Can America’s Aging Leadership Deliver the Future?
The Political Scene | The New Yorker
The New Yorker
4.3 • 3.9K Ratings
🗓️ 25 November 2022
⏱️ 34 minutes
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Summary
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?
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| 0:46.5 | I have a couple notes, but that's it on people's ages. |
| 0:52.0 | Because I'm getting so old I can't remember. |
| 0:56.8 | All right. |
| 0:57.9 | We need a millennial guest star for this appearance. |
| 1:00.1 | It's true. |
| 1:01.2 | You know, you're practically a millennial age. |
| 1:03.0 | No, I'm a geriatric gen X, I think, is the technical demographers term for me. |
| 1:07.2 | Well, that's right. |
| 1:07.8 | You know, Evan and I are, you know, sort of in the same |
| 1:11.4 | demographic cohort here. That's right. Call me boomer. |
| 1:16.8 | Welcome to the political scene, a weekly conversation about the big questions in American |
| 1:25.2 | politics. I'm Susan Glasser here in the Washington |
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