Gerontocracy

Back in the waning days of the Cold War, commentators in the West would express wonderment at the age of the people who led the major communist countries. In China there was the Gang of Four, led by Chairman Mao and his equally unpleasant wife. In the USSR there was the triple play of faceless apparatchiks, Brezhnev to Chernenko to Andropov.  Could never happen in our ever-changing democracies, right?

Well, apparently it can and will. It's now all but certain that the US election this fall will be fought between Donald Trump, who will be 70 years old on election day, and Hillary Clinton, a mere stripling at 69.  If Trump is elected he will be the oldest man ever to take the oath of office for the first time.

You surely don't have to have strong feelings about Trump's or Clinton's policy proposals (such as they are) to find this a profoundly depressing outcome.  Even leaving aside the non-trivial possibility that either of them could become ill or even die while in office,  these two seniors are going to be setting policy for the only major First World country that isn't already confronting the problems posed by a rapidly aging population.  If President Trump or President Clinton turns out to be an absolute disaster in the job, well, they're not going to be around for too long to suffer the consequences, are they?

Living literally five miles from the US border, we've had a ringside seat for the whole primary election process.  It's been dispiriting and scary,  and it seems it's only going to get worse from now until election day in November -- and beyond. How has it ever come to this, America?