In politics, as in life, looks matter. The fact that Fifties Britain was led by a man who marvelled at the sight of an escalator spoke volumes about its obsession with its own past and inability to embrace the post-war world. And even if Mr Biden really is a dynamo of energy and master of detail, as his supporters insist, his appearance hardly proclaims the virtues of youth and vigour. Indeed, if the United States’s enemies wanted to paint it as a decadent, decaying, senescent society, unable to move on from its Cold War heyday, then no casting agency could have supplied better rivals than Biden and Trump, two ageing prize-fighters who made their names when Bill Gates was still at college.
Why has the United States, so often the herald of modernity, become such a gerontocracy? There’s no easy answer, but an obvious place to start is a political system that rewards years of contacts, lobbying and fundraising, instead of promoting young blood and fresh ideas. To put it bluntly, its politicians are so elderly because its politics are so corrupt. In that respect, the obvious comparison is the Soviet Union when Biden and Trump were in their twenties — another self-consciously youthful society that had simply grown old.
Under Leonid Brezhnev, who stayed in the Kremlin until his death at the age of 75 in 1982, people often joked that the USSR was being led by a dead man. There was a lot of truth in that. By his final years, Brezhnev had suffered several strokes and at least one near-fatal heart attack and was also afflicted with emphysema, memory loss, bronchitis and gout. Contemporary news footage shows his aides manoeuvring him about like a department-store dummy, not unlike the heroes of the film Weekend at Bernie’s. No doubt Brezhnev, too, would have insisted that he had the wisdom of experience, that age was just a number, and that you’re as young as you feel. Then he ordered the invasion of Afghanistan.
There is, of course, an obvious rejoinder to all this. At the first US presidential debate in 1984, the 73-year-old Ronald Reagan put in a dreadful performance against the 56-year-old Walter Mondale, forgetting that he was in Kentucky rather than Washington and admitting that he sometimes felt “confused”. At the second debate a fortnight later, one of the interrogators asked him about it, and Reagan had the perfect comeback. “I will not make age an issue of this campaign,” he said, trying but not quite succeeding to hide a smile. “I am not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent’s youth and inexperience.” Even Mondale roared with laughter, and that was that.
Although it would be satisfying to end with some sweeping conclusion about youth always trumping experience — or vice versa — the truth is that there isn’t really an obvious pattern. Do younger politicians make rash mistakes? Yes, if they’re Tony Blair, reordering the world around him. No, if they’re Barack Obama, a case study in passivity.
Should you weep and wail if your paramount leader looks like an extra from One Foot in the Grave? Maybe not. When Deng Xiaoping won an internal power struggle to become master of China at the end of 1978, he was 74. A chain smoker, he was very far from being one of life’s gym bunnies. He was, in other words, one of the last people you would pick to catapult his country into a new age of economic reform and breakneck change. But we know what happened next.
And here’s an even better example. The most celebrated doge in Venice’s history, the enormously cynical Enrico Dandolo, was 85 when he took power in 1192, and ruled for another thirteen years. Dandolo might have lost his eyesight, but he had all the ruthless greed of a much younger man. He kicked out foreign residents, launched an attack on the Dalmatian coast and, most infamously, bankrolled and orchestrated the Fourth Crusade’s sack of Constantinople, one of the most appalling atrocities in medieval history. Among the looted treasures were the four Horses of St Mark, which stand in Venice to this day. So every tourist postcard is, in its way, a tribute to this malignant but undeniably vigorous old man.
In any case, when it comes to politics and age, perhaps the venerable antiquity of our leaders is the wrong question. Who cares how old Biden is? It’s the age of his voters that’s the real problem. Surely now, after all we’ve been through, it’s time to wake up to the realities of the modern world, and to reform the age at which young people can vote. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: 18 is far, far too young. But I suppose that’s an argument for another day.
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