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- [00:00]
A
I think black people should have more votes than I do. John Stuart Mill believed, you know something that I don't believe, which is that those of us with doctorate should have more votes. And now the good fight with Yasha Monk.
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B
Do old people rule America? Why is it but our last two presidents have been so old? Why is it that there are so many old people in the Senate and to some extent in the House of Representatives? Is it true that even in academia, in private industry, old people now have a disproportional amount of power? And is this a specifically American problem? Or do the United States actually compare well in this regard to Germany or China or other countries around the world? And what should we do about all of that? Should we, for example, give 20 year olds six, seven times more votes than 80 olds? Well, that is what my guest in this episode of the podcast argues. Samuel Moyn is the Kent professor of Law and History at Yale University and he is the author of a new book called Gerontocracy in America. In the last part of this course conversation, we talk about a couple of rather different topics from earlier in Sam's work. We talk about his attempts to historicize and perhaps to some extent attack the importance the prominence of human rights discourse in our contemporary politics. Can the idea of human rights play an important role today? And to what extent is it a mistake to attack it if the result is even worse things happening in the world? And finally, Sam and I talk about our long standing set of tensions and disagreements and perhaps in some areas surprising agreements about the Trump era. Was the response to Trump in 2016, 2017 mostly good or mostly bad? Were people right to warn about him as a threat to democracy? And did they do that in ways that actually helped us to understand the phenomenon, fight back against it? Or is it one of the reasons why a true end to this era of turmoil in American politics still doesn't seem to be in sight? To listen to that part of the conversation, to support the podcast, to support what we do here, please become a paying subscriber. And this week I'm throwing in the best discount we ever give. 30% off your first year of subscription, bringing the cost of one week of subscription to about $1. The cost of one episode of this to about 50 cents. Please, if you can support us, go to writing.jashamunk.com 2026 to become a paying subscriber, that's writing to dashamonk.com 2020. Sam Wine welcome to the podcast.
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A
Thank you for having me.
- [03:17]
B
So the old People have a problem. Why are the old people the problem, Sam?
- [03:22]
A
Well, I don't think the old people are a problem. I think gerontocracy is in the same way that, you know, whites may not be a problem, but white supremacy is real. And so my goal is to kind of actually show how old people or older people actually sometimes suffer, too, under a regime of gerontocracy, and just to kind of look at how that regime came about, what its current form is, not just for the sake of younger folks, but also for the mass of older people themselves.
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B
All right, I'll refrain from being flippant for the rest of the conversation, but walk us through some of the ways in which America is ruled by gerontocracy today.
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A
Well, in the book, I look at the first coinage of the term. I mean, it's not Greek, but it's based on Greek words. So it's supposed to kind of add a dimension to our classification of forms of government like monarchy or oligarchy. And yet the person who coined it made very clear that it was taking a kind of different form in modern times. That had to do with the organization of the electoral system, you know, how people have elections and in a democratic society. And then it has a lot to do with how wealth is allocated and transmitted. So I definitely talk about the politicians of our day, who in America are old men and women. But I am mainly interested in showing that gerontocracy is systemic in that way and that it affects, you know, what it means to go to the polls and the outcomes, how elections are financed and then how our economy is organized. Because I have this sense that we should think about power in the broadest sense, rather than just look at who's in office, as the Greeks did, primarily look more at who has power, which means effective control of the lives of most people.
- [05:48]
B
So let's go through some of these areas. Right. As you're saying, politics is the kind of most straightforward. And then there's ones that you think are perhaps more important or deeper. But just at a purely descriptive level, what's the evidence that old people are ruling us in Congress, in the White House, and so on in a way that hasn't been the case in past eras of American politics.
- [06:10]
A
Well, the most graphic evidence, if we're talking about the United States, is the two most recent presidents. There had really only been one very old man in the presidency before Ronald Reagan, and that was William Henry Harrison, who died in short order of a cold in the 19th century. But, yeah, with Reagan we began to see older and older men in office, capped by the last two presidents, Joe Biden and Donald Trump. Now, in fairness, more than half of humanity is ruled by an old man over 70 at this point, and that's largely because of the aging of Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping and so forth. But the American syndrome is specific. And what I try to do, although I think this is tolerably well known too, is go beyond the focus on Biden and kind of cognitive decline to ask about, well, just how unrepresentative is the political class generally in the United States, looking in particular at Congress and the federal judiciary? And, you know, I, I, I don't want to like, get into numbers, but, you know, what I've tried to do in the book across all these topic is, is just provide the receipts mainly generated by other people and gather them in one place. And so Congress is aging, the Supreme Court is aging in the sense that even when appointed young, the justices stay for a long time. And aside from cognitive decline, the risk of death is a very serious aspect of the problem. You know, Donald Trump's one big beautiful bill was facilitated in his passage by the death in droves of Democrats in the House in the six months before that bill. And then, of course, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, formerly notorious for other reasons, died setting up the end of federal abortion rights. So, you know, all of that pales in the end if we're talking about the political class beside like, yeah, representational fairness, because, you know, cognitive decline or death are just like the flagrant symptoms of a broader political class that's old, very few people in their 30s and 40s and in any position of significance in the federal government. So that's the story when it comes to politicians.
- [08:50]
B
So what do you think is the explanation here? Obviously, when it comes to president. You said that that's been the trend since Ronald Reagan. Ronald Reagan was quite old when he assumed the presidency, but the three presidents afterwards were relatively young. Right. He was followed by Bill Clinton, then George W. Bush and Barack Obama, all of which were reasonably young men at the time they took office. And where some of the dynamics in the Senate particularly, and perhaps in the House of Representatives have to do with very specific American institutions, I think that's harder as an explanation for the presidency. So what I mean by this is that if you're an incumbent senator, you have particularly in a safe state of which there are now very many right, on both sides, it's very hard to displace you. And so if you're 78 years old and you're running for reelection, you probably wouldn't win in a primary contest when you're first being elected. But with 25 years of service and all the favors that are owed to you and all the fundraising muscle at your disposal, you may be able to hold off a primary challenge, and then you're going to sail to re election in Texas or in Massachusetts, if you're in the right political party. The presidency is kind of harder to explain. In 2020, Joe Biden faced a lot of younger and much younger rivals for the Democratic nomination, and yet voters in the primaries freely chose him. In 2024, Donald Trump faced a number of opponents who are quite a bit younger than him, but he clearly was able to actually retain the loyalty of the Republican primary electorate to such an extent as to gain reelection. And I haven't seen analyses that may be out there which show that there's a very obvious age gradient in which primary voters voted for those candidates. But in 2024, for example, it's not clear to me that the people who voted for Trump in Republican primaries were systematically older than the people who voted for his rivals. And even in the election itself, there was less of a kind of age difference than we might have expected. And most of that is produced by partisanship rather than a kind of preference for a particular kind of age. So what do you think produces this? And if this is the free choice of American voters, I'm free to disagree with that choice. I think there's good reasons to disagree with that choice in both of those cases. But it's sort of unclear that we shouldn't just leave it to American voters to make their own decisions rather than telling them what kind of decision they should make instead. Right.
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A
So one reason why I'm interested in pushing beyond politicians in general and not just the president, is I agree there's a lot of contingency and idiosyncrasy in, in the political story. And yet it's the one that, to the extent Americans care about age and politics that they care about. So I'm using it as a door now. I agree with you. I'd even add on your presidency story that if Donald Trump were to, you know, fulfill, you know, the fondest hopes of those who've resisted him and depart or die within a year, we'd immediately have the youngest president in U.S. history because J.D. vance would enter the office at an age younger than Theodore Roosevelt, who currently holds the record for young president.
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B
And when you look at some of the leading Democratic contenders for the nomination in 28, they go from kind of middle aged men like Gavin Newsom to very young contenders like aoc.
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A
Yeah. So I mean the foundations of, of what I'm thinking of is the structure of gerontocracy as, as a structural phenomenon that goes beyond these contingencies and therefore leads us beyond the level of politicians. I mean, the main driver is going to be the aging of humanity and certainly of Americans. But I guess I would, you know, push back a bit on the moral. You, you seem to, you know, like hypothesize when, when it, it turns out that there's a lot of contingency in accounting for the age of politicians. So first, you know, voters only select and express, you know, their candidates and express their preferences within a system and we have to like, you know, critically inquire into that system. So let's, you know, continue to take, you know, my analogy of like white supremacy is something like many people would acknowledge exists and it may like be systemic in the way that I'm saying gerontocracy is. And like if, if, if you said, well, oh, you know, after the Supreme Court's decision in Calais, no black politicians are being elected in the deep south anymore. And like the, you know, that would be, you know, is that the will of the people or is it because of the way the will of the people has been organized in an electoral system? So we really would have to get to that whole topic. But as far as I see it, it really matters that they're the advantages of incumbency, which you mentioned, which means that especially when politicians in America are starting their careers later, um, you're just going to have an older set of politicians than, than the, the, the electorate and certainly than the population. And then we'd have to get into campaign finance where the, the facts are glaring about just how old the median campaign donor is, like over 60, sometimes higher. And you know, like I, I devote a whole portion of the book to something else which is, you know, thinking about gerontocr political level not just in terms of the politicians, but in terms of the institutions. So you know, we, we do literally have a branch of government named after old men and we do have age, a minima in the Constitution for federal political office with no age maxima. So those are also features of the way we've organized political choice. And you know, you're the trained political scientist. I'm just whatever I am. And you know, we, we can't say the will of the people as if that's preexisting because it utterly depends for its expression on the institutions we've devised and the rules we're following to figure out what it is.
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B
And perhaps we'll get into a little bit later what we should do about those institutions, what kind of ways to reform them. I think certainly when it comes to something like abolishing age minima, I think there's a very strong democratic and liberal reason to abolish them. I think some of the suggestions you make in the book are rather more ambitious, and we may have different views about that, but we can get into that. Let's get beyond on politics. As somebody who is an immigrant to the United States, having grown up in Europe, I've always been struck by how open American society is to the talents and contributions of young people. I feel that a little bit less now that people in my age group in Germany and France and so on are coming to have genuine roles of importance and responsibility in society. But I was struck when I was 30 years old that I had many friends and acquaintances in the United States who already had positions teaching at major universities, positions editing publications or at least important sections of publications, very significant roles in law firms and investment banks. Obviously, when you look today at Silicon Valley, you have an enormous amount of people in their 30s who have about as much power and influence as any human being has had in the history of humanity, by certain standards. And this stood in contrast to a lot of 30 year olds in Germany still being interns, still to sort of somebody getting to be the editor of a newspaper section of a major publication at the age of 30, being a sort of incredibly exceptional achievement, which you would say, oh, do you know this guy had edited this section of his newspaper by the age of 30. Right. I mean, it's amazing. When I worked in theater after college for a year, my first task as an assistant director was to hire an intern. And I was 21 years old and the intern that we ended up hiring was 29. Right. So to what extent is it true, when you look at American society more broadly, that there is this kind of gerontocracy? Isn't America still in many ways the country of the young that have enormous opportunities if they have the right kind of education and perhaps the right kind of background and the various advantages that play into that in a system that is not always as meritocratic as it claims to be? But isn't it actually striking how much influence and power and money a lot of young people have in the United States compared to anywhere else in the world?
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A
Well, Oscar Wilde famously said that the youth of America is its only tradition. Now I don't think that's true. I see the US Constitution as a gerontocratic document and the ways we've already addressed and that's like, you know, a big tradition. But I agree with you and it's one reason why I, I'm interested in, in thinking about the American case that at times America has stood for, for launching youth and you know, even providing, you know, careers open to talent. I mean, I, I think you, you know, might overstate the transatlantic gulf insofar as I think the whole point of modernity was to topple, you know, elder rule and put in place opportunity for young people. You know, the whole modern novel and its roots in, in the so called Bildungsroman is about the opportunities that then young men could enjoy after the revolution on the model of Napoleon. So I wouldn't, I wouldn't sign on to some sense that like, as a, you know, like there's just like that stark a difference. I agree with your anecdote, but the question is what's happening now? And the demography, I think is unsuitable for the picture of America, you're saying still prevails. Or, you know, I'm not denying has like I got to be an Ivy league professor at 29 and I got to have tenure shortly after. So it's, I have had enormous opportunity as a youth. Many of my students have not. Some have been the editors of those publications you mentioned, but in part because they were blocked in becoming professors in a way I, I wasn't. And so the general story has to be that our demography is changing with fewer young people and an overwhelming absolutely and relatively of aging people who are not suffering decline and are not forced out of, out of their power. The baseline is changing. And that's the very modest claim I'm making.
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B
Yeah. So I guess on this, I guess I just wonder whether we need to distinguish between areas of American life and the American economy where you're not just distributing a fixed number of positions of influence and opportunity and ones in which you are now for a variety of reasons, I think universities, and particularly humanities department within universities and particularly humanities department studying the sorts of things that you and I studied when we were applying for faculty jobs are just at the extreme end of that distribution. Universities have not increased their numbers in part because it is an oligopoly that is trying to protect its prestige. The faculty of Columbia University recently voted by something like 80 or 90% against admitting more students to the opportunities that university may give to people. The number of students studying the humanities has crashed for the last 20 or 30 years for a whole set of reasons. Within the humanities, political theory, my discipline, and European intellectual history, your discipline or intellectual history, your discipline, are very much out of fashion. And so in those very specific areas of American life, there is indeed a highly limited number of positions and opportunities. And if professors no longer have to retire and some of them choose to stay in post until they're 75 or 80 or 85, that means that young doctoral students don't have an opportunity to take up those faculty jobs. I wonder whether the lesson of that is that universities should actually expand opportunity, that humanities need to reform themselves to actually attract some undergrads who want to study the humanities, that perhaps the institutional priorities of who's getting hired are sometimes wrong in these universities, where we should hire more professors rather than more administrators, and all kinds of lessons which are more specific to this particular case rather than the broader thesis. Now, when it comes to the broader economy, it doesn't strike me that it's the case that Most talented driven 25 year old or 30 year olds don't have enough opportunities to go and join banking or artificial intelligence, or that there's not enough capital to go around for them to do a startup, or that they can't become pharmacists, or that they can't become teachers and so on and so forth. Right. So I guess to what extent are we overgeneralizing from the world that you and I know, and despite our occasional ideological disagreements, I think probably have a bunch of things we disagree about in terms of our analysis of what's dysfunctional about them. But there may not actually be typical of what's going on in American society, in the American economy more broadly.
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A
Obviously that's a really fair question. And I don't mean to stake my case on academic gerontocracy in part because in the few pages I address it, it's really addressed as its own distinctive idiosyncratic phenomenon. However, aspects of it turn out to be more familiar than your kind of binary presentation suggests. I do agree that like we are a bit illusioned about the general picture because of, of certain vanguard sectors of the economy which do indeed provide youthful opportunity. And Silicon Valley would be the classic example. But most of the, the, the analysis I give of the job situation is making the point not about the academic scene, but about American business more generally, which has features that resemble universities to the extent that there are apex positions and there's a pyramid of authority, and the higher you go, the older you are in, in the last 30 years. And in part, the reason is that across these sectors, mandatory retirement, which was once a familiar element of American, you know, of the American employment landscape, was abolished in the later 1980s through the early 1990s. And, and, but more generally, I think all of these sectors involve aging Americans who are being not just kept alive, but in at least to themselves, a high enough functioning state to, you know, indulge the illusion that they've still got their mojo and they, they stay. And so we're really talking about most sectors of where, where American innovation is at stake. And, and, and then Silicon Valley would emerge as, as a kind of outlier. So that I don't, I don't want to overgeneralize. But of course, the reciprocal, you know, trouble is, you know, undergeneralizing or saying academia is like just an exception to the rule, which it's not.
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B
No, that's, I think, fair. But I guess there is a distinction between areas where the argument seems immediately compelling, which is politics and academia. And they're kind of united by having a relatively stagnant number of positions that are to be meted out. There's only one president, there's only 100 senators, you know, and sadly, the faculty of major universities hasn't expanded in the way that it might have.
- [26:06]
A
I agree with.
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B
And then areas where. Right. I mean, now you're right. But if you look at, I guess, CEOs of S&P 500 companies, by definition, there's 500 of them. So, you know, opportunity in the economy as a whole does seem to be a little bit of a different story.
- [26:23]
A
Well, The S&P 500 take up a gargantuan percentage of the economy as a whole. And then if we, if we're interested in, like, those who own their own businesses, you know, they're even less constrained and more likely to stay. Now, that may be permissible. And one, you know, now we're really talking about employment, not things in general or the economy in general. And I actually am very modest in this regard. I agree with you that we need to analyze sector by sector, industry by industry. Where is there a supply of younger people who are objectively blocked because of a bottleneck failure to organize succession? Until recently, at least, big law, which is, you know, you know, another elite profession, was a kind of outlier in requiring mandatory departure of their senior partners. And that's eroding now, but it was actually a kind of a sector that preserved a sense of the importance of arranging intergenerational succession of counsel for those who have legal problems. And it could be legally structured in such a way to sidestep ordinary prohibitions and federal law of mandatory retirement. And so that would be a different sector, although actually it's increasingly looking like the dominant form. So I guess maybe the difference between us is, you know, whether to resolve all the complication in the direction of saying there's like a dominant situation. I think that's the case. Or do we really see, like a few pockets of gerontocracy and it's less. It's kind of more a minor problem to deal with, let's say, in those few sectors where it's significant. And I think I just. That can't be right, because it's too general, even if we shouldn't overgeneralize.
- [28:28]
B
Yeah. And I even have a sort of strong dog in this fight, I have to say. I think that there's something clearly intuitive and appealing about the thesis of a gerontocracy in America. And there's certain elements, particularly in the political system and perhaps in academia, where that strikes me as being right. I also perhaps have a comparative instinct, or where this problem just seems to be so much more pronounced in every other society I know, whether that is China, looking at the composition of the Central Committee of a Communist Party and all of a kind of top political officials, whether it's the fact that a lot of young people who are graduates of the most prestigious universities that it's incredibly hard to get into, feel like they're never going to be able to afford an apartment in Shanghai and Beijing if they don't stand to inherit one, whether that is extreme rent protection laws that mean that if you came to Beijing or Shanghai from a countryside in the 70s or 80s, you probably live in a big apartment in the center. But as a result, everybody else has that problem. Right. Or obviously, looking at Europe, Right. You know, there you have additional problems, which in part you now have in China as well. If you find employment where, you know, you have an extremely generous pension system, as in France, where pensioners now, on average, have more money at their disposal, get more money every month than have more income every month than working people in the United Kingdom with a triple lock, which basically makes sure that pensions are always going to outgrow the salaries of working people by definition, as long as the policy stays in place and all of that is purchased at such strong levies on work that you have a huge problem of youth unemployment that by and large, you don't have in the United States. Now you can see that as a glass half empty or a glass half full. You can either look at that and say, you see, gerontocracy is actually a problem beyond America and perhaps America is in danger of ending up with the same depth of problems and that makes the problem even more urgent. Or you can say, well, but also Americans are a little bit spoiled and they should look at the ways in which other countries have this problem so much worse and appreciate what Americans have.
- [30:44]
A
I love those points. I mean, in the end, I'm always going to want to transcend comparison to other places that are worse in the name of comparison to what society ought to look like and how it ought to be organized more generally. I think the comparisons are complex because Western Europe is indeed suffering, you know, as in, in just to take its capitalist growth compared to the United States right now. And so it's producing fewer jobs, you know, for young people, even though in the American case those may be what David Graeber called jobs. But you know, at the same time, Western Europe has a much more kind of widespread culture of retirement. It has a welfare state that comparatively enables retirement and allows Western Europeans to avoid fear of, of decline in a way that Americans, not just because of their work ethic, but because of their extreme fear of what their long term, you know, situations will be like, can't afford to do. And you know, it's not surprising then that not just professors at, you know, the pinnacle UK institutions, but all professors across Western Europe are subject to mandatory retirement rules. And that's true in many industries. So like, I see a lot of bright spots in Western Europe and a lot of resources for the anti.
- [32:17]
B
But what does it buy you if, if people have to retire at 65, but young people have a problem of mass unemployment? I mean, wouldn't you rather have people not having to retire and there's actually opportunity for young people?
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A
Well, absolutely, but there may, there may be sectors in which there's actually a choice. And I think, you know, I've made the argument now that academia in America is like much of, of organized business, especially in large firms where there are a lot of folks in the firm who have the same experience of serving endlessly under old men and women and the market wants them to leave. And actually the stock price of companies actually increase when an old leader finally gives up power, whereas it actually goes down when a younger CEO falls ill or dies unexpectedly. And so in the name of growth, you might really want to Take seriously how widespread the pipeline issues are and then argue in the cases where that's true, we should want to combine growth with, and in the name of growth, mandatory retirement.
- [33:45]
B
Yeah, I give an argument. I guess I'm just struck by the fact that again, comparing those places, the United States seems to me to have both a lot more opportunity for young people and a lot fewer rules about old people having to retire. So it seems superior on both of those metrics in terms of the opportunities it gives to people than Germany or France.
- [34:07]
A
I would have thought as millennial. I would think most millennials have a generational experience of living after the 20089 financial crisis and feeling an immense sense of blockage since, and that may not be shared universally. And it doesn't mean that they don't have jobs available to them if they may not be the jobs they wanted. So I don't know, like it really. I, you know, I, I take your points, but I worry about, you know, vast generalizations when we really should look sector by sector and figure out is it true that America is already this neoliberal utopia where because of the lack of rules, it's the land of opportunity for all comers? Not really.
- [35:03]
B
Well, that's not exactly what I said. But what do you think we should do about this? What is the set of responses that we should have on that, including in the political realm where you make some really quite provocative ideas?
- [35:18]
A
What's helpful about your questions is that we've really isolated kind of jobs, both political and non political, from the kind of overall analysis where, as I said, I'm as focused and maybe more focused on the political system, gerontocratic institutions, you know, the, the organization of elections, and not just jobs in the economy, but, you know, the economy more generally. However, if we're going to talk about jobs, I believe in age limits as well as youth quotas, which again, we can look to Western Europe principally for inspiration for the latter. The trouble with term limits, which is is very popular, like age limits among Americans when polled, is that Americans are entering their political careers later in life. And term limits, let's say, merely give them a time limit. Age limits have a virtue of guarding against the risk of cognitive decline or death, at least to a much greater extent. And youth quotas, I think are really exciting because no matter where you set a limit on service, you're basically going to have many or most politicians kind of closer to that limit than we would like in a kind of, you know, like the bulk of them and what we really See, as the problem, I think, is not cognitive decline or death, as I said earlier, but just a lack of representation for most age cohorts. So youth quotas allow us to correct that to some extent.
- [36:59]
B
So age limits is a slightly broad term. What do you think is an appropriate age limit for or a senator, a professor, you know, a CEO?
- [37:09]
A
I'd go for 70 right now, but nothing really. I mean, I don't care. You know, I'm more committed to the philosophical idea, you know, especially as our life expense goes up and it may go up in leaps and bounds. I don't think it will. But there's, you know, we have to like, leave open the possibility that that will happen. And so the number has to be flexible and open to change. But as of today, I'm for 70. Ish.
- [37:35]
B
So you're the Kent professor of Law and History at Yale University and you're the head of Grace Hopper College. I believe if you introduced age limits of 70 for the professoriate, that would give you about 16 more years of service. Are you willing to pledge to retire when you turn 70?
- [37:51]
A
Oh, I've done it in the Chronicle of Higher Education. I kind of spun off the few pages in the book about Gerontocracy, and I did commit to that there, but it's not a problem because I've been baked. I would love to retire now. And I really think in my. Myself as semi retired to begin with and maybe we'll talk about retirement. But you know, I've tried to, in
- [38:13]
B
a sense, for retirement for academics is kind of fake, right? I mean, I was speaking to a very prominent academic the other day who was saying, I'm really thinking about whether to retire next year or the after. Oh, how come? And they're saying, well, because it allowed me to write more books. Right? I mean, so. So it's sort of like, why do you no longer need the money? And obviously I love teaching. I'm sure you love teaching, you know, but at some point you think, oh, I want to focus on my writing. But that's not really retirement in the way that it is for most people. And a lot of people love their jobs, but they have jobs where when they retire, they no longer get to do their jobs. Right. And that's kind of different for us where at least a lot of our jobs is to do things that we get to do more of if we retired from our faculty positions.
- [38:51]
A
That's true. And I discuss this in the book. My own view is that we should think of retirement at least as A default as a last chance to reinvent yourself. But it's just true that some people will have an experience of their vocations. That is it, it makes it impossible for them to give it up kind of existentially. Now I think that's a kind of. It's, it's, it's, it's a mistake for them existentially when that's the case. But I'm not going to like, mandate that they go fishing. And anyway, is fishing really, you know, a good, an acceptable way to spend your retirement?
- [39:29]
B
Tell us about some of the political proposals. So one of the proposals is that you sort of float this, that perhaps I forget the exact details. You get one vote if you're 80 or over, and when you get two votes if you're 70 or over, and you get free votes if you're 60 or over, all the way down to toddlers. Not quite. How seriously do you mean that proposal? And what about just the very straightforward objection that the point of democracy is meant to be one person, one vote? And that perhaps some of our constitutional realities, like the ban on running for Presidents before you're 35 or once they should go out of a window, that we should approach a principle of one person, one vote more rather than less, and saying that simply on the arbitrary basis of which year you were born and you suddenly are supposed to have 5 times more vote then the other person going to cast a ballot next to you, that seems like a pretty fundamental violation of that foundational democratic principle.
- [40:27]
A
Awesome. So there's a general discussion to have about just how bad electoral gerontocracy is. Even when you and others are rightly on a campaign for our democracy, we really have to reckon with the truth about what we're defending, which is an electoral gerontocracy. And then there's a long list of remedies, many of which all of which actually are less radical than the one you're speaking of now. But let's talk about it because I'm into it, let's say philosophically. So first, it's just not true that we should think of democracy as involving one person, one vote. It certainly doesn't in the United States anyway, right now because of the Electoral College and Senate, which basically overweights the votes of those from less populous states by constitutional design. But more generally, actually, you know, the idea of one person, one vote became like an article of faith in the United States largely as a result of Supreme Court decree in the context of the civil rights era. If you go back to the origins of democracy and mass suffrage. In the 19th century, there were very widespread proposals for, you know, plural voting and organizing voting generally very differently than we do. And there were like, there was an argument for it. Now, the argument I would make is that what does it mean to be equal in a democracy? Right now, we basically say if you have one body, no matter its age, you should get one vote. And what if we had a principle of equality that said your vote should be correlated with how much time you have left so that we don't overweight, which we do now, the vote of those who are closer to death, therefore, less likely to see and live under.
- [42:29]
B
So if you're diagnosed with a very serious disease that foreseeably leads to demise within the next five years, you should get your vote discounted.
- [42:38]
A
I mean, I wouldn't because, like, all of this is about policy making, Yasha. And so, like the policy to have so called one person, one vote is a policy of systematically overweighting the votes of those who are older, one could argue.
- [42:57]
B
But why is it overweighting them? It's weighting them equally.
- [43:00]
A
Well, only on one conception of equality. Because the question is, what are we equalizing bodies or life expectancy? And so another way of thinking about
- [43:12]
B
it is let's draw this back to democratic theory a little bit, right? The basic problem of society is that I have a bunch of boneheaded ideas about how we should be governed, and you have a bunch of boneheaded ideas about how we should be governed. And there isn't a God or some kind of objective authority that's gonna tell us whether you're right or whether I am right. And so we're trying to design a set of institutions that we can all somehow live with because we realize that not having political organization at all or taking up arms in order for me to clobber your boneheaded ideas out of your mind is not worth it. The cost of that is too high. I might not win. In the meanwhile, we're all going to suffer. And so the whole point of democracy, from that point of view, is to say there isn't one person who's in some way superior to the other. We should all have the same amount of voice. And I don't think the idea of one person, one vote, but is some kind of epiphenomenal invention. It flows relatively logically from that principle. Now, that doesn't mean that this is perfectly respected in the United States or in any other democracy. And we can certainly discuss reforms, whether that's Campaign finance, whether that's reforms to the electoral college that would allow us to more fully live up to this. To sort of claim that there isn't some fundamental set of reasons why you might think that one person, one vote really speaks to the basic aspirations of a democratic system is, I think, to ignore something quite important.
- [44:47]
A
The history just doesn't back you up. I mean, it wasn't obvious until it was. And that's among other reasons why everyone, all liberals, you know, believed for a long time that what matters would. Was your. Not that you had a body that was alive, but that you had an adequate stake in the election and the capacity to exercise the relevant judgment. And then there was one person, one vote among those people. So that that was hegemonic for a very long time. And you know, maybe there were some folks who said there were exclusions in the same way that I could say, well, you know, children and prisoners are kept from voting in the United States even though they have bodies that are alive. And. But my actual point is somewhat different, which is that to me, it's, it, it could be we could imagine historical circumstances in which it becomes equally intuitive to say that what the equality that matters is the equality of your stake in the election. And that actually was the rule, as I suggested for much of the history of democracy, because it was a natural thought to those early Democrats that you couldn't have a stake in the election without education and more important, property, because that's what, that's what made politics matter, is how property was going to be protected or not. And you couldn't have, you couldn't participate without that. So I just, you know, we can look cite some history books if you want, but it's just not true what you're saying.
- [46:31]
B
Well, here I think we've come to our fundamental difference, which is that you're an intellectual historian, I'm a political theorist. So we have different. I wasn't making history.
- [46:39]
A
Political theorists who believe the opposite of
- [46:42]
B
what I didn't take myself to be making a historical claim. I was.
- [46:45]
A
Oh, okay. No, I agree. It's totally intuitive. Now you're right that it's totally intuitive. I guess I'm looking at the situation and saying if that is really an ideological smokescreen for Gerontocracy, then we might have to revisit it in creative ways.
- [47:02]
B
So, so if we're going to revisit this, right, if we're going to say we'll open up the black box of one person, one vote, you know, we think that for Various reasons. Various groups of voters should have a vote that counts for more than those of others. Why is age the one that matters over others? Right.
- [47:23]
A
I mean, I, I think black people should have more votes than I do. John Stuart Mill believed, you know, something that I don't believe, which is that those of us with doctorate should have more votes. But like, this is basically.
- [47:37]
B
Okay, so who else? Okay, so black people should have more votes. Should Latinos have more votes?
- [47:40]
A
I, I would, I would say, you know, you know, we, we could give women a modest increase.
- [47:47]
B
So women should have, but, but, but what, what about disabled people?
- [47:53]
A
Well, look, that, that would be subject to debate, but I mean, I think that if you, if you like, if you're someone who cares most of all about the fate of minorities who are unlikely themselves to enjoy political power unless they enter into compromising, you know, coalitions, then we, we could proceed that way. Women out. Well, right, So I, I, my own view is that we, we should have an ongoing debate about how to organize our, our elections. We do in some sense, but we're locked into a constitution that basically forbids us from experimenting with our electoral system.
- [48:34]
B
Sure. Great.
- [48:35]
A
So Germany has, you're asking, from my view, what would I vote for? I have no trouble basically, you know, saying, first of all, we need more descriptive representation. That's to say, elected representatives need to be produced by the system who are rec, are understood by, you know, relevant sectors, the electorate, to represent them. That's why the Calais decision, I don't know if you supported that one, was, I think so noxious because it forbade arrangements that allowed black people to have black representatives in this country. But more generally, you know, now we're talking about the actual sculpting, the electorate itself and who gets what powers. And there I would be open to experimentation. And I think the age case is to me like the clearest one. Go ahead.
- [49:26]
B
So let me go back here to democratic theory.
- [49:29]
A
Right, because let's do that.
- [49:31]
B
So you're now saying, so your point is that if you're younger, should have more votes. And then I challenged you by saying, okay, what about ethnic minorities? What about trans people? What about disabled people? Right. And as I take it, your answer was broadly yes, sure. They should all get more votes as well. The problem with this is precisely in my mind that it undermines the point of democracy in adjudicating between our fundamentally different visions of government in the world. Right?
- [50:12]
A
Yes, but there's no neutral technique to
- [50:14]
B
do so, that democracy is precisely the technique that perhaps not in a neutral way, but better than any of the alternatives in human history has been able to say. We take this hugely diverse country with people with a vast multiplicity of views and preferences and interests and so on, and the way that we keep social peace, the way that we avoid civil war, the way that we avoid a complete falling apart of this polity, is to say everybody gets one vote. That is how we're going to decide what the policy is. And there's a certain set of fundamental rights which protects you against, for example, the government locking you up for worshiping in a way that we don't agree. And what you're suggesting is sort of completely exploding this right, because then what we have to do is to either come to some Habermasian consensus about exactly what multiple a black person should have in terms of how many votes they get, and what multiple Latino persons should have, and what multiple somebody who has one black parent, one Latino parent should have, and whether or not trans people should also have multiple. And all of those things. And what it would actually encourage in any kind of real world sense is just naked interest group politics along racial, ethnic and other lines in a way where there's never any consensus. And the only way to contribute to policy discussions, to band together explicitly as members of monolithic groups to protect the interests and the vote of your group against those of the others. And so that's where I don't think this is about whether or not in the 1850s, Mill had a different view and thought that more educated people should have multiple votes or, you know, whether or not. I think it really is about whether this would be, you know, a deviation from a democratic principle which actually undermines the historic achievement of this political system.
- [52:20]
A
I really appreciate those arguments, but I'm not sure I agree with them for a couple of reasons. One is that your alternative is the nightmare scenario. So your case there at the end was really like the familiar case against affirmative action. And it's familiar to us really from the, the neoconservative movements, you know, theories about the Balkanization of America, Arthur Schlesinger and so forth. And we, you know, and you've written in this vein, you know, we really need to have a unifying nationalist creed and so forth. I don't think that's like, that's not all that's going on. And it's not how. Certainly not how we avoid fascism or tyranny, which has a lot to do with material factors. It's not like mainly how we organize elections. But then the big response I Have, you know, is that there's no non neutral technique. And you know, the idea that one person, one vote is, is it, I think is, is, is not persuasive.
- [53:33]
B
And so you don't think that there's something less politically fraught and less to the influence of changing electoral majorities and insiders and outsiders about saying the moment you're a citizen, you get one vote, end of question, versus we have a multiplier depending on the particular intersection of identities at which you stand. That multiplier is 3x or 5x or 7x or 0.2x.
- [54:03]
A
I think you're certainly right that in the real world a lot depends on what people empirically think. And I think you're probably right that as of today a lot of folks would say, well no, of course one person, one vote is just the only credible way of organizing elections, you know, because it's the only neutral principle now. But then someone could write a book and there could be whole movements basically saying that's false and there's a more just way to do this. And then, you know, I'm not saying that there's going to be some big conversion. I agree with you that like what people think out there really matters. Even if affirmative action was just, it really matters that the majority thought it wasn't, certainly the majority of white people. So that you're completely right about that. I thought we were talking about as a matter of principle, can we argue like credibly for an alternative to one person, one vote if it turns out that's itself a partisan, you know, non neutral view? I mean more generally, like if you went out into the street and said, okay, you say you're for one person, one vote, but then how can you defend the Senate? No one would understand it. So we can't be hostage to like public opinion in that way if we're trying to like think about our principles and whether they're credible and consistent and so forth. I concede a lot to you. I mean, this is a very important point you're making.
- [55:41]
B
No, I mean it's interesting conversation on the Senate. I guess I would make two points. The first is that virtually every democracy have ways to ensure that different territories have influence in different kinds of ways. So in the European Union, Luxembourg as much vote on certain kind of votes as Germany or France does. And that's just the cost of large scale political unions between entities that have to some extent a different identity that persists. The second thing to say is I think there's a lot of Enthusiasm in America for either abolishing the Senate or diminishing the extent to which it is geographically unfair or uneven. But that's precisely because I think there is a compelling logic to one person, one vote that perhaps is cushioned by the need to have some kind of political representation for smaller states with their own identity or whatever else. But the reason why people have trouble explaining that is precisely that one of the fundamental principles to which I think they intuitively hold is I, as a voter in New York or Texas, should have the same influence as a voter in Montana. And that's currently not for case. And that seems unfair. So sort of the logic of that seems to suggest to me that we should go closer towards one person, one vote. Not saying that because we tolerate for complicated historical reasons as well as for some other things like we need for geographic representation, some deviations from it, the thing to do is just to give up on the principle at all and think it doesn't constrain us when it comes to fundamental things like whether a 70 year old should have the same vote as a 30 year old or a white person should have the same vote as a black person.
- [57:23]
A
I love that. And I'm sure it's right up to a point. I mean, the question is whether concluding that we're overweighting the wrong people's vote, namely those in small states, means logically or otherwise that we shouldn't overweight somebody else's vote. So I know a lot of people who, you know, hate the Senate but believe in majority minority districts. And like, what's that about? It's about saying we should organize the districts so that within them, you know, blacks who are a minority in the state generally can get someone of their race elected. Now, you may not agree with majority minority districts, but it's certainly the case that most liberals think both things, that the Senate's problematic and that Calais was bad.
- [58:16]
B
But. Well, I would suggest the most cynical reading of that, irrespective of the merits of each of those institutional arrangements that I think as a kind of materialist intellectual historian of a certain ilk, you should actually be quite sympathetic to, which is that most of these people you're talking to prefer the Democratic Party for all of the misgivings they may have about it over Republican Party and the overrepresentation of small states harms the Democratic Party and, and majority minority districts help the Democratic Party.
- [58:47]
A
That's cynical. But it's, you know, I see it.
- [58:58]
B
Thank you so much for listening to this episode of a good fight in the rest of this conversation, I talk to Sam about some of his earlier work. We talk about human rights, whether human rights discourse was hegemonic on the left and perhaps in society more broadly in the 1990s and 2000s in a way that was counterproductive, or whether it was a mistake to attack human rights because it opened the doors to even greater cynicism in international politics. And finally, how we should rate, with a little bit of distance, the response of writers and intellectuals to the rise of Donald Trump in 2016, where the people who are warning about populism as an imminent threat to democracy, helping us understand the stakes of a moment, or were they possibly making it harder for us to respond to it in a constructive and cool headed way? As you will imagine, Sam and I have some interesting disagreements about that, but we also discover some areas of surprising consensus. To listen to this part of the conversation to support what we do here, Please go to writingtashamonk.com and become a paying subscriber. And this week I'm throwing in the steepest discount we ever give. 30% off your first year of subscription, bringing the cost of one full episode without paywall and without any ads to the low, low price of 50 cents per episode. Go to writingthe-monk.com 2026.
- [60:28]
A
Sa.