The Old Guard: Confronting America's Gerontocratic Crisis

I completely agree. With so many high profile cases of people suffering from some form of dementia being elected to important offices (McConnell and Feinstein; Biden and Trump), it's clear that the intended electoral mechanism isn't working to replace people who are not fit to serve. Name recognition & incumbency advantage are just too strong to allow the right thing to happen.

The version of the fix that I like is, if you would be 65 or older on the day you would begin holding the office, you are ineligible to be in the election or the appointment process. This gives some room for acknowledging that there isn't a clear cut-off where one immediately becomes unfit to serve. If you're a healthy 64, you can serve all the way to 70 for an office with a lengthy term; but if you're going soft at 65, then you don't need to make the difficult decision of whether or not to run. The decision has been made for you, way ahead of time, and you can make plans to retire and support a successor, avoiding a really nasty, personal primary process.

This would have nicely avoided Biden's awkward "will he, won't he" decision that led to the 2024 disaster we're still suffering from. Feinstein & McConnell would have retired well before their brains transformed into cottage cheese, turning them into jokes and destroying whatever legacies they worked to build. It's better for everyone.

The B-word - boomer - is what it is about. The government has always been about them, well, at least since WW2, or WW Eleven as one of the few youthful members of Congress would have it.

In the UK and elsewhere in Europe we had free education for the boomers, with benefits for them in the holidays. But they hoisted the ladder up after them. Final salary pensions, boomers had that, but they deprived others of getting the same perk. The same with healthcare and everything the state does, it was all designed for boomers.

The boomers once had people waving CND and Peace signs in their midst, however, after 9/11 the boomers found themselves back in their happy space of having an external enemy, the semi-fictional 'al-qaeda' mercenaries that none of them ever met. Their younger selves would not have been clamouring for war, but, after the planes hit the towers, they were just gagging to support more and more bombing, all in their name.

The boomers paid for the nukes, the planes to deliver them and the entire war machine, whilst pricing their kids out of the housing market whilst chastising their own kids with 'back in our day we had nothing and had to work harder than you with your latte and iphone'. We all know the deal.

The problem is not just a few geriatrics in power, which societies have had problems with ever since the first king, it is bigger than that, it is the boomers that do not care about anything other than their selfish world view, that can't be argued with because you can't 'cheek your elders'.

The problem with the boomers is that many of their children honestly believe they can mimic the boomer life, where you knuckle down and pay for that mortgage like they did and where you spew toxic emissions everywhere you go, because boomers are entirely car dependent.

Equity in this context usually refers to the concept of Social Equity, which is interested in equality of outcome

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_equity

The extent to which equality of outcome is pursued and for which groups are traditionally factors, but the overarching idea is in pursuit of equality of outcome.

Term limits encourage the development of robust laws, systems and institutions which provide a far more stable basis for running a society than having power structures that rely on the brilliance of an individual or individuals. Without terms limits or the like (and there are countless examples not just in history but currently around the world), individuals in power are motivated mostly to preserve that power and have less incentive to work on improvements that will outlast them.

> and to the degree that old people are still doing it themselves they’re depriving us of opportunities to learn and to practice and to benefit from their experience.

Young people’s ability and motivation to organize and communicate is not dependent on anything other than themselves choosing to do it and get involved

> That’s why we’re not as good at it.

If you continue to believe that you’re dependent on older generations to teach you everything you’ll never get anywhere.

What works for older generations isn’t going to be good advice for getting younger generations to organize and communicate. The age differences are large.