Our Gerontocratic Youth Culture
What explains this odd paradox of an infantilizing youth culture governed by geriatric pathocrats?
Note: I started working on this post only ten days ago, but it feels prematurely dated in light of the whirlwind news cycle during that time. Such is the state of our world today. Decades are now happening in mere weeks. Nevertheless, I think the broader points raised in this post are still relevant.
Ten days ago, America was pretty clearly a gerontocracy, with 81-year-old Joe Biden as the obvious avatar for our cultural senescence. And Trump, though fully in command of his faculties, is nevertheless 78. (RFK, Jr., the other candidate for President is a relatively spry 70.) But then came that image of Trump, rising to his feet moments after being struck by a would-be assassin’s bullet, and rousing the crowd with an inspiring chant of, “Fight! Fight! Fight!” In an instant, he beamed with the vim and vigor of a man in the prime of his life. And then, Biden dropped out of the race via a social media post, which is probably the most youthful thing he’s done since taking office, and he named Kamala Harris — whom the media is trying desperately to reinvent as a “yass kween” girlboss — as heir to his tattered crown.
With Biden gone and Trump’s campaign dramatically energized, America no longer seems quite as gerontocratic as it did just ten days ago. Nevertheless, the larger points I intended to make with this post still remain valid.
Also, rumor has it that 84-year-old Nancy “Grandma Vodka” Pelosi was the one who ordered the political hit on Biden, showing that the Ancient of Years still reign supreme in the D.C. swamp. (
published a great post on that topic yesterday.) With this in mind, I decided to finish this post about our paradoxically childish gerontocracy, and publish it before the next wild news story sweeps the cultural current even closer towards that imminent moment when “some rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born”1 …
Our Paradoxical Gerontocracy
If the USA was a person, she would be a childishly immature old hag, still believing herself to be young and attractive in spite of her wrinkled skin, hunched back, and gnarled hands. Someone who unironically calls herself “sexy at 60 70 80 …” and all that nonsense. How did we end up here?
Since at least the 1960s we’ve had a “Youth Culture” in America and the rest of the NATO-occupied West. Looking back, much of it seems to have been suspiciously astroturfed (like everything else about our culture’s inorganic evolution). For example, there was the infamous “rural purge,” when television executives (more or less, simultaneously) decided to cancel still-popular programs that featured sympathetic depictions of heritage Americans living traditional lives. These shows were replaced with programs that portrayed heritage Americans as clowns and their cultural norms as backwards and bigoted.
Hmmmm … there’s something apt about that word used as a synonym for television shows: programs. When television networks make changes to the content they broadcast, they are said to have changed their programming. Like the television (or any such device with a screen) is a technology used to program a population with desirable behavioral traits, especially the young and impressionable. (And today we wonder why we have so many NPCs.) Anyway, I’m sure there are no conspiracies of Kalergi-planning elites who, after observing what promised to be a favorable trend, decided to give it their imprimatur and bless the trendsetters with lots and lots of money.
So we’ve had a youth-driven culture for at least the past 60 years. Meanwhile, we’ve also developed a late-stage-Soviet-Union style gerontocracy. Seems like a paradox, but it points to some important truths about America and the postmodern West.
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