[redux] Ageism and the American presidency

I’m with family for the week, so thought I’d recirculate this newsletter which feels even more relevant than when I first wrote it four months ago. I love this country. And this presidential election cycle is so deeply alienating to me—not at all a reflection of the most honest and creative and collaborative and resilient of us.

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Like many of you, I’m terrified of a Trump presidency and trying to understand the most strategic way to never have to live through another one. One of the core considerations that keeps coming up—on Ezra Klein's podcast, on The Daily Show, on Saturday Night Live, in conversation with friends and neighbors—is President Biden’s age, 81, and cognitive fitness. The questions people seem to be asking all over America are: is he too old to run again? Is it ageist to even ask this question?

I’m convinced that these questions are rooted in a rotten frame and that, in order to substantively and spiritually counter Trump’s toxicity, we need to think differently. I’ve also been reading Naomi Klein’s brilliant book, Doppelganger, which so cogently, and accessibly, describes our political and media moment, and how we must resist its circular and hollow logic. Of the left’s relationship with the right, she writes, “I sometimes feel as if we are tethered to each other as reverse marionettes: their arm goes up, ours goes down. We kick, they hug.”

In other words, let’s not be have the conversation the right wants to have about aging. Let’s have a conversation we know is more real, dignifying, and substantive.

In this country, we’re unhealthily obsessed with formal work as the core marker of a person’s worthiness. We lionize productivity and profit. We neglect basic best practices like family leave and vacation time. We deny the basic realities of the life cycle—that there are certain times at which it is harder to show up to an office, whether it’s postpartum, in a season of disease or disability, or, indeed, as an elder whose energy is waning—due to no failure of will power, mind you, and at no standard rate, but the natural evolution of the human body.

The American presidency—both the actual functions of it and the campaigning leading up to it—are among the most high-octane professional roles one could possibly take on. It is logistically grueling, cognitively demanding, emotionally intense. It requires a tremendous amount of extroverted, performative, social, spontaneous, and intellectual energy. An 81-year-old can do it, sure, but should he have to?

When I think about the American presidency as it’s currently structured, it seems like a terrible fit for what Jane Fonda calls the “third act” of life—when we are, best case scenario, invited to decouple from our egos, climb off the ladder of success that typifies the first two acts (for better and worse), and lean into our true nature, creativity, and wisdom. Of course this third act looks and feels differently for each person, but common to all good endings is the sense that artifice has been stripped away to get to the core of a person, and that this—the shining simplicity on the other side of complexity—is what is honored and given away.

I’ve got a couple of great Jane Fonda stories. What a goddess! And yes, this is what I look like when someone official does my make-up. Weird, right?

Being of service in the “third act” is so rarely about grinding. It’s not about speed and agility and perfection. It’s about perspective—a person, like Joe Biden, who has seen a lot of life, both joyful and tragic, and lived long enough to understand what really matters. He should be able to give that to the world in a form that doesn’t deny his age, a form that acknowledges his limitations, not as personal failures, but as natural blessings (one who lives long enough to have and acknowledge the inevitable limitations of aging, after all, has gotten to live!). As Franciscan friar and ecumenical teacher, Father Richard Rohr, writes in his book, Falling Upward:

“The task of the second half of life is, quite simply, to find the actual contents that this container was meant to hold and deliver.”

Richard Rohr

The U.S. Presidency doesn’t seem like Joe’s container anymore, or at the very least, the arduous campaign required to become the president again doesn’t seem like his container.

We’re asking him to take cognitive tests and defend his slips of the tongue and perform some kind of adolescent perfection. All of this feels in line with Trump’s way of seeing the world—where frat brothers never die and a sort of delusional and unwavering virility is the goal. I don’t want the American public to fall for his framing. I don’t want Joe Biden to have to pretend to be something he’s not, at a stage and age that he isn’t. I want him to deliver himself in the right container. The American people need the gift of hard-earned wisdom more than ever, not the blustering of old men both pretending to be unaltered by time.

It that ageist? One might argue I don’t have enough imagination for the wide variety of what an 81-year-old wants and can do. I don’t want to limit my elders’ possibilities. But I do want to say…

We need you! We need you playing roles that honor your energy and beautiful limitations. We need you slowing us down, not trying to keep up with our society’s hazardous default speed. We need you nourishing the next generation of leaders. We need you offering the long view. We need you honest and crystallized and cared for. We need you resting in the truth of your worthiness, beyond official role and title. We need you!

This isn’t just true of the American presidency, by the way. We have far too few models of organizations, neighborhoods, and communities, where we have created the right size and shape roles for our elders. I’m moved by PolicyLink’s modeling, where national treasure Angela Glover Blackwell is the founder-in-residence and hosts her own podcast. I love Brenda Krause Eheart’s beautiful innovation of housing foster kids with adopted grandparents in community together. And, of course, Cogenerate, is thinking about all kinds of ways that elders might make the most of their third act in friendship and collaboration with people of different generations. We need more of these deep and wide models, and the cultural shifts that would create a different conversation in this country about aging and worthiness and how we all need one another.

When announcing his run, President Biden said it was “time to finish the job,” but every wise person knows that there is no finish line on this one. The American project is a messy one that transcends one man, one presidency, one generation. Father Rohr also wrote: “Unless you build your first house well, you will never leave it. To build your house well is, ironically, to be nudged beyond its doors.”

I think President Biden has built our house well at moments of terrific frailty in this country and now it’s time to go beyond the doors.

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I know I have some amazing elder readers in this community. Please tell me what you think! Am I off here? What are you thinking about all of this?