OK, how many of you had on your women-in-power bingo cards that, in 2022, Sheryl Sandberg would be out at Facebook but Queen Elizabeth II would still be Queen? It’s the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee, marking seventy years on the throne. She’s getting a lot of love for that tenure, but it makes me think, geez, some people just don’t know when to step away.
Perhaps what sparked my cynicism about the Queen was an op-ed by Yuval Levin, Why Are We Still Governed by Baby Boomers and the Remarkably Old? Dr. Levin is, of course, referring to the U.S., and he’s spot-on about our governance problem. But I think the problem goes further: we have too many old people running our companies and major institutions as well.
Whether it is, say, healthcare, education, or the
military, we’re so busy protecting the past that we’re not really getting ready
for the future.
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To Dr. Levine’s point, the President, Speaker Pelosi, Senate
Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, and our most recent former President are all
members of the Silent Generation, as are the House Majority Leader and Majority
Whip. Senate Majority leader Chuck
Schumer at least is a Baby Boomer. According to the
Congressional Research Service, the average age of House Members is 58.4
years, of Senators is 64.3; both numbers are trending up. 
Some of our oldest Senators
As Dr. Levin points out, “Our politics has been largely in the hands of people born in
the 1940s or early ’50s for a generation.”
But the private sector,
you might object knowingly! OK, about
that: Statista tracked
average age at hire of CEOs from 2005 to 2018, and the average age of CEOs rose
from 45.9 to 54.1 during that period (making them solidly Baby Boomers). Fortune confirms
that the average age of Fortune 500 CEOs is 57; again, Baby Boomer
territory.
Sure, there’s a Jon Ossoff (35) in the Senate and a
Mark Zuckerberg (38) running a Fortune 500 company, but let’s not pretend that power
is not still concentrated in the hands of Baby Boomers and the remarkably old,
as Dr. Levin charges.
The Senate and corporate boardrooms are alike in
another unfortunate way: they’re still the provenance of white men. Twenty-four Senators are women (compared to
about 29% of House members), but only 3 African-Americans are in the
Senate. Less than 10% of Fortune 500
companies had
a female CEO, but there are only 6 African-American Fortune 500 company
CEOs. Not 6%, mind you – just actually only
6 people.
And, of course, members of Congress are much richer
than most Americans; according
to OpenSecrets, “The median net worth of members of Congress who filed
disclosures last year is just over $1 million.”
Many count their wealth in the tens, if not hundreds, of millions. In the private sector, of course, CEOs are
paid 351 times the average worker, and CEO pay has increased 1322% since 1978,
both according to the
Economic Policy Institute.
If you’re not a Baby Boomer or some other “remarkably
old” person, and certainly if you’re not a white male, and you think that
either our political leaders or our corporate leaders understand, much less are
acting in, your interests, well, think again.
Dr. Levin argues: “It’s often said that Americans now lack a unifying narrative.
But maybe we actually have such a narrative, only it’s organized around the
life arc of the older baby boomers, and it just isn’t serving us well anymore.”
When leaders, be they
political or corporate, have been in power for 10 or 20 years (much less 70!),
if they don’t have clear, already capable successors at the ready, that’s a
failure of leadership. That’s a culture
of “me;” that’s a culture of “now.” Those
leaders are not leading towards the future; they’re protecting the past. Dr. Levin nails it again:
“And our politics is implicitly
directed toward recapturing some part of the magic of the mid-20th-century
America of boomer youth.”
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To be leading towards
the future, we have to be willing to not only build upon the past, but sometimes
to tear down what the past has built. The
Democrats revere the New Deal and the Great Society programs, but we need to
recognize that both were deeply flawed and brought, at best, uneven
results.
No one designing a
social retirement program in 2022 would structure it like Social Security; no
one designing a health insurance program for seniors now would come up with
anything that looked like Medicare; no one would who actually cared about disadvantaged
people would ever purposely design something like Medicaid.
Yet here we are.
We’re stuck with these cultural institutions; talk about MedicareForAll
or Baby Bonds or even capping prescription drug prices might as well be talking
about things in the Metaverse.
Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez. Credit: Getty Images
I’m not ready for a Senate with Jon Ossoff, Josh
Hawley, Tom Cotton, and Krysten Sinema (the four youngest Senators), not a
House ruled by AOC and Madison Cawthorn (the two youngest Representatives). He may be really remarkably old, but I’d
still trust Warren Buffet over Mark Zuckerberg.
We should want younger and somewhat more reckless, but there are limits.
Dr. Levine proposes more “middle-aged leadership,” but he admits:
Yet they have not broken through as defining cultural figures and political forces. They have not made this moment their own, or found a way to loosen the grip of the postwar generation on the nation’s political imagination.
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What people love about the British monarchy is that it stands for the history and traditions of England. The cost of that, though, is that it is also bound by them. The test of a true leader, be they a monarch, a President, a Senator, or a CEO, is that they know when it is time for new traditions and for forging a new path in history – and when it is time to step aside for new leaders to achieve those.
But, as Dr. Levine laments, “We plainly lack grounded, levelheaded, future-oriented
leaders.” Where are they? And who needs to step aside for them?
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