American Gerontocracy
Plus: DeSantis’s RFK pander.
Nota bene: “Donald Trump’s legal and political teams are preparing for the possibility that the federal grand jury will vote on charges against the former president as early as Thursday, according to three sources familiar with the thinking of his inner circle.”
Happy Thursday.
Pardon the morbidity, but I really have to say what everybody is (or should be) saying about what happened with Mitch McConnell yesterday.
Imagine if that had happened to Donald Trump. Or Joe Biden.
Our politics would be upended in the blink of an eye. The margin is that thin.
But this is what living in a gerontocracy is like.
McConnell is 81 years old. Trump will be 78 on election Day. Biden, as we all know, will turn 82 next November.
Nobody is getting any younger.
One trip, one fall, one stumble. One moment when a political leader simply freezes in mid-sentence, goes blank, and has to be escorted away from the podium for a wellness check. And the presidency would hang in the balance.
**
Yesterday’s image was alarming. Via the Wapo:
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) on Wednesday abruptly left a news conference after he froze midway through his opening remarks and appeared to be unable to resume speaking immediately.
McConnell began the GOP’s leadership weekly news conference by saying lawmakers were on a path to finishing a major defense budget bill this week.
“We’ve had good bipartisan cooperation and a string of —” McConnell said.
He then froze and remained silent for about 20 seconds, staring straight ahead, before other members of GOP leadership intervened. Sens. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) and Joni Ernst (R-Iowa), standing at McConnell’s side, asked if he was okay but McConnell did not respond verbally.
The good news is that he seemed to recover relatively quickly, returning to take questions, more or less as usual. Later in the day he joked with reporters about getting a call from President Joe Biden. “The president called to check on me. I told him I got sandbagged,” a reference to Biden’s recent trip and fall.
But NBC is now reporting that McConnell fell getting off a plane at Reagan National Airport this month.
The fall, which has not been previously reported, occurred July 14 after the flight out of Washington was canceled while everyone was on board. McConnell, R-Ky., who was a passenger, had a “face plant,” someone who was on the plane at the time but did not witness the fall told NBC News….
McConnell has also recently been using a wheelchair as a precaution when he navigates crowded airports, said a source familiar with his practices.
So, we need to have a conversation about our political Elder Culture.
“The leadership of both major parties has shown repeated problems with aged and infirm members,” noted Reason’s Nick Gillespie. “Our Constitution is 234 years old. Our leaders don’t have to be.”
Apparently, however, they do.
Both parties seem to be locking themselves into a rematch of octogenarians, despite the risks, even as public concern seems to be rising. This month's Harvard CPAS/Harris Poll found growing unease among Democrats about Biden’s age. Eighty-five percent of Republicans and 71 percent of independents said they have doubts about Biden's mental fitness. The Biden campaign is clearly concerned.
NBC News reported on Monday that Biden's 2024 campaign is strategizing to minimize the physical toll of the job for the president while highlighting his decades-long experience as an electoral strength. The outlet said his team has been increasingly providing Biden with a shorter set of stairs for boarding and disembarking from Air Force One and offering shorter note cards for the president to read.
**
Political guru Mike Murphy thinks it’s time for a “true friend” to take Biden aside…
So a plea to Biden’s true intimates. Tell him the truth. This second term caper is a big, dangerous, selfish mistake. And with the grim specter of the Mad King Donald Trump back within reach of the Oval as a potential GOP nominee, the stakes are way too high to fool around.
Biden, simply put, is too damn old to be as formidable a candidate as this moment in American history demands.
The problem with this, of course, is that the Democrats lack an obvious Plan B, except a veep who is also underwater in the polls.
**
Meanwhile in the GOP, someone else is decompensating in real time:
DeSantis’s RFK Pander
He really is really bad at this, isn’t he?
On Wednesday, the Florida governor said that he might consider conspiracy theory wingnut RFK Jr for a position in his administration, running either the Food and Drug Administration or the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Even his longtime conservative defenders were gobsmacked by the stupidity of Meatball’s pander. Via Mediaite: “Conservatives: DeSantis's RFK Comments 'Embarrassingly Bad'.”
Here’s National Review’s Charles Cooke:
National Review’s Philip Klein:
David Frum observed: “Another thing to learn from this humiliating episode: being pro-RFK Jr is now a right-wing signifier as potent as a Confederate flag or a spinning sonnenrad.”
**
Mike Pence took the easy layup:
Asa Hutchinson: Why I’m Doing This
On Wednesday’s podcast, I talked with the former Arkansas governor about his long shot presidential bid…and what’s happened to his party.
You can listen to the whole thing here.
Hunter’s Deal Collapses
Let’s be clear: the judge was not the problem here. Via the NYT:
Judge Noreika quickly zeroed in on a paragraph offering Mr. Biden broad immunity from prosecution, in perpetuity, for a range of matters scrutinized by the Justice Department. The judge questioned why prosecutors had written it in a way that gave her no legal authority to reject it.
Then, in 10 minutes of incisive questioning, she exposed serious differences between the two sides on what, exactly, that paragraph meant.
Christopher Clark, Mr. Biden’s lead lawyer, said it indemnified his client not merely for the tax and gun offenses uncovered during the inquiry, but for other possible offenses stemming from his lucrative consulting deals with companies in Ukraine, China and Romania.
Prosecutors had a far narrower definition. They saw Mr. Biden’s immunity as limited to offenses uncovered during their investigation of his tax returns dating back to 2014, and his illegal purchase of a firearm in 2018, when he was a heavy drug user, they said.
When the judge asked Leo Wise, a lead prosecutor in the case, if the investigation of Mr. Biden was continuing, he answered, “Yes.”
When she asked him, hypothetically, if the deal would preclude an investigation into possible violation of laws regulating foreign lobbying by Mr. Biden connected with his consulting and legal work, he replied, “No.”
Mr. Biden then told the judge he could not agree to any deal that did not offer him broad immunity, and Mr. Clark popped up angrily to declare the deal “null and void.”
Exit take: The Hunter story isn’t going away anytime soon.
Quick Hits
1. Sorting Out the Florida Teaching-About-Slavery Mess
[The] the flap over the newly approved Florida school standards for the teaching of African-American history is a “both sides” story, and one in which neither side looks very good. Not only the left but mainstream liberals—including major media outlets and Vice President Kamala Harris—joined in a frenzy of denunciations over a line very misleadingly summarized as a claim that “enslaved people benefited from slavery” because some of them learned useful work skills. But while the Florida curriculum doesn’t say that, or suggest that American slavery was not so bad, it does have very real problems. What’s more, Harris’s essentially false and inflammatory accusation was matched by an incredibly ham-fisted response from Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and an apparent major stumble by the standards’ principal authors.
Add to this a lot of all-around self-beclownment in the media, and it’s “The Culture Wars Make Everyone (and Everything) Dumber,” Chapter Eleventy-Thousand Eleven.
2. Mencken’s obit for William Jennings Bryan
Speaking of the verdict of history… Hat tip Windsor Mann for this gem:
William Jennings Bryan was a vulgar and common man, a cad undiluted. He was ignorant, bigoted, self-seeking, blatant and dishonest.
His career brought him into contact with the first men of his time; he preferred the company of rustic ignoramuses. It was hard to believe, watching him at Dayton, that he had traveled, that he had been received in civilized societies, that he had been a high officer of state.
He seemed only a poor clod like those around him, deluded by a childish theology, full of an almost pathological hatred of all learning, all human dignity, all beauty, all fine and noble things. He was a peasant come home to the dung-pile.
Imagine a gentleman, and you have imagined everything that he was not.
3.Time to Do Something About the NILFs
Brent Orrell in today’s Bulwark:
This collapse in work participation has been accompanied by a surge in men’s dependence on disability payments and other safety net programs like Supplemental Nutritional Assistance (SNAP). Unsurprisingly, non-work and welfare is also correlated with “deaths of despair,” incarceration, and single parenthood.
As Nicholas Eberstadt has documented, men who are “not in the labor force” (NILF) are alarmingly disengaged from others and overly self-focused. According to federal time-use surveys, NILFs do very little work of any kind, whether paid, unpaid, household chores, or caring for family members. Most of their waking hours are occupied with “personal care” and “socializing, relaxing, and leisure,” with much of the latter devoted to looking at screens: phones, computers, and television.
4. "Natcons" and "Freecons" and Liberals
Robert Tracinski at Symposium:
This “simpleminded brute’s version of conservatism” is not the only one, though it has begun to dominate in recent years with the rise of “nationalist” conservatism. That’s why I was very happy to see a big new effort to push back by way of a manifesto of “freedom conservatism,” signed by some people who will no doubt be familiar to readers of this newsletter, including Charles C.W. Cooke, Jonah Goldberg, Brent Orrell, Dalibor Rohac, Charlie Sykes, and the venerable George F. Will—basically the entire classical liberal wing of conservatism. They are now apparently calling themselves “freecons” to distinguish them from the “natcons.” …
The manifesto harks back explicitly to the Sharon Statement of 1960 that formed the late 20th Century conservative movement in a “fusion” of free marketers, Cold War hawks, and religious conservatives. In effect, they too are trying to go back to 1955, not concretely but ideologically.
That’s a much better goal, and good luck to them. But I am not a conservative, and I am skeptical about the idea that we can solve problems just by turning back the clock.
There is a reason conservative fusionism became unfused in such spectacular fashion in the last few years. Instead of trying to rebuild the old movement with the same basic flaws, we need to make a clean break in terminology, and in our underlying priorities and ideas, and build on the firmer foundation of liberalism.
Cheap Shots
There’s no gullible fool like an old gullible fool. Via Hannah Gais:
Lol, Cathy should take a step back from this debate. She was thoroughly taken to school after claiming that slaves weren’t sought for specific skills. In the span of two tweets, she went from calling the claim to ridiculous to saying “yes, slaves were in fact sought for skills.” Only with slavery can we be paternalistic and claim that slaves learned skills that helped them post slavery. It’s adjacent to neo-Confederate apologia that slaves were better off being slaves than being free in Africa as though there weren’t entire societies that existed on the continent before the Europeans arrived. Hell more than half the examples the “experts” from Florida gave after the backlash started were never slaves! Slavery existed for 250 years before emancipation, the idea that a few slaves learned skills that they capitalized on after the Civil War is nothing more than a thinly veiled attempt to assuage the guilt we feel today about the practice. Not only this, they are making that particular point a BENCHMARK. As in, it has to be taught. How absurd.
A few things. One, at this point it's fairly obvious that the last person who should be talking about social issues and cultural debates is Cathy. I know she's smart about a lot of things, but the reflex to go 'actually the left was overreacting' to things that the Bulwark's JVL already deconstructed for being insane is kind of wild. Like, any sane person can probably agree that anything that isn't 'slavery was morally wrong on every level' has no business being taught to children. This isn't a Song of the South situation where they're trying to portray Reconstruction as a golden era, we're talking the literal era of slavery where men, women, and children were kept in bondage and sold like animals. There's no both sides here. If 'the left' is overreacting in the sense that they are saying 'we shouldn't both sides slavery' I think that's defensible. And it's more defensible for Harris, a literal black woman, to take some offense to people whitewashing her own ancestor's history!
But enough on that. Let's talk Hunter briefly. The Hunter Biden 'story' is that Hunter did a bad thing. Okay! But you know what else? The system is working! The president is not leaning on judges and officials to let him go! The system is literally working as intended. Do you think the Trump kids would be brought up on charges the same way under a GOP president? I don't. And so as far as I can tell, the story is 'the system is working as intended.'
As for our gerontocracy, this really is the core problem in our society. Not simply in politics either, it's everywhere, and a lot of this is baby boomers not wanting to move aside or plan for the future, the latter part could sum up their entire forty years in the spotlight since they powered Reagan to office on a plan of 'eh, we'll lower taxes for us and cut benefits and pay for it later or something.' At the moment, we have presidents, congressmen, and supreme court justices that are expected to make laws about everything from internet privacy to crypto to AI, and most of them cannot navigate a smartphone.
In the 90s, they laughed as their parents couldn't handle 'the computers' and that's now them. But it infects everything else too. For example, the reason participation in trades has declined is not that there is a lack of people to do those jobs, but because the older people who are retiring are not training new people because it's to expensive and bothersome to do so. I learned this firsthand from a family friend who's repaired elevators for his entire life; they'd love to have new people, but the companies that employ them would rather rely on aging talent than train new talent to replace them. The same was true for my brother in law's father, who was an electrician during his life.
One of the problems in our world is that people live too long now. That's not to say that living is bad, we're not talking a Logan's Run situation. I mean that our institutions and the pace of change do not adhere to our idea that age should be the signifier of wisdom. The main reason we have a problem with the Supreme Court, for example, is that justices live so long that you can lock in a majority for a lifetime by appointing someone in their thirties, who will then likely be in that position your entire natural life. The average length of time a justice serves has been extended to the point where we should really ask why we don't have both higher minimum age requirements and lower maximum age requirements. That's not a term limit idea; it's simply a matter that when it comes to law, you probably should be at least fifty, and no older than seventy, in order to have some idea what's going on.
And Congress has turned into a work program for people who should be retired. In no other industry would you expect people over sixty five to be active participants in the workforce, especially not when talking about modern questions. You wouldn't have asked someone who was seventy in the 40s how to build a plane better, so I don't know why we think that the ideal time for law making is for people whose golden years were thirty years prior.
McConnell is simply the most recent example. We've seen this a lot lately. RBG and Feinstein on the left come to mind. We simply cannot accept this notion that human beings are capable forever, when they are not.
You mention men not in the workforce, but perhaps the best way to get them into the workforce is not to make life harder for them, but to push older people out of the workforce so that the demand for labor is higher. The reality is, we're in this situation because we make retiring too hard, we make getting into jobs too hard, and we've allowed much of our nation to atrophy because the people in charge won't move aside and are choosing to die in their positions.
Speaking as someone who lost his grandmother a year ago and watched her slowly deteriorate mentally and physically over time, I can say that I would not trust someone in McConnell's condition to do his own taxes or live on his own, and yet we are all expected to be nice and not say what is clearly obvious, that the man should retire and we should not be pretending it is normal or ethical to allow him to keep serving. Ditto for people like Feinstein. At some point, allowing the facade to remain is elder abuse.