archive.today • Opinion | Trump Is Really Old, Too - The New York Times
I scanned the article but it seemed tedious and not funny. I still had a look at the final paragraph though.
I happen to think that Democrats would be safer with a nominee who’s younger than Biden is and radiates more energy than he does. But I believe at least as strongly that if the unideal choice before Americans winds up being Biden, with his imperfections, or Trump, with his, rejecting Biden because of how old he has grown isn’t a grown-up decision.
Remember when Citations Needed came up with Ep 167: The Attractive Anti-Politics of 'Gerontocracy' Discourse and we had a whole struggle session around whether it's okay to hate old people that never really got resolved?
Due to his old age before election day Biden could...
Be incapacitated by something like a stroke.
Die.
Etc.
Due to those reasons - I don't want Biden to be the nominee. I'm not cheering for a potential second Biden term but I think a second Trump term would be a horrific.
Yeah, some degree of ageism and/or ableism seems okay when scrutinizing leaders
I struggle with the "it's ageist" vs "will (likely) not be alive to see the consequences of their choices" dichotomy but tend to think the second part outweighs the first, though I guess in some sort of idyllic world where I thought the things they were doing would be positive or that they might be removed once they became clearly mentally infirm I might lean towards "it's ageist"
There was no age where Biden had good opinions.
There's ageism, which I'm not excusing or denying the existence of in Hexbear (heck I am guilty of it myself), and then there's the borderline elder abuse that they're subjecting Biden to and which they are clearly guilty of in the case of Feinstein.
This isn't some nitpicking over George W Bush's apparent decline in his verbal fluency from his earlier days as a politician to when he took office either; in order to function properly in your role as a representative you need to be competent because otherwise there's a risk of opportunistic manipulation from people who are influential (e.g. DoD bigwigs who want to push for war and so they have decided to exploit a potentially vulnerable President) or who are close to the representative.
A person can have early onset dementia in their 30s or 40s and be incapable of effectively acting as a representative and that's not ageist, that's just a fact that must be grappled with. The reality of having political leadership that is overwhelmingly old, and thus more likely to be experiencing significant cognitive decline, is that there will be concerns about the impact of this cognitive decline on competence.
Plenty of people got behind Bernie because they felt confident in his ability to be a president despite his age because there doesn't seem to be any concerns about his cognitive ability. If people chose not to support him purely on the basis that he's too old then that would be ageism.
I also think that there's a reasonable justification for having an age limit for roles like judges and representatives because there's a risk of a situation developing where, if there are a large number of people who have held political roles for an extensive period (especially when it's the same role) then there's a risk of serious destabilisation that can occur if a whole generation of political leaders die off in relatively quick succession without having allowed for younger generations to develop into these roles and naturally replenish the political structure as they get appointed to higher positions.
(I believe there were concerns about a gerontocracy forming in China at one point and that was at least one of the factors for why they established term limits to mitigate the risks of political instability that a gerontocracy could lead to.)
And let's be honest, there's an entire disenfranchised voting bloc in most liberal democracies where people are old enough to work and old enough to pay taxes yet they are not given the right to vote until they hit the arbitrary age of 18, which is another example of ageism in the other direction which is endemic to the political landscape.