’re old enough to retire and collect old person benefits you are no longer fit to lead not because you are might be incapable but because you are simply not generationally relevant. The office of president has term limits for effectively the same reason and nobody calls those insane.
We should not strive to be ruled by wise elders. I am not arguing that there is no place for respect or that old people can’t have great influence and utility. Just that they shouldn’t be on the field playing ball.
Term limits on the presidency have nothing to do with age. You could be 35, serve two terms, and you’d still be banned from being president again … at age 43.
It’s not. Nobody is saying old people are subhuman scum who shouldn’t be treated kindly and with respect. The argument is that after a certain point you may not have a lived experience that is relevant anymore for being an effective political leader. The same way we wouldn’t put two 80 year olds in the cockpit of a commercial aircraft… the risk there is obvious and clear.
That's not really weird at all. It's enough time to gain some experience and wisdom in the world before being endowed as Commander in Chief of the most powerful military on earth.
A maximum age is dumb though. There really is no telling what developments in tech will lead to in terms of human lifespan.
I'm more concerned with people staying in politics for too long. Yes if someone entered Congress at 25 they should certainly be gone by 45, but if they started at 65 I see no reason to boot them out based on some arbitrary age restriction.
Are we each so important that we need to extend our life with technology, beyond the low-tech solutions of exercise, sleep, nutrition (can get enough exercise just meeting this need), warmth, purpose, and love?
What is the role of culture and generational bonds in all this?
It’s not just okay, it is necessary. Otherwise, old ideas won’t die and give room for new ideas to grow, like a forest burning so that the saplings can get sun.
There is already precedent of careers in aviation having required retirement ages. In areas with high stakes, it is not unreasonable to have age limits.
It’s a mix of issues with both incumbency and health episodes that come with old age.
In practice the legislatures do not sufficiently police the health of their members and remove them if they are in poor health and unfit to serve; and four to six years can be quite a long time for health issues to emerge.
It's not the legislature's job to do so. It's the people's job to do so. The House has 2 year terms and the Senate has 6 year terms.
But there are people that are plenty sharp well into their 80s, 90s. Benjamin Franklin was in office until he was 82. You look at someone like Warren Buffett as a more famous example of someone that is plenty sharp well into their 80s.
People age at different rates, and there's really no telling what sort of advances in medicine might improve this and extend life and healthspan by decades.
The problem is that you can be perfectly healthy in year 1 and have severe cognitive decline by year 3, and voters can't really do anything about that.
as a general rule, right now states have no constitutional authority to institute recall elections for federal offices like Congress, so the only way to delegate that kind of authority would be for the current Congress to vote that into existence.
Yet one of the most corrupt first world democracies has them while most of the much less corrupt democracies doesn't have it. Maybe it is needed due to corruption, but it doesn't seem to be necessary.
I don't know a single person who wanted Biden as the democrat candidate. He only won because the other dudes on the ballot are some nobodys that nobody knows. Do you even know who they are without looking? It's almost like it's rigged from the inside with some nobodys just so that Biden wins.
An anecdote is not evidence, neither is the failure of you and your friends to research people in the primary evidence of a grand conspiracy. Complaining about Biden specifically in an incumbent year really feels like a bad faith argument.
Biden and Trump are probably the worst examples for the point you’re trying to make. There’s no Democrat that polls better against Trump than Biden. Biden beat Kamala Harris (who had Obama’s team behind her), Elizabeth Warren (the choice of affluent white professionals), and Bernie Sanders (the choice of progressives) because he had the support of the party’s critical black voters and moderate/conservative faction. Trump, meanwhile, was the choice of populist republicans who overthrew the party’s establishment (Bush/McCain/Romney) wing.
The parties manipulate who runs in the primaries. Voters regularly just don't have the choices.
The present ages of all of the candidates who won delegates in the 2020 democratic primaries: 82, 82, 81, 74, 41
I didn't want to vote for Pete Buttigieg.
Amy Klobuchar wouldn't have been my choice for a candidate but was the nearest to someone I'd actually want to vote for and she dropped out after the third state.
So yeah the Democratic party can go to hell. Donald Trump was their doing because they/Hillary pushed everyone off the ticket years ago and they haven't fielded a desirable candidate since Obama, and he was, all things considered, mediocre.
These days the bar for a politician to get my vote is to still have a child in university (or younger) and to not literally be a Nazi. It is disturbingly difficult to find someone to vote for.
Yep. I would vote for a yellow haired keyboard warrior or a bible fearing evangelical regardless of whether I share a single political belief so long as they’re participating in the society I actually exist in. 80 year olds don’t live in the same world.
Given how many people are struggling to find enthusiasm to voice support for Biden due to the situation in Gaza and how he isn’t trying to play hardball with Netanyahu in comparison to the hardball Reagan played back in the day… there is a lot of negative sentiment for Biden due to his age and intransigence on many issues… from the outside looking in (I’m in Australia, so I don’t have a vote in this, I just care about the foreign policy implications) … the situation in the upcoming election is very much looking like a lot of people view it as “narcissistic nut job who seems extremely keen on fascism” and “old politician who might be getting just a little bit senile from time to time… but is also not doing enough to try and stop a genocide” … oh and and throwing your vote out for a third party candidate who literally had brain worms
This isn’t an inspiring group… I expect a non trivial percentage of Biden voters are literally just going to the polls thinking ”he’s the least worst of these people and the others would be so insanely worse that it’s my duty to vote for this guy to make sure the people who believe in the other guys don’t destroy my country”
A mandatory age limit (which remember is enshrined at the other end, we have precedent for someone being too young for the office of president) would force the Democratic Party to nominate a different candidate, who Biden would be obliged to support out of party loyalty since he is being forced to retire due to the age limit, and we might see a less “Passive” Democrat campaign that would be holding the other candidates to the fire on their various problems, from brain worms and heavy metal poisoning to dozens of felony charges and a felony conviction pending the obvious appeal after sentencing…
As for the future when people might live longer…
again from the outside… I’d like the USA to be less dominant because the monopolar world has been a destabilising influence that has slowly allowed US based business interests to corrupt the governments of allied countries and pressure long term changes that have had devastating effects like the current NHS situation in the UK, and the various small countries whose governments have lived and died at the whim of US foreign policy due. While broadly speaking in the long long term the USA has been a good steward of its global power… it has been at its best when it was competitive against other global powers and not sitting on some global throne of power just deciding who gets aid funding or pressuring for treaties like the TPP which have deeply pro business anti consumer political protections built into their bones…
why the big preamble? Well in the long long term i imagine that by the time a healthy person is fit enough to run a global power at the age of 125 (extrapolating from the current age relative to the 80 year cutoff in question) i imagine we’re going to be in the situation where smaller powers have significantly asymmetrical influence… if space travel and eventual efforts at colonisation succeed… eventually they will assert sovereignty due to the classic cycle of colonial development… either the colonising power expands fast enough to maintain their control over the colony or the colony being at a distance (be that economic, logistical, political, or something else) the colony will eventually drift away from the parent developing its own identity and want independence… if we have lunar, asteroid or mars colonies… I don’t see how a lunar colony with enough mass drivers already built for cargo and logistics reasons… couldn’t make any government on earth sit the fuck down and grant them independence… the relative merits of that independence movement are for the future to decide as it’s entirely hypothetical… but my point is that the world will be different… and if the world is different and things have changed, maybe you could just change the damn law and update the age… it seems so obvious you would just raise the age if there was sufficient political support.
And thank you for anyone who followed my rambling short sci fi thread to its blunt and obvious almost non-sequitur ending, I hope it was at least a mildly entertaining read.
Actually I would go with 70 unless people working in industry (CEOs) is forced to retire at 60.
CEOs of large companies really run the US, people working for them tend to write the laws plus they really decide who gets to run via contributions. Most people would call them contributions, but Citizens United changed that.
This is not really something written in the constitution, just something that the justices vividly hallucinated into existence in 95. If it actually comes up again, it'll probably be overturned.
Benjiman Franklin was strongly vociferous on the constituition being barely sufficient until a despot showed up and trashed it.
Might be time for a rethink and reset of the election methods, terms, supreme court lifetime appointments, corporations as citizens, allowing lobbying, actually imprisoning | significantly firing corruption in politics, stronger seperation of arms of government, etc.
All that sounds like a great opportunity for a movement to get usurped by a dictator. That many huge changes all at once.
The US has been going strong for nearly 250 years with the same form of government. Who has gone longer? (Leaving out a few microstates and such). Ben Franklin was wrong.
Which isn’t to say we don’t need some change. To be honest most of what we need is better candidates and people more interested in subtlety and honest disagreements.
> All that sounds like a great opportunity for a movement to get usurped by a dictator.
The US is close to that already without having to change from its rut.
> To be honest most of what we need is better candidates and people more interested in subtlety and honest disagreements.
Agreed.
However it's baked into the antiquated US system to devolve into two party system that doesn't represent the people at large and are essentially two sides of the same coin (or at least until recently when the circuit breaker has been a lurch toward despotism).
Ironic given the founders mostly didn't even like party politics, but that's the inevitable grind of iterated discrete dynamic systems for you.
Older isn't better just by virtue of age, the US got some good ideas from the French and the native american people and then stagnated, meanwhile the UK continued to evolve, countries like Australia adopted "Washminster" system that built on the strengths of two prior systems, etc.
There are systemic reasons why the US has such a limited choice for President, it's a problem that who leads as #1 is even a big deal, it's just a little king for four years which was the problem with George back in the day.
We could demand amendments or a new Constitutional Convention. In practice, though, the US Constitution is pretty sclerotic in comparison to other nations'.
Interestingly, anecdotally, the idea of an age cap for our politicians has been a thread I’ve seen both sides of the aisle share sentiments and easily agree on in casual political conversation more and more lately. I am cautiously optimistic that this may be a conduit towards the non-bloody version of the future where we don’t go to civil war and instead decide to do a little foundation repair on our political system. Age/term limits and voting reform.
And 80 is too high, but it is a good test legally. If you can retire and collect money for being old, then you are simply not generationally relevant anymore in terms of your political landscape. Almost by definition when you think about it that way. 60 or 65 should be the cap. Perhaps even to vote… It has nothing to do with technology and lifespan. It has to do with cultural relevance. Sure, our society should foster wise elders who hold respected opinions gained from years of experience, but to be ruled by them is to subject your prime years as an adult to the stolid ideals of a past generation.
Do I trust people like Trump or Biden to sensibly navigate a complex social landscape with gender fluidity, cyber personas, changing approaches to marriage, digital privacy concerns, digital identity, or even to understand the everyday stress and pressures of the generation producing the nation’s capital and the nations offspring? Heck no. Even if they read up on the topic and can respond to talking points or have formed their own opinions, _they didn't live them,_ it’s not the life of their generation and they simply cannot have true empathy for any such concerns. I would be more comfortable electing someone I disagreed with on almost every political topic to office, from my generation, than some impedance mismatched person twice my age who appears to align more naturally with my beliefs. Why? Because I know if it comes down to it, when stakes are high and it really matters, when that person has to make a decision that will have great impact, they will be equip with the tools, thoughts, experiences, etc. to navigate the decision in a way that’s socially relevant, even if I disagree with the outcome.
I say all this understanding that the time will come for my generation to relinquish power (if we ever get it) and shepherd in the next, likely before the power structures we’ve created would prefer it. The problem today is we’re still subjects of our grandparents power structures. And it is so hard not to become apathetic to our entire system when it’s so ingrained and inaccessible.
Ignoring all the actual structural (wealth & power) problems we have that play into our inability to find strong leaders aged appropriately, I sometimes wonder if this isn’t a courage problem. Trump and Biden have nothing to lose. It doesn't take courage and backbone to play those scapegoat roles, because nothing they do to their image or reputation matters. It takes true courage for a 40 year old with half a life ahead of them to stand up and advocate for what they believe in, knowing they’ll e.g. face ridiculous death threats, and may well be ostracized by formerly close friends and/or communities once their hand is known. Most people are not willing to take that risk, and I’m not sure a good leader with a family should be expected to. The reason freedom of expression is sacrosanct is because it enables people to stake their reputation in a way that doesn’t risk being canceled. So they can go back to life as it were if their platform doesn't take off.
In short, if we want to see younger leader perhaps we should stop canceling people left and right over small human blunders or evolving opinions and be more forgiving and tolerant as a society.
Why can a lower limit on age to participate in elections be constitutional but an upper limit not? You need to be 18 to vote and 35 to be president but we can’t legislate an upper age limit on running for office?
It’s because of the constitution. The most fundamental laws of the land are expressed in the constitution, and nothing else can override them. In the US, the 26th amendment establishes the minimum age of 18 for voting (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twenty-sixth_Amendment_to_the_...) and Article II, Section 1, Clause 5 of the constitution establishes the age of 35 for presidency. However, a constitutional amendment (which is difficult to pass with today’s political divide) could theoretically change that.
1. Term limits are how to avoid career politicians.
2. Numerical age is unimportant compared to the health and fitness of an individual, and the agility of their mind. This throws away perfectly competent and capable candidates with explicit ageism.
Personally I think it’s more important to increase the voting age than to prevent elderly candidates. Democracy is only as good as the participants. And the human brain does not mature until closer to 30. That’s also when people have gone through more of life’s big steps and can have better perspective on the world to make better decisions. I simply don’t understand the push from some to lower the age, as it will result in worse decisions in our system. The only reason I can see for lowering the age is to favor one side or the other at that time.
The voting age used to be 21 in the US and people got mad after being repeatedly drafted into pointless wars by congress. If you're going to die in vietnam or a random hole in europe, at least you can vote on it now.
I remember when I first voted at 18, thinking that I'd be pissed if I were old enough to die fighting a war, but not old enough to elect the people that drafted me in the first place.
I think they're making the false assumption that only the effected parties would be out protesting.
I mean, I'm in my 50s and I'd be out in the streets throwing down with the cops if they took away the right to vote from a significant portion of the population.
There may be an argument that reducing the voting age could result in more politically engaged under-30s (and eventually, over-30s).
At 18 most people have too much going on (high school graduation coming up, studying for and applying to college and/or looking into employment, potentially seeking housing if their parents are kicking them out, etc) to have much capacity for political participation. That picture is significantly different just a couple of years earlier, where time and mental bandwidth is generally at more of a surplus, and so if people became capable of voting at that age it stands to reason that more would take advantage of it (and continue to after that).
The argument doesn't need to be about political engagement, it's about liberty.
Denying the vote to a thoughtful 16 year old is worse than giving the vote to a 29 year old that takes it for granted. And then same thing applies to a 2 year old, if they can independently mark the ballot...
