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Janis Kliphardt (Emery)
Thanks, Vic. Dorian devastated the Bahamas - it’s slow and sheer unpredictability is causing great fatigue on the eastern seaboard. It is critical to prepare for the worst. Dorian continues to be a dangerous storm.
Beware tornadoes.
Timothy Noah, a sexagenarian and mindful of the scourge of ageism, has an article in PoliticoMagazine / September 3, 2019. Here are large chunks from his article...
America, the Gerontocracy Our leaders, our electorate and our hallowed system of government itself are aging. And it shows.
“Hate crime is rising, the Arctic is burning, and the Dow is bobbling like a cork on an angry sea. If the nation seems intolerant, reckless and more than a little cranky, perhaps that’s because the American republic is showing its age. Somewhere along the way, a once-new nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal (not men and women; that came later) became a wheezy gerontocracy. Our leaders, our electorate and our hallowed system of government itself are extremely old.
“To affirm that America must work harder to include the elderly within its vibrant multicultural quilt is not to say it must be governed almost entirely by duffers. The cause of greater diversity would be advanced, not thwarted, if a few more younger people penetrated the ranks of American voters and American political leaders.
“Remember laughing at the Soviet Politburo? The U.S. doesn’t have a Politburo, but the median age of Trump, Pelosi, McConnell, and the three leading 2020 Democratic candidates is ... uh ... 77. And it doesn’t stop there. The average age in Congress declined through the 1970s but it’s mostly increased since the 1980s. When the current session of Congress began in January, the average ages of House and Senate members were 58 and 63, respectively - slightly older than the previous Congress which was already among the oldest in history.
“The entire U.S. workforce is getting older, thanks to the aging of the Baby Boom—that giant Hula-Hoop-shaking cohort born during the prosperous post-World War II years from 1946 to 1964. But the federal bureaucracy is even older.
“The two Democratic presidential candidates proposing the most dramatic departure from the status quo are Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. Still, there’s something to be said for youth and vigor.
“We think of ourselves as a young country, and in many respects we are. No nation in the world has a written Constitution older than ours. And it shows.
“The list of the Constitution’s anachronisms and ambiguities is long. None of this would matter much if our government were more amenable to reconsidering first principles, but that’s getting harder. The Constitution can be amended, and it has been, 27 times. But growing political polarization in recent years has made that difficult. Only two constitutional amendments were ratified during the past half-century. Congress passes fewer substantive laws today than it did 30 years ago. Increased use of the filibuster (which is not mentioned in the Constitution, but has been around almost as long) almost certainly played a role, and a fed-up Senate has during the past decade started phasing out its use.
“And Congress has acquired a problem James Madison never anticipated: a reluctance to compete with the other two branches of government in the exercise of power. Political scientist, Yuval Levin concluded in a provocative June 2018 essay in Commentary that partisanship has displaced ambition to legislate. Senators and representatives now “see themselves as players in a larger political ecosystem the point of which is not legislating or governing but rather engaging in a kind of performative outrage for a partisan audience.” Though Levin didn’t put it this way, Timothy Noah believes he seems to be suggesting that Congress had grown decadent.
“A more modest theory of governmental decadence was set forward by Rauch in his 1994 book Demosclerosis. The idea was that democracy had developed arteriosclerosis because the accumulating power of interest groups over time was choking it like a weed. Demosclerosis differs from gridlock, Rauch argued, because gridlock implies that nothing gets done. Rather, Rauch wrote, in a demosclerotic government, plenty gets done, but the government’s ability to solve problems is compromised because it can’t easily reassign a finite set of resources. Old allocations must continue, and therefore new allocations can’t be experimented with. Think of it, Rauch says, like leaving a bicycle in the rain. The bicycle may be perfectly fine, but if you leave it outside long enough rust will corrode it. All things considered, Rauch says, the Constitution is in excellent working condition. But it’s machinery has been left out too long in the rain.
“Bringing a bicycle in from the rain should be within the ability of America’s somewhat doddering polity. Our gerontocracy is a bit rheumatic, but it isn’t hopeless. Still, the task will likely be easier and go much faster if a few more young hands (and minds are allowed to) pitch in."
It's time to loosen our grip on the torch. janis
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