The old have come to dominate American politics | Hacker News Reader

The old have come to dominate American politics

economist.com

21 pointsgmays50 comments

Vote in primaries, folks! Given gerrymandering and self-segregation, most seats are uncompetitive. That means the general election is quite meaningless. But the power remains in the nominating contests, which are thinly-attended, with seniors and extremists overrepresented in those electorates.

You want to get rid of a politician? Do it in a primary election.

But that’s hard, I can’t do it on my phone.

Then the obvious solution is to do what a civilised country does: schedule the election on a Saturday and make it compulsory and easy to do.

Other countries have phones and all the other excuses. We just don't have a system that's deliberately designed to suppress voting.

In the US you have to register to vote. That creates friction. In my country they send every adult citizen a ballot.

In the US some people lose (by law) the right to vote.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disfranchisement#Based_on_crim...

And in some states (Florida) felons had their ability to vote restored but the legislature made it so that you have to pay your fees, fines, etc., before your sentence is considered served. They don't have a central place by which to check if you are paid up. The result? New crimes and bye bye voting.

Which country?

Other countries have compulsory voting in primaries?

Well, no. The flaw in my comment. But my main intent was to speak to the broken nature of American "democracy", as it is called.

In Australia, we don't elect a president, so we don't have primaries. The head of state - the Governor General - is almost never involved in the process. Instead, the leader of the party that has a parliamentary majority (and therefore forms government) becomes the Prime Minister. And the party leader is selected in whatever arcane manner the party desires. People vote for party representatives or independents at the level of their local electorate. The prime minister (Australia) doesn't get to override the parliament by decree. And since the house of representatives and senate are functional, decrees are unnecessary.

What we don't have is:

* Gerrymandering. Electoral boundaries are drawn fairly by the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC).

* Rules that take away people's right to vote. Our voter participation rates are about 90%[1] in both the House of Representatives and the Senate. If you don't have an opinion, you show up at the polling booths, get your name ticked off, draw a nice big cock on the ballot papers and drop them in the box, or just walk out.

* Endless filibustering. We do have Double Dissolution[2] (the nuclear option) where both the House and the Senate are dissolved (if only there was a big vat of acid!) and everyone goes back to the polls. It's very rarely used, but occasionally threatened.

* First-past-the-post voting: we use a ranked-choice system called preferential voting, where if your first choice doesn't get a majority, your vote transfers to your second choice etc.[3] That means we do not have a two party system and you can not waste your vote by voting for someone other than the big two.

* Other American shitfuckery that I can't think of right now. But we do have some American-style donation shitfuckery that I wish we could fix. Money has disproportionate say in our political system, though it is far less broken than American politics.

[1] https://www.aec.gov.au/Elections/federal_elections/voter-tur...

[2] https://peo.gov.au/understand-our-parliament/having-your-say...

[3] https://www.chickennation.com/voting/

>with seniors and extremists overrepresented in those electorates.

Which is exactly why we end up with senior and/or extremist candidates.

This isn't rocket science, people.

I have long felt that there should be mandatory upper age limits on public office, whether elected or appointed. 65 seems right to me.

If under 35 is too young to be President, then there should be some age that is too old.

My rule is that, if someone is too old to drive, they are too old to run the country.

> Polls show that nearly three-quarters of Americans favour an age limit for elected officials...

Stop voting for them and they will stop running.

They all want someone else's representatives to stop running, not their own.

I desperately want my representative (Feinstein) to stop running.

That she has: https://www.politico.com/news/2023/02/14/dianne-feinstein-pa...

Right, intra-party politics seems to put way too much value in party loyalty--running against an incumbent is a way to get yourself blacklisted by the party, which leads to an unhealthy pattern of unthinking support for declining leaders. It seems like Democrats are making this mistake in 2024 by not running a candidate to replace the obviously declining Joe Biden; it could well lead to a catastrophic re-election of Donald Trump.

It would require a constitutional amendment, obviously. Given that it would be voted on by a bunch of people who it would un-employ, as well as another huge cohort it would render ineligible in the near future, I can't imagine legislatures going for this, same as I can't imagine ranked choice voting getting traction. Why would lawmakers, en masse, vote against their own personal career interests?

A few, sure, but amending the constitution requires widespread agreement.

This is just ageism. According to this logic, why not put an upper limit on the voting age? Say, 77? There are great advantages to age, and people age differently.

It’s not just about age it’s about generational differences

OK, so it's two forms of discrimination then, ageism and generationism.

How is a minimum age not ageism?

> There are great advantages to age, and people age differently.

The problem is the health of elected officials can't be trusted--their medical staff explicitly mislead or omit issues. "A pharmacist says he has filled Alzheimer's prescriptions for members of Congress" A single news article from a handful of years ago (and a huge ethical breach) is often brought up because there's a problem. That's the only reason anyone is interested in finding another proxy.

It's a tough problem, because doctors are supposed to be strictly concerned with their patient's health. So someone would have to set up and administer some sort of medical police force.

I read today that John F. Kennedy was riddled with health problems. He was young, and was considered a good president. How would this new medical enforcement work in His case?

https://www.google.com/m?q=john+f+kennedy+health&client=ms-o...

> How is a minimum age not ageism?

Well you can't very well have four-year-olds voting, correct? It's unfortunate because they have a stake in election outcomes, but they can't understand that stake. I wish they could vote but indeed they don't even understand what an election is. Instead eighteen is the age that's been chosen for voting, so that one might have time to develop enough of an understanding of the world, the country, the issues, and oneself to make a responsible decision. Is that the right age? One might even have a smidge of wisdom by eighteen. How about sixteen? Then for office, the Constitution has minimum ages, yes. I'd rather see those removed than an upper limit installed. Especially in this time when people are living longer and longevity science is making great early strides.

My grandmother lived to be 104. She was extremely sharp until about 100. She had a great length of experience upon which to draw, and she did. She'd had time to witness the arc of history, to confront her own mistakes and prejudices and to view questions from several perspectives. She'd developed wisdom.

Now, if we're to talk about the health of elected officials, it's obviously true the the old are more prone to issues. Until the fountain of youth is invented we all die. But it's not because "medical staff mislead or omit issues" that it's kosher to start stripping people of their rights. Enforcing transparency around relevant health issues would be the way, rather than using hearsay ("A pharmacist says he has filled Alzheimer's prescriptions for members of Congress") to discriminate against entire groups of people.

There shouldn't be an age limit, there should be a term limit. The problem isn't really that people are old, that's just a symptom. The problem is that it's the same people in government, decade after decade.

Term limits have been discussed again and again. They are a terrible idea because it results in special interests basically running the entire show. Politicians don't have time to learn how to write laws, so they instead are stuck rubber stamping whatever comes across their desks, even more so than they already do today.

Also building alliances takes time, it used to be that politicians in DC were all friends with each other, which means they could go to the bar after work and figure things out together over some drinks. Now days any politician seen talking to someone of the "opposing" party is deemed a traitor and vilified by the 24hr news media.

I still think that killing earmarks is what killed bipartisanship. There is just nothing that each side can give the other without earmarks, so there is no way to negotiate. Instead, it’s just full-on war 100% of the time.

They were a tiny percentage of the budget, and it was a small price to pay for functioning government.

It's inevitable with a two party system. If the US had 20 parties there would be a political tradition to form coalitions. Liberals forming a government with far right Christians- the best medicine for ideology is Machiavellian pragmatism.

And it creates personal churn, removing people from politics in scandals

So you think special interests don't run the show right now?? Do we live in the same universe? Because the us government is almost exclusively run by special interests.

> So you think special interests don't run the show right now?? Do we live in the same universe? Because the us government is almost exclusively run by special interests.

And term limits will make it worse.

This isn't some theoretical, research has been done on states that have implemented term limits, everything got worse.

OK imagine senators have a 2 term max, 12 years. They are now 100% incentivized to plan for their next job and not actually care about being a senator. We already see this with roles that are appointed by the administration, FCC commissioners are famous for this. Go from industry -> government -> higher paid industry role, utilizing the connections one gained while in government.

term limits remove institutional knowledge from government and place it into the hands of lobbyists and consultants. imagine what your workplace would be like if after holding a job 4-5 years, employees were dismissed. sounds like a recipe for chaos and failure.

> imagine what your workplace would be like if after holding a job 4-5 years

Hah, I wish we could hold on to engineers for 4-5 years…

There should be a competency test. A hard age limit is dumb; there are fully competent people in their 90s. But at the same time what’s happenening with Mitch McConnells recent issues. If he worked for apple or something they’d either hide him from public appearances or force him out of the company into retirement. And while there’s still technically some debate there (I guess) then you have a case like Diane feinstein, who is obviously completely incompetent even to the layman. Imo in any other situation that would be a reportable case of elder abuse but apparently if they’re a politician with a huge net worth that’s no longer the case

Politics is about representation and the elderly deserve representation too but they deserve competent representation. And we deserve proportional representation. But that brings up the issue that the political system is arguably rotten to its core and set up in such a way that it’s almost impossible to do such a thing. For proportional representation to be realistic we really need reforms to so many things, lobbying, gerrymandering, voting access, campaign finance, media regulation, etc. and the people who would need to reform this are the current representatives whose power would be potentially be threatened by the reforms that would be enacted.

Kind of a bummer, really

We need leaders with a vision of the future and with bright minds and ideas. Not someone that forgets where they are, and what they were saying. Yes we definitely need age limits. 65 should be the limit.

Airline pilots have an upper age limit.

Apparently, it's not safe to have anyone above a certain age fly a plane, even with a copilot, traffic control services, and multiple system redundancies.

And with pilots, age comes with experiences. Every year of flying, on one hand brings closer to mental and physical decline, on another hand gains valuable flying hours. Sully Sullenberger landed the plane on the Hudson river when he was 58, 7 years from upper age limit. By that time he had flown all kinds of planes in all kinds of condition. With politicians, I view experience as net negative, like how long the fish has been rotting.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_threat_from_cosmic_ra...

I wonder how much of this is the gerontocracy refusing to let go of their power vs a newer generation of politicians failing to attract enough 'middle of the road' voters towards their policies and pursuing only extreme ideologies.

It seems like the bar is far higher for younger politicians to unseat an elderly incumbent and I think this has to do with the ease of raising money if you’ve already raised money and being a known quantity for donors.

Gerontocracy is the symptom. Citizens United and court/regulatory capture are the linked causes.

This isn't just an American problem. It will happen to any system that exists for a long period of time.

The solution is to have an upper limit for candidate age, lets say 60, and an upper limit to voting age, lets say 65.

There is already a lower limit for voting, we should have and lower limit for candidate age as well, lets say 30.

And why perchance is this democratic?

Because the returns on capital outpace those on labour over most timespans, and these folk have had a lot of timespans.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_in_the_Twenty-First_Ce...

Those that contribute to society economically.. get a voice. Instead we now have old people taking on massive debts with a punk "no future" attitude.

The min age for president is double the min age to vote.

And the exclusion of minors from voting is made acceptable by existence of parents/guardians morally and legally responsible for their interests. Seniors often don't have the same.

I'd never really thought about this before, so my thinking might not be fully fleshed out here, but... the Baby Boomers are a numerically large generation. The Millenials are a large generation. Gen X is a small generation. In political circles, there is a thought that we may never see a Gen X President and will skip straight to the Millenials. Makes me wonder if part of why the Baby Boomers have been able to hang on so long really is a result of the smaller population of Gen X.

I think too that money can't be overlooked. Lots of wealth still concentrated in the Baby Boomers, and it takes a lot of money to win in politics, which Gen X and Millenials may not have (statistically speaking).

* you might think I'm a bit off here, but when I attend Democratic Party events, there are lots of Baby Boomers and some under-40s, but I'm one of the only Gen X in the room. In leadership it's similar.

What have X’ers brought but Cory Bookers or Marjorie Taylor Greenes?

https://archive.ph/9Caxc

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