In the 1970’s, the Soviet Union was a gerontocracy; during the first half of the 1980’s, Soviet leaders were dropping like autumn leaves. I read somewhere that Konstantin Chernenko was in the hospital for his entire term as General Secretary, where he died to make way for Gorbachev.
In the early 1930’s, the German President, Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg, was so senile that on one occasion he is said to have mistaken Adolf Hitler forold men and women Kaiser Wilhelm II.
Lately I’ve started to wonder whether there shouldn’t be an upper age limit both on serving in office and on voting. Is it really just for an 85-year-old to be making decisions whose consequences he will not live long enough to face, but with which his children and grandchildren may face for decades?
Take, for example, Brexit. Unless I’m mistaken, younger voters in the U.K. voted overwhelmingly to remain in the European Union, but were outvoted by old men and women nostalgic for the vanished British Empire. Older Americans turned out in droves for Trump in 2016; it’s all one to them whether climate change is real or not, since none of them will be around when the seas rise and the Great Plains turn to desert.
Mind you, I’m in my 60’s, and I have no children; I should be among the last to care about such things. But it strikes me that there are times when democracy is just not fair, and this is one of them.
I was poking around the Internet the other day and happened to stumble uponon, of all things, the Constitution and Canons of the Episcopal Church. I notice that there are provisions that require all who hold positions in the church to resign when they reach the age of 72. It’s a pity the authors of our federal Constitution did not include such a provision with regard to, for instance, the federal courts.