"The Reign of Old Men"

 When Mitt Romney unexpectedly announced his forthcoming retirement from the Senate at the end of this term, he chose to use the occasion to warn that American government was at risk of becoming a gerontocracy. He said that he was stepping aside in part to make way for new (read: younger) leadership in politics, and in case this seemed too subtle a hint, he specifically urged both of the current frontrunners for the two major nominations for 2024 to bow out and let someone else try captaining their respective parties. He couldn't vote for Trump, he said; but Biden too—he urged—was too advanced in years to be an effective leader, and ought to quit while he was ahead. 

Romney's words fed into a deeper anxiety among many observers of our political scene that our leadership has gotten too aged, and that there don't seem to be enough plausible young or middle-aged people to take their place. The usual parallels drawn here are to Sen. Dianne Feinstein and Sen. Mitch McConnell—a nonagenarian and an octogenarian, respectively, who have recently had health scares in Congress but have so far declined to retire. 

Whether or not these are legitimate concerns, however, my own fear about the advancing age of our current political leadership is much more immediate and specific. I'm far less worried about McConnell hanging on too long, say—I'd take him over the rising generation of New Right or "Nationalist" Republicans anytime (despite having spent decades detesting him), and I hope he stays put for as long as he possibly can, really, no matter how many health scares might come his way—so long as his presence in the Senate at least marginally decreases the likelihood of a future Majority Leader Hawley or Majority Leader Vance (barf). 

No, to the extent I'm worried about politicians getting too old, it has little to do with the abstract gerontocracy concerns of the journalistic think-pieces or the euphemistic urgings of politicians calling for "new leadership" or a "new generation to take the helm." What I am worried about is the very simple and disturbing possibility that Joe Biden could die or suffer a severe health crisis before next November. Or, if not that, Republicans and conservative media could nonetheless succeed well enough in their quest to paint him as feeble and infirm that they could sway people to stay home or vote against him. Polls already show most Americans wish Biden were not at the head of the Democratic ticket for 2024, and it largely seems to be for this reason (his age). 

And given that Trump is looking almost certain to win the Republican nomination for 2024 at this point, this means we have to face seriously the gruesome possibility of a second Trump presidency. And this would not just be a redux of Trump 1.0, let me emphasize—bad as that was. The man has become considerably more vindictive since his 2020 defeat, not to mention even further unmoored from reality and indifferent to truth, and he would almost certainly devote his next four years in office to seeking vengeance on his political foes and dismantling the remaining institutional checks and balances that halted his previous attempt to seize illegitimate power in 2020. 

Our constitutional order, that is to say—which just barely kept breathing in the previous election—might not survive a second throttling at the same hands. 

I was thinking about our plight in this regard after reading a Symbolist play by the Nobel Prize-winning poet, playwright, and essayist Maurice Maeterlinck: The Blind (Les aveugles). The short one-act play depicts a group of sightless patients from a hospital who have gotten stranded in the woods on the lonely island they inhabit. The priest who oversees their care at the facility apparently led them out into the forest in order to experience the last days of sunlight and ocean breeze before a harsh winter sets in. He was already quite aged, however, at the time they set out, and he has perished along the way. His corpse remains propped center-stage during the performance, and the audience knows from the beginning that he has died: his sightless patients, however, do not perceive this until close to the end. 

One of the themes of the play is plainly the transfer of power and leadership between the generations, as well as the need for new forms of "vision" on the part of the young who will eventually supplant their elders. The aged priest in the play tells a young blind girl at one point that he believes "the reign of old men is going to end." (Hovey trans.) As one of the few sighted ones on the island, and their primary caretaker, the priest had literally up to this point been the patients' eyes and vision. But with his untimely passing, leaving them stranded in the woods, the blind patients need to look elsewhere for guidance. 

The young girl, though blind, possesses an inward sight of a different kind, and she provides some of the leadership they are missing: she (along with the oldest blind woman of the party) is one of the few patients to sense—when a dog from the hospital appears on stage—that he will only disclose bad news if they follow him (and indeed, it is the dog who leads them to the corpse of the priest, revealing to them that their trusted leader is dead). Even before this, she senses death in the air enough to braid her hair with asphodels; and it was to her—as we have seen—that the priest chose to disclose his concerns about the future and his recognition that there would have to be a passing of the torch with his looming demise. 

Most importantly, it is the young blind girl who is first to perceive their only possible path to salvation. When the lone infant in the party begins to cry, it occurs to her that the child—unlike its mother—may be able to see. In one of the play's most emotionally-potent images, she therefore holds the infant aloft, swinging his eyes into the darkness before them like a lantern, and encourages him to see what is coming. The child—youth, the new generation—will have to be the new vision that will take the place of the one that departed from them with the death of the elder.

It probably does not take a lot of imagination to see the analogy that came to mind for me in reading the play, given what I have said so far. Biden is like the kind old priest, who—despite his good intentions—is at risk of leading us out into the woods and then leaving us stranded there in the darkness (that is, if he should perish or have a health scare at the wrong moment of the campaign season). And we would truly be lost in a dark wilderness indeed if Biden were to suddenly lose his physical capacity for the office before the next election, whether due to a stroke or some other frequent concomitant of advanced age. There is no frightening forest of folklore or late-nineteenth-century Symbolism to compare to the prospect of a second Trump term. 

The play, though, seems to hold out a suggestion of hope—perhaps one that applies to us as well. Even as the priest perishes and leaves them stranded, after all, his passing creates the opening for a new generation of leadership to emerge—the young girl and the infant then step forth to provide the vision they had lost. 

It is worth noting, however, that the conclusion to the play is left deliberately ambiguous. The young girl discovers the child's capacity for vision and seeks to use it to perceive the identity of whoever it is whom they hear coming through the woods. When that mysterious disembodied presence finally arrives, and the blind patients cry out for mercy, it is unclear whether they have just met a rescuer and well-wisher or someone who means them harm. Is it an angel and savior whom the child's newly-discovered sight has disclosed; or is it a demon and foe? 

The play seems to underscore the same uncertainty we face now: even though the inevitable and tragic passing of the generations with age may have its silver lining in the arrival of the fresh and young, the appearance of new guides and leaders for a different era—we don't actually know if they can save us either, or if they will arrive soon enough to do so. The person who meets us in the woods—the one who arrives at the final scene of our nation's ongoing doom-drama—may well be the destroyer—the one who tried and failed to wreck our democratic institutions last time around and has come back now to complete what he started.

We may regain our sight in the wake of the end of the "reign of old men," that is to say, only in time to see another old man arrive to put us back in darkness again.