It’s become a commonplace to say that the world situation today is more dangerous than it has been since the 1930s. For those who were on the Left then or now, the ascent of the totalitarian Right spelled a battle for civilisation which had triumphed by 1945, but only at the cost of the bloodiest war in history. For those on the Right then or now, the great threat was communism, the crushing of the individual in the name of the greater collective good, the state or of History with a capital H.
But today, that old whole world order is teetering on the brink. With autocracy ascendant, belief in a superman (the mythical strongman) is, by definition, a threat to democracy.
We live in clarifying times, just as those generations did. What is different today? Unawareness of history is greater. The blurring of once clear left-right divides. Again in the world there is an overabundance of weapons, and not much interest in ploughshares. But all of these are differences in degree. There is only one difference of kind that I can see, but it is fundamental and ominous: the failure of a new generation to supplant its elders.
The young blame the old for not moving out of the way. To anyone who grew up, as I did, in the 1960s when music was king, two songs spring to mind as applicable here: Cat Stevens’ Father & Son and Bob Dylan’s The Times They Are a-Changin’. Could it be because America’s old roads were rapidly ageing that Biden put so much political energy into getting an infrastructure bill passed?
In the 1930s Hitler was not yet fifty. In the 1980s, Reagan – elected president in his seventieth year – was considered avuncular, but when his ‘opposite number’, Mikhail Gorbachev, came to power, he was in his mid-fifties, a mere stripling by comparison.
'Unless younger people oust those too old to hold sway in a world that has evolved beyond their ability to comprehend the present, let alone control the future – that future will be no different from the past; and the unlearned lessons of history will have to repeated all over again.'
The most powerful countries on the planet are ruled by – and, whatever the outcome in the United States on November 5 will continue to be ruled by – dotards. Whatever your view on either man, this is not healthy, and bodes ill for the future.
Xi Jinping is 70; Narendra Modi, on a messianic path to re-election as these words are inscribed, 73; Vladimir Putin, 71; Benjamin Netanyahu 74; and, as may have been noted once or twice in news coverage on whatever platform you receive it, Joe Biden is 81 and Donald Trump a month shy of 78 (perhaps the only thing he is shy of). Old men for an old order. By contrast, Emmanuel Macron is 46, but his star is sinking.
It can be of no comfort to those who believe in democratic values that the most physically fit of the Old Guard is, so far as one can tell, Putin. Today, it is as the Bible warned, the young grow faint. Jacinda Ardern resigns at 44; Ireland’s ultra-progressive Taoiseach Leo Varadkar at 45.
As 2024 approaches its mid-point, Europe is divided; America is riven, and blood has begun to flow on campuses. Science teaches us entropy. But in history the equivalent of entropy is disintegration, the descent into chaos. Students of history know that it has sharp edges. Eras, or orders, do not merge seamlessly from one to the next. What to identify as the outstanding characteristic of any era is largely subjective, even when dealing with facts.
Eric Hobsbawm’s great series of historical works covering the two centuries from the overthrow of the Bourbon dynasty to the collapse of the Soviet Union was divided into The Age of Revolution, The Age of Empire, The Age of Capital and The Age of Extremes. While empires (I would argue only the name, not the reality) are thin on the ground in our times, no one can deny revolutions are afoot, extremes are thriving and there’s plenty of capital around (who has more than they need and who has less, that is the question).
Students of history can also observe, and compare, what happened to every bygone gerontocracy (dictionary definition, ‘a form of social organisation in which a group of old men or a council of elders dominates or exercises control’).
In the last quarter of the 20th century, the Soviet Union was led by four septuagenarians in succession (Khrushchev, 70 when they gave him the heave-ho), Brezhnev, Andropov and Chernenko) before someone from the next generation down broke through. Thank goodness it was Gorbachev.
In China, Mao hung on into his eighties until the only thing he could cling to was life itself; and in his own ninth decade Deng Xiaoping, for all his faults, withdrew from the scene on his own terms, after which he enjoyed ten years of retirement.
In America, Ronald Reagan fell asleep at cabinet meetings (not in courtrooms) and – whatever criticisms can be levelled at his policies and prejudices – he made a nation feel good about itself, which is surely one of the purposes of having a head of state, be it a monarch or a president.
Leaders considered too young for the job aren’t always notable successes and, depending on your own political point of view, you may think Barack Obama, Tony Blair and Ardern were no great shakes – but critics are unlikely to give a leader credit for the ‘negative virtue’ of which doctors boast – not doing any harm. They might like to consider that Obama didn’t repeat the mistake by his predecessor George W Bush of launching an unpopular and bloody war on a false premise; that Blair didn’t perpetuate the ruinous policies of his five immediate predecessors that inflamed tensions in Northern Ireland; and that Ardern rallied her compatriots during two great crises – the Covid pandemic and the Christchurch massacre.
Yet, if youth and inexperience are drawbacks, what are we to make of John F Kennedy’s conduct during the Cuban Missile Crisis; what can we say of Alexander the Great – creator of an empire that spread all the way from Greece to the borders of modern India before he died at 33; or of Pitt the Younger, who became Prime Minister of Great Britain at the age of 24 and steered his country’s fortunes steadily through two cataclysms, the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars?
There is something repugnant about oldsters making decisions that will affect ensuing generations but have no consequences for themselves since they won’t be around when the results of those decisions make themselves felt.
If you run into a young person who is unaware of much history that occurred before they were born and who is disillusioned with the messiness of this system called democracy which doesn’t solve all the ills of the world in the manner of a neat magic trick, perhaps the best thing you can do is remind them that under this system even the worst politician can be removed from power, but under its diametric opposite – autocracy, whether it be one-person rule on the Führerprincip or one-person rule over a politburo existing in the name of the downtrodden masses – the ruler rarely retreats into a private life of calm contemplation.
Tell them this: if you don’t like the people who govern you, and you can vote them out, do it – and, in a democracy, that means taking seriously the fact that, unless younger people oust those too old to hold sway in a world that has evolved beyond their ability to comprehend the present, let alone control the future – that future, when it does belong to the young after they’re a few years older, will be no different from the past; and the unlearned lessons of history will have to repeated all over again. Young people who don’t abandon democratic ideals will go from being social-media ‘influencers’ to social-reality influencers.
And that’s where your superpower lies.
Ken Haley is a Walkley-winning journalist, freelance editor, amateur pianist and the author of three travel volumes.
Main image: People watch the CNN presidential debate between U.S. President Joe Biden and Republican presidential candidate former President Donald Trump at a debate watch party at The Continental Club on June 27, 2024 in Los Angeles, California. Biden and Trump are facing off in the first presidential debate of the 2024 presidential cycle. (Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images)