No Party for Old Men

Rep. Raúl Grijalva, 78, is stepping down from his role as the ranking member on the Natural Resources Committee to make way for Rep. Jared Huffman, 60. Rep. Jerrold Nadler, 78, faces being ousted by Rep. Jamie Raskin, 61, from the Judiciary Committee. Apart from the prevalence of ‘J’s’ in this story, ‘young’ House Dems in their 60s are ousting older fellow Dems in their high 70s from key positions to better prepare to take on Trump and House Republicans.

Replacing people in their 70s with people in their 60s is hardly a youth movement, but seniority has crippled the Democrats with a great many party leaders who seem to be barely there.

The Biden reckoning did not swing the 2024 election, but it opened the door to vocal calls for Pelosi to stop squatting in Congress (the 84-year-old recently filed papers to run again in 2026 which would put her at 86 for a term that would end when she would be 88) and for some ranking House members who have been accused of not knowing where they are to step down.

House Dems have been sniping at Rep. David Scott, 78, who they privately say has trouble remembering and focusing on the issues at hand. If they succeed in pushing out Scott, after pushing out Grijalva, the revolution of the sixties against the seventies will be underway.

Like some primitive Eskimo clan, the Democrats are shoving their elderly out on ice floes and leaving them to drift away in the hopes that this will somehow atone for the 2024 election.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s refusal to retire before her death provided Democrats with the political urgency to violate political norms by cruelly pushing out Justice Stephen Breyer. Biden’s insistence on running again has been widely blamed for the party’s catastrophic defeat and now opens the door for a purge of the elderly.

Ageism has become just another form of the identity politics that defines the party. A party in thrall to an ideology that divides people by race, sex, ethnicity, and sexual preference will now be fighting its divisive battles over age. As if age were the real issue for the flailing party.

Blaming the party’s misfortunes on the old overlooks a few crucial things. Replacing Pelosi with Rep. Hakeem Jeffries hasn’t exactly set House Democrats on fire. The best that can be said about Jeffries is that apart from his family legacy of antisemitism, there’s not much to say.

And swapping out Biden for Kamala not only didn’t save the campaign, but didn’t even bring in a candidate who could communicate coherently or provide meaningful leadership in a crisis.

These things are not a function of age, but of character, charisma and aptitude.

Kamala proved that a 60-year-old woman (seemingly the new perfect age for a House leadership role) could stumble, flail, and spout gibberish with the worst of them. The one thing she could do that her former boss couldn’t was follow a script. And that just was not enough.

Age is a symptom of a much bigger problem. Gerrymandering has led to a handful of competitive districts. Once a Democrat congressman or woman gets in, it usually takes a priest, a procession and a coffin to get them out. Party leaders derive their power from relationships with donors or community leaders that take decades to develop. Minority House members in particular are often locked into gerrymandered districts backed by a generation of community organizers who grew old along with them, and nothing but demographic change will oust them.

The trouble with demographic change is that it’s usually for the worse.

AOC ousted the powerful Rep. Joe Crowley in a district that was part hipster and part Latino, and went on to become the unpopular face of the party youth. When Rep. John Conyers was ousted in a scandal that was part senility and part #MeToo, he was replaced by Rep. Rashida Tlaib: the first official terrorist in the House.

The lack of swing districts means that party primaries determine the seat holder and the only way to push out a generational bench warmer is some combination of identity politics, scandals or running far to the left leading to a party of ossified leaders mixed with insurgent radicals.

Democrat centrists, an endangered species, have tried to make the case that the party’s obsession with identity politics helped alienate the country. They’ve been protested for suggesting that trying to win women while erasing them may not be the best strategy.

But nobody in the party or out of it really cares what they have to say.

The Democrats have a great formula, not for winning elections, but for raising money. At over $2 billion, the Biden-Harris campaign far outraised Trump. An estimated $16 billion in election spending favored Democrats. Democrats lost the full trifecta, but that matters less to the pros.

What really matters is money and the old-timers and the radicals have the backing of key donors. That’s why the party is stuck with Pelosi and AOC. They can bring in the money.

And who cares if Americans don’t much like either one.

The real problem with the Democrats isn’t the age of their leaders, but the age of their ideas. No matter the age of their officials, the party claims to look to the future, but is stuck in the past. The party’s touchstones are the New Deal and the civil rights movement. Trump and Biden are only four years apart, but where Trump embraced new ideas, Biden pretended to be FDR 2.0.

The socialists, even if they’re no older than AOC, are even worse, strapped to guiding lights like Karl Marx and Bernie Sanders, still trying to make the same failed ideas work again. Tax hikes, anti-industrialism, nationalizing everything and promoting a revolution predate the Civil War. Even the exciting new twists aren’t that exciting. There were drag queens in the cabarets of Weimar Germany and hating the Jews is an idea that was old when the pharaohs were young.

TikTok can temporarily make old ideas seem new to an audience that knows nothing and postures for everything, but like AOC without makeup, old ideas always show their age. Teens embracing Communism in 30 second videos (only to then become fascists or transgender two weeks later) is no basis for an electorate, a movement or a system of government.

Artificially de-aging the party by purging its elders doesn’t show that the Democrats are moving forward, but that they’re trying to appear younger to fool the voters, but mostly themselves.

Biden was not the problem; he was the scapegoat. His policies were those of the party. His encroaching senility just cast a sharp and unflattering light on the policies and the party. He made the party seem old, but the party also made him seem old. Replacing him with Kamala who after trying to run on the formless joy of TikTok trends instead made her closing case by running on the same abortion plank that Democrats had been running on forever.

Age, as King Solomon warned us, can bring with it wisdom or foolishness. Wise ideas are those which have been proven, while foolish ideas are fantasies that can never be proven.

Sacrificing the elders of the leftist tribe to the cargo cult deities and magical thinking of the movement will not fix its problems or make the old, failed ideas at its heart work again.

After two centuries of relentless human sacrifice, the Left should at least have learned that.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

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