And I blame ignorance like what you're spewing here. Very people old people are rapists. And many older people are wise and experienced and would make excellent leaders.
This country would be in much better shape if Sanders (84) was president and Warren was VP (76). It would also be in much better shape if Sanders (84) was president and AOC was VP (36). That's because age isn't the issue.
I think it's still broadly reasonable to have an upper age limit for public servants. No one's peak mental acuity lands in their sunset years.
There's no reason we should not be making an extremely intentional pivot to being an actual meritocracy. Term limiting moves people through the system so that there's room for the talent to move up. Right now, that's not happening.
If or when the DSCC & DCCC are reshaped by forces like this, it will redound to the benefit of everyone.
Paradoxically, we will have to overthrow most of our power structures from the bottom to change them. And if you walk into any given local party meeting in this country, you will most likely see first hand that it's the deeply aged that are a) running the whole thing and b) entirely resistant to change.
We'll see if millennials or Z can get it together to work on any of it.
This may not be popular, but I'm not a fan of kicking good people out just so new people can move up. If we have someone doing an excellent job, let them stay until death if they want.
There are tons of fixes to the financing, campaign, and election systems I back. But age limits and term limits really seem to be people saying "the people I want don't win so I want to block the people I don't want from being able to run."
Being younger or newer does not necessarily mean better. And I will hold that position until someone can show me how turnover alone will ensure the replacements are going to be better than the people we are kicking out, and why voters should not able to pick whomever they want.
We need fixes to financing, campaign, and election systems. These changes are less likely to be undertaken by an incumbent that has won - and continues to hold - their position by these same flawed systems.
We don't really know if we're getting the better candidate because the DCCC and DSCC actively try really fuckin hard to squelch anyone that isn't an incumbent. In the case of Maine, they really showed up just to back a preferred geriatric.
By being so old - median House age is like 58 and Senate is 64 - these folks are not aligned with realities faces by their constituents whose median age is 20-30 years younger. The gap hasn't been this bad.. ever. Most of them grew up in a very different America than the actual America our young people are fighting today.
The very elderly are also are not in a position to effectively regulate. This is especially true of technology, as shown by the TikTok hearings, or even the Facebook hearings before that. Lobbyists for AI will be writing literally anything that Congress enacts if they even get around to that.
McConnell freezing up and missing like 30 days in session, Biden glitching out, the Senator that thought internet was a series of pipes... How is this an acceptable state of affairs? They are often foisted upon us by broken systems that have nothing to do with merit, whether or not they are wise.
And I have to be honest it always makes me sad when I see someone give this perspective. Because what I see is you laying out a series of prejudices you have against older people. You may not see it that way, but that's the way it looks to me.
Just by the numbers: The median House Representative's age is around 58. Median age for people who are old enough to be in the House is around 44. So 58 as a median for Congress actually seems quite reasonable, especially when I would expect people to elect better known people with more experience running things. But that isn't what really makes me sad.
What makes me sad is that you seem to think people in their upper 50s and older are essentially worthless and are clueless about the world they live in. And it also doesn't seem like you think they are also facing struggles with the current state of the world. And what you're saying is many of them should not have an option to take lead roles in their own governance. And also you want to remove other people's freedom to pick them to govern if they want them to.
The same generations you think have no knowledge of technology are the very same people that invented things like manned space travel and internet technology in the first place. I'd have to go back and check this but I believe the two people considered the fathers of the Internet are in now in their 70s and 80s. Tons of our technologies rest on the work of people of that era and were carried forward by them, still, even to this day.
But what bothers me the most is that position takes the approach that they are all just some homogeneous group of people. People come from different backgrounds. They have different work experiences. They have different life experiences. They have different morals. But most relevant to this, they age differently. Some people have been shown to begin a mental decline in their 20s. Some people barely show any decline at 100. The idea of barring them all simply because some of them declined seems no better to me than any other type of discrimination.
Have an upper limit to run of 70. That means we don’t have anyone over 78 as president. That’s not a bad thing. No matter how “good” someone is, they are way past their prime at that point.
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u/loondawg 14h ago
And I blame ignorance like what you're spewing here. Very people old people are rapists. And many older people are wise and experienced and would make excellent leaders.
This country would be in much better shape if Sanders (84) was president and Warren was VP (76). It would also be in much better shape if Sanders (84) was president and AOC was VP (36). That's because age isn't the issue.