Gerontocratic Vistas
Think back to the aftermath of Super Tuesday, when it became clear that Joe Biden was going to be the Democratic nominee for president. The dominant sentiment among progressives and leftists was that the Democratic party had made yet another fatal error, had doomed itself to another defeat by picking a sleepy moderate rather than a progressive candidate who excited young people and nonvoters. After Hillary Clinton’s loss in 2016 this theory of electoral politics became all but an article of faith among progressive writers and commentators. If you nominate a boring centrist like Biden, turnout will plummet and cost you the election; if you nominate a progressive like Bernie Sanders, you’ll energize tons of nonvoters and make up for any alienated moderates.
There is no way of evaluating the truth of the second half of that claim, because Sanders didn’t win the primary, but the coming election seems like it will disprove the first half. Biden is logging huge leads over Trump in recent polls, including an astonishing twenty-point lead among voters over 65, who backed Trump by ten points last time around. Biden is also winning by huge margins among voters in the suburbs, who also went narrowly for Trump last time around. (This pattern holds true even in swing states like Florida and Pennsylvania.)
This is the exact kind of thing we were told could never happen: Sanders supporters counseled against courting moderate swing voters and centrists in the suburbs, predicting that Sleepy Joe would not generate enough enthusiasm to overcome Trump’s base. They warned that you can’t just count on people hating Trump, you have to offer them a bold vision for the future, or else they’ll stay home—Naomi Klein wrote an entire book about this called No Is Not Enough. Now, though, we are seeing that in fact it’s Trump who has an enthusiasm problem, and that “negative partisanship” among Democratic voters might be an even more effective driver of turnout than Trump’s much-discussed magnetism. “No” might indeed be enough.
In polling of many swing states, especially Florida, the groups that identify as most enthusiastic about voting this year are the same groups that have swung hardest toward Biden—voters over 65 and voters in the suburbs. Even as millions of them age into retirement and die, Boomers still have a vise grip on the national steering wheel. Having declined to abandon the Republican Party when it nominated Trump in 2016, these voters have grown tired of watching the president’s demented ravings on television and now see fit to depose him. Tens of thousands of them crossed party lines to elevate Biden in the Super Tuesday primaries, and now they are poised to push him over the finish line into the White House. This age group has such a substantial turnout advantage over young voters and voters of color that even as the composition of the Democratic electorate continues to shift, they in effect exercise a veto on the party’s nomination process. (No offense to anyone over 65 reading this email.)
Depressing as this fact is, we should note that it’s also ironic. Since at least 2004, Democratic strategists have been counting on “demographic inevitability” to shift the balance of the Electoral College: an influx of young voters and Latinx voters was supposed to deliver them Florida, Arizona, and maybe even Texas. More than fifteen years later, the Democrats may finally lock down all three of these Sun Belt states, but only thanks to the legions of elderly voters who have flocked to the suburbs and retirement homes of Dallas, Phoenix, and Naples. It is this same bloc that turned out in force during the Democratic Primary to elevate Biden over Sanders, who was by far the favorite candidate of Latinx voters.
America is through and through a gerontocracy: it’s not just that our politicians are old white men, but the people who elect them into office are also mostly old and white. The Democrats could have countered Trump’s xenophobia and racism with a bold progressive agenda, but they didn’t, and they are going to be rewarded for it. Even as Biden has reportedly come to a private realization about the need for big structural change, his campaign has offered no vision for such change; indeed he is hardly campaigning at all, having cut off his embarrassing TV appearances and reduced himself to tweeting in support of Signore Fauci. There is no indication that any of this will matter: debate gaffes aside, the ever-passive Biden will probably win on the basis of an almost aesthetic hatred for Trump among moderates and independents. Even if he somehow manages to lose Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, the voters in The Villages will most likely throw him the grand prize, the Sunshine State, where twenty percent of voters are over the age of 65. Of course president’s catastrophic response to a disease that disproportionately kills the elderly has probably had something to do with this shift, but if you look at the numbers from Super Tuesday, you can see that the battle lines had already been drawn.
In the decade since the recession there has been a massive upward transfer of personal wealth from younger Americans to older Americans. The main vehicle for that transfer has been homeownership, which millennials can no longer afford because we spent too much money on avocado toast. Indeed if you take a long view of the twentieth century, homeownership is arguably the mechanism that built our present political landscape in the first place, leading to the expansion of the suburbs and the ravages of the subprime mortgage crisis while marginalizing and disenfranchising Black residents who were confined to gerrymandered urban areas. The fact that the older Americans who have accumulated this material capital should have an equally tight grip on political capital should not be surprising; that the suburbs are now poised to deliver us from Trump should be a cause for reflection, if not celebration.
What I’ve Been Writing
I reviewed a new book about Miami and climate change for The Baffler.
Not much else in the past month—I’ve been working on a few larger projects that I’m hoping I can share more about soon, and fact-checking a forthcoming book that is going to be really, really good.
What I’ve Been Reading
Books
Solomon Gursky Was Here by Mordecai Richler, a family saga about a clan of Canadian Jews who get rich running booze across the border during Prohibition. Have been getting into Canadian lit lately since I can’t actually go to Canada this summer.
Max Havelaar by Multatuli, a nineteenth-century Dutch novel about the exploitation of peasants in Indonesia. Absolutely batshit, I’m not sure I’d recommend it.
Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee, I’m late here but it’s a wrenching, wretched book.
And I’m almost done with The Idiot by Elif Batuman. Definitely making me glad I didn’t get in to Harvard.
Articles
Fracking companies are shutting down, paying out millions to their executives, and leaving their wells to spew methane into the atmosphere. (New York Times)
Trump’s new Postmaster General is ordering postal workers to delay mail delivery, which I’m sure won’t have an adverse impact on the election. (Washington Post)
It took the coronavirus pandemic to redeem Connecticut’s bad bet on the suburbs. (Wall Street Journal)
The price of EU carbon credits has never been higher, signaling confidence in a “green recovery.” (Financial Times)
Jane Mayer on the alliance between Trump and Ron Cameron, owner of one of the largest U.S. poultry companies. How does she do it? (New Yorker)
How private equity and a blitz of discrimination lawsuits brought down unicorn jewelry company Alex and Ani. (Marker)
My friend Sabrina Imbler on the thistledown velvet ant, which is actually a wasp. (New York Times)
How a heartthrob from the Qatari royal family lived it up as a student at USC. He had a graduate student act as his academic “sherpa.” (LA Times)
India built a mini-surveillance state to supervise more than 250 million festival attendees. (Rest of World)
Saidiya Hartman: “What we see now is a translation of Black suffering into white pedagogy.” (Artforum)
Anne Applebaum—daughter of the Republican elite, wife of a right-wing Polish politician, friend of Boris Johnson, former editor at The Economist—has just now concluded that liberal internationalism is flawed. Welcome to the party, Anne. (The Guardian)
Speaking of “Welcome to the Party,” Jon Caramanica on Pop Smoke’s last days. (New York Times)
Pankaj Mishra is the only person you need to read on the US and UK’s failed responses to the coronavirus pandemic…
…and Patricia Lockwood is the only person you need to read on, uh, whatever Patricia Lockwood is writing about. (Both from London Review of Books)
A history of cheap food and the politics thereof, going back to the Victorian era. (TLS)
RIP the Segway, the “grandfather of micro mobility” invented too early for the era of Bird scooters and bike shares. (Bloomberg)
And finally, Moira Weigel on the CEO of Palantir’s dissertation about Adorno and the Frankfurt School. (b2o)