The Young Must Govern Too: Politics in an Age of Gerontocracy
By Matthew Parish
Saturday 19 September 2026
There is something peculiar about a political system in which the people making the most consequential decisions about the future are disproportionately those who will experience the least of it. This is not an argument that elderly people are foolish, incapable or unworthy of public office. Some of history’s finest statesmen have done their greatest work late in life. It is instead an argument about political ecology. A healthy democracy needs a mixture of generations, because different generations possess different kinds of experience and different stakes in the consequences of political decisions.
The United States has developed an especially striking version of this problem. The 119th Congress that began in 2025 had an average age of approximately 59. The average Senator was about 64 and the average member of the House about 57. At the beginning of that Congress, half the Senate was over 65. By contrast, Maxwell Frost, elected to the House from Florida in 2022, became the first member of Generation Z to enter Congress. Millennials constituted only about 16 per cent of Congress according to one analysis, despite representing a substantially greater share of the population.
The presidency has displayed the phenomenon even more conspicuously. Joe Biden was inaugurated in January 2021 and Donald Trump returned to the presidency in January 2025, meaning that two successive inaugurations installed presidents who were already well beyond the conventional retirement age. The point need not be converted into an assessment of either man’s abilities. Their policies, records and political philosophies can be judged independently. The remarkable institutional fact is simply that a country celebrated for perpetual reinvention has repeatedly selected leaders born closer to the Second World War than to the digital revolution.
America’s founders certainly did not imagine that youth was intrinsically unsuitable for political responsibility. The Constitution requires a member of the House to be only 25, a Senator 30 and a President 35. The constitutional structure therefore establishes minimum ages but no maximum ones. Its assumptions seem to have been that a certain amount of maturity was necessary before political power might safely be entrusted to somebody, while thereafter the electorate could make its own judgement.
That arrangement was perfectly sensible in an eighteenth-century republic. Yet the modern American political class has acquired characteristics that the constitutional architects could scarcely have anticipated. Political careers can now last for decades. Some members of the current Congress first entered federal legislative service in the 1970s or early 1980s. Senator Chuck Grassley’s congressional career, for example, began in 1975. Such longevity represents an extraordinary accumulation of institutional knowledge, but it also illustrates how American politics can become a profession from which retirement is indefinitely postponed.
This matters because the world is changing unusually quickly. Artificial intelligence, biotechnology, autonomous weapons, cryptocurrencies, algorithmic financial markets and social media are not peripheral subjects that legislators can safely delegate to specialist committees. They increasingly constitute the infrastructure through which economic, military and political power is exercised. The people writing laws about these things need not be programmers, just as a defence minister need not know how to repair a jet engine. Nevertheless political leadership requires an intuitive appreciation of the society being governed, and that intuition is partly generational.
A politician born into a world of smartphones has a different instinctive relationship with technology from somebody who encountered the internet in middle age. Neither perspective is inherently superior. The older politician may understand historical continuity, institutional fragility and the dangers of fashionable enthusiasm. The younger politician may understand how technology has altered friendship, employment, sexuality, privacy, education and political identity because these transformations formed the environment in which he or she became an adult. A legislature containing both perspectives is richer than one overwhelmingly dominated by either.
There is another, more fundamental problem. Politics involves decisions whose costs and benefits unfold across time. Climate policy, sovereign debt, pensions, artificial intelligence regulation, military alliances, infrastructure and education are all exercises in allocating resources and risks between generations. A decision to borrow today may entail taxation decades hence. A decision about artificial intelligence taken in 2026 may determine the employment market of 2046. A decision about military deterrence may shape an international security architecture that persists for half a century.
Young people therefore have a distinctive political interest that cannot entirely be represented by their elders, however benevolent those elders may be. Representation is not merely the process of discovering what policies are objectively desirable and appointing wise people to implement them. It also involves ensuring that people who must live with political consequences participate in making the choices that produce them.
This is why the argument for younger politicians should not become an argument against older ones. The problem with gerontocracy is not old age but imbalance. A parliament composed entirely of 30-year-olds would possess its own formidable collection of deficiencies. It would lack institutional memory. It might underestimate the recurrence of political mistakes because its members had never witnessed them before. Political history repeatedly demonstrates that ideas presented as unprecedented innovations are often ancient follies wearing new clothes.
The elderly statesman can remember the last occasion upon which everyone was certain that this time was different. That is valuable. The young statesman can reply that sometimes things really are different. That is valuable too. Democracy works best when the two are obliged to argue with one another.
There are nevertheless powerful institutional forces favouring age. Politics rewards accumulated networks, donor relationships, name recognition, committee seniority and mastery of party machinery. An incumbent who has spent thirty years cultivating political relationships possesses advantages that a talented 32-year-old challenger cannot easily reproduce. The longer political careers become, the more these advantages compound.
The result can become circular. Experience becomes necessary to obtain office because office is where political experience is acquired. Senior politicians dominate party organisations because they have been there longest, and party organisations select candidates partly according to whether they have accumulated sufficient political credentials. Youth is then treated as evidence of inexperience when the institutional architecture itself has prevented younger people from acquiring experience.
The economics of modern adulthood compounds the difficulty. A young American contemplating politics may have student debt, high housing costs, uncertain employment and young children. Building a political career may require years of poorly compensated local activism, fundraising and campaigning. The independently wealthy, professionally established or institutionally sponsored consequently enjoy substantial advantages. By the time many ordinary people have acquired sufficient financial security to enter politics, they are no longer particularly young.
Yet political renewal requires that democracies find ways around these barriers. This does not necessarily mean imposing maximum ages for office. Such proposals raise difficult questions about arbitrary distinctions and democratic choice. Nor does it necessarily require congressional term limits, which have their own trade-offs: removing experienced legislators can transfer practical power from elected representatives to permanent officials, lobbyists and professional political operatives.
The more interesting reform is cultural. Political parties can decide that candidate recruitment matters. They can search universities, businesses, the armed forces, charities, technology companies and local government for people in their twenties and thirties who have accomplished something outside professional politics. Donors can take younger candidates seriously. Journalists can resist treating youth as synonymous with frivolity. Voters can judge candidates according to what they know, what they have done and what they propose rather than assuming that wisdom accumulates mechanically with birthdays.
Young politicians must also earn this confidence. Youth is no substitute for seriousness. Social-media fluency is not statesmanship and viral celebrity is not political achievement. One of the dangers of demanding younger politicians is that political parties respond by recruiting influencers rather than leaders. A 29-year-old who understands how to manufacture outrage on TikTok may represent the future in a chronological sense while contributing nothing whatsoever to improving it.
The ideal young politician is therefore not somebody who advertises youth as a qualification. It is somebody whose youth permits a different perspective while whose seriousness transcends it. Such politicians should know history precisely because they did not experience much of it. They should listen to older colleagues because institutional memory matters. But they should also possess the confidence to tell those colleagues that the future cannot indefinitely be administered according to the assumptions of the past.
America has produced remarkably young leaders before. John F. Kennedy entered the presidency at 43. Theodore Roosevelt assumed it at 42. Bill Clinton became President at 46 and Barack Obama at 47. Whatever judgements one makes about their respective politics, their elections demonstrate that American voters have not historically regarded comparatively young age as incompatible with national leadership. The recent concentration upon much older presidential candidates is therefore not an immutable feature of the American constitutional order.
Indeed there is something peculiarly un-American about gerontocracy. The mythology of the United States is built upon reinvention. People cross oceans, cross continents, abandon professions, establish companies, invent technologies and reconstruct themselves. American capitalism tolerates the spectacle of people in their twenties creating enterprises that transform entire industries. Silicon Valley would consider it absurd to suggest that somebody must wait until 65 before being entrusted with consequential decisions. Politics often operates according to precisely the opposite assumption.
The contrast will become increasingly difficult to sustain as artificial intelligence accelerates social change. The coming political questions will not merely concern tax rates or adjustments to familiar welfare programmes. They may concern whether particular categories of human employment continue to exist, who owns synthetic intelligence, whether autonomous machines may make lethal decisions, how identity is established when images and voices can be fabricated perfectly, and whether democratic debate remains possible when every citizen inhabits an individually generated information environment.
These are questions for everybody, but they are especially questions for the young because the young will inhabit the societies created by the answers. A person who is 25 today may live to see the twenty-second century. The political institutions governing his or her future should contain substantially more people capable of imagining that future not as an abstraction but as their own prospective life.
The United States does not need to exchange a gerontocracy for a juvenocracy. It needs the circulation of generations upon which republican government ultimately depends. Elder statesmen should advise, caution and sometimes lead. Middle-aged politicians should bring the experience of careers, families and institutions. Young politicians should disturb assumptions, demand explanations and insist upon the political relevance of futures that established institutions find difficult to imagine.
A democracy is, among other things, a conversation between the dead, the living and the unborn. The elderly bring memory to that conversation. The middle-aged administer its present burdens. The young stand closest to those who have not yet arrived. They therefore need seats at the table, not because they are wiser than their grandparents, but because the table belongs to them as well.
