Can America’s Aging Leadership Deliver the Future?

The Political Scene’s Washington roundtable discusses whether the United States is a gerontocracy, and what that means for the country’s politics.
A banner that says “The New Yorker The Political Scene. From Washington Susan B. Glasser Jane Mayer and Evan Osnos.”

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Many of the most important and powerful people in Washington, D.C., are on the older side. Joe Biden turned eighty last week. Mitch McConnell is also eighty. Nancy Pelosi, who recently stepped away from a leadership position in her party, is eighty-two. All three of these leaders have delivered big victories for their respective parties. But there is a question of whether America is becoming a gerontocracy—a country ruled by the elderly. The staff writers Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos gather for their weekly roundtable conversation to ask: Do age and experience impart wisdom for troubled times, or can they create an inability to confront new ways of thinking?