Democracies are in huge trouble. Could they be saved if only the elderly controlled their destiny?
US President Joe Biden is not getting any younger either Photo: Samuel Corum/Pool/ABACA/imago
It's been a tough week for Democrats, whatever that word means, and there will be many more tough weeks, months, and years to come. We are just at the beginning of a massive epochal change, and the question of what democracy is then will be different than it is today.
But what exactly is democracy today? Who means what when using this word, which contains so many possibilities and contradictions that it is difficult to reduce these variants to a denominator, to a concept? Is it a set of ideals? Is it a procedure, a practice for gaining and exercising power? How contemporary are current forms of democracy really? And what society, what reality is reflected through the democratic mask?
In any case, the last few days have shown that behind this mask a kind of silent coup is taking place: the old men are in the process of taking power and, in doing so, have established a certain form of democratic practice that in many ways runs counter to the very needs of modified future demands. This was particularly strikingly clear in the television duel between the two candidates for the US presidency, Joe Biden, 81, and Donald Trump, 78, two old men in power, each with different democratic deficits.
With Trump, for whom the US Supreme Court has enabled a kind of turbo-accelerator of authoritarian desires by largely placing the power of the president above the law, another silent or not so silent blow in these desolate times; with Donald Trump, these deficits are all very clearly present. In the case of Joe Biden, on the other hand, after his disastrous performance, it must be said that these deficits are clearly related to his age and his reluctance to admit what the world has seen: he probably should not even drive a car anymore in his condition.
Where are the Democrats with common sense?
And she certainly shouldn't be running a country, basically no matter which one. How did it come to this? How could a woman like Nancy Pelosi lead the Democratic Party in the United States until the ripe old age of 82? How could it be that Ruth Bader Ginsberg refused to resign as a Supreme Court justice and died in office at the age of 87, allowing the current court to abuse its power? And how could it be that the Democratic Party today cannot nominate a candidate who is in full possession of his or her mental faculties?
Democracy is not a game like golf, which the two old men argued about in this debate for the history books of an aging democracy, before the less childish Donald Trump warned Joe Biden to return to being objective. And democracy is not a private matter of families or dynasties like the Trumps, whose daughter-in-law controls the Republican Party, or the Bidens, where it is now up to Biden’s wife Jill to withdraw (totally unlikely) or not (totally dangerous, totally irresponsible).
How can it be that the Democrats will not nominate a candidate who is in full possession of her mental capacities?
The old have an advantage
So what do you do with stubborn old people, pardon the harsh words? Or to put it another way and be serious: How do you protect democracy from older people? In France, too, it has been shown that, despite all the divisions that currently pervade societies, age is one of the most powerful: 48 percent of young people between 18 and 24 years old voted for the leftist New Popular Front, while only 18 percent voted for older people when they were 70 years old. But the electoral participation of this age group was the highest.
Older people therefore have a double advantage: in an ageing society, they continue to grow as a population group, which means that they are ever more numerous; and they are more active in a form of democracy that simply no longer works for many young voters. Because it no longer adapts to the times, because it does not deliver what it promises – justice and equal opportunities, for example – because the cards, it seems to them, are already cast.
In any case, it is not enough to mock the fact that young people do not even take advantage of their democratic opportunity. Because, for reasons that are not at all implausible, they do not believe that elections have any effect, for example because the candidates are too old. It would be much more important to allow real changes in democratic practice so that it is more permeable to all age groups and society in its diversity is also reflected in political practice, which should be representative in its name.
Claim interest
These changes include career paths and the internal logic of parties, as well as changes to electoral law, such as giving more weight to youth votes. This includes laws with an expiry date, as well as a type of policy planning that takes key fundamental issues of a society – i.e. ageing, housing, migration, climate – out of disputes between parties and shows other ways of finding collective solutions.
In the meantime, there are other options for literally suing for the interests of the future: the “future lawsuit” that Greenpeace has just launched against the federal government, for example, is a clear change in democratic practice and makes a lot of sense in view of the political paralysis of parliament and the governmental, legislative and executive branches. At this moment, the judiciary becomes more important and the courts become more important. Or, as in the United States, unfortunately an instrument of oligarchic and gerontocratic coups.