Age Never Matters
Commentators have a habit of describing a certain generation of people as sharing common characteristics by placing them in the same generational set. For example, people in their 20s and younger are known as millennials. The commentators called people born between 1946 and 1964 “baby boomers,” and people of a later generation “Generation X.” Critics described baby boomers as being too leftist and too willing to let the government to take care of them because they never went through the Great Depression and World War II like their parents underwent. Meanwhile, millennials have mobile phones and access to the Internet, which provides them a massive amount of freedom to pursue useful (and sometimes harmful) information on the Internet while being monitored by “helicopter parents.” Kitschy Internet memes and tacky birthday cards have a habit of telling people that their age is “just a number.” While that is certainly true, age affects perceptions of people as being homogeneous within their constructed generational set.
My experience is perhaps exceptional among American young adults in that my paternal grandfather was a staunch Democrat and my father a firm Republican. I cannot adequately stress what polar opposites they represented. My grandfather spent his retirement years working his property, watching Westerns, and faithfully consuming MSNBC programming. My father listens to Rush Limbaugh and watches Fox News and the Fox Business Network sporadically. Yet they were extremely jovial in their conversation, while engaging in lively and heated political discussions. The popular stereotype is that their positions should have been switched, so how did they get along so well?
Each understood the other. My grandfather was born in 1945 and migrated to Colorado at 11 to find a job as his mother could not afford to maintain him and his numerous siblings. After he passed away in 2016, my grandmother told me a fact that my grandfather kept secret from the rest of the family. Before quitting cigarettes around a decade ago, he had smoked since he was a small child. He smoked cigarettes because they suppressed hunger. A church expelled him and his family for being too unkempt. As a result, my father and I spent decades urging him to accept Christianity. He did, but we never held out hope and never particularly cared about him ever joining a church and moving toward organized religion. My grandfather understood the importance of the government providing basic welfare for its citizens when the citizens’ local community was too pompous and callous to provide for them.
My father had a decidedly different upbringing. He never really wanted for anything as a child. He even saw the benefits of a having a father that belonged to a union, the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 1. During a particularly heated union election, my grandfather and his compatriots brought guns to intimidate voters into voting for their candidate who would allow them to keep their jobs. He saw the frustration of his own father at President Reagan’s union-busting tactics. It remains his main critique of the Reagan administration. He joined the military to earn a college degree and served as a Morse Code operator for the Air Force. He left the military in the early 1990s and obtained a job as a postal carrier. Dad treats all people older than him with respect, something with which my grandfather understandably struggled because of his past experiences with authority figures. My father had a respectable authority figure that provided for his family’s needs by driving three hours to and from St. Louis every day for decades. He values hard work and local initiatives above the dictates of an overarching federal bureaucracy for which he continues to work. In short, the ages of my father and my grandfather did not affect their beliefs or their attitudes toward life and interpersonal relationships, but their upbringing certainly did.
I do not believe that age is the ultimate determinant of someone’s personality, but there are numerous instances where age factors into political analysis. Candidates for executive authority are rarely elderly, but can be perceived to be so. In the United Kingdom in 2006, Mock the Week comedians lambasted Liberal Democrat Leader Menzies “Ming” Campbell for looking like “a corpse” and for being the founder of the historical Ming Dynasty of China (which lasted from 1368 to 1644)! Nick Clegg replaced him as leader in 2007 as Campbell turned 66 years old. For context, he would have been younger than the two main candidates of the 2016 presidential election had he ran at that age. For an American example of the “aged” stereotype, Bob Dole ran as the Republican nominee in the 1996 presidential election. The popular sitcom The Simpsons mocked the 73-yearold Dole for his supposedly advanced age by having a caricature of him recite his own name repeatedly. Twelve years later, another Republican nominee for president, 72-year-old John McCain, received his fair share of jests on the point of his age. However, McCain was only two years older and Dole three years older than President Trump, who turned 70 during the 2016 presidential election. Additionally, Campbell, Dole, and McCain are all still alive at the time I am writing this article.
Why were the ages of Bob Dole and John McCain such a significant obstacle for their public images while the public image of Donald Trump did not suffer as much? They may have had the problem of competing with considerably younger candidates. Bill Clinton was 23 years younger than Dole and McCain was 25 years older than Barack Obama. By contrast, Trump was only one year older than Hillary Clinton. Admittedly, Trump was quite a bit louder and cultivated a more energetic persona than either Dole or McCain. That being said, the presence of an age disparity probably harmed their campaigns more than their campaign style.
The age of members of the legislative branch does not correspond to ideologies either. In the British parliament, the longest serving Member of Parliament (MP) in the House of Commons receives the title of “Father of the House.” Both members of the Conservative Party (the main party of the political right) and the Labour Party (the main party of the political left) have held the position.
In 2015, the final two WWII veterans retired from the House of Representatives. One was Republican Ralph Hall and the other was Democrat John Dingell, Jr. The stereotype of old conservatives and young leftists does not always correspond to reality in the House of Representatives and in the Senate. If the stereotype were true, then Nancy Pelosi would be a Republican stalwart and Ted Cruz would be a staunch Democrat.
Even in the judiciary, age does not convincingly correspond to ideology. The most obvious example of the lack of age’s importance is the Supreme Court’s 1973 decision of Roe v. Wade. Seven of the nine Supreme Court justices in Roe v. Wade voted to overturn abortion bans. Of them, William O. Douglas was born in 1898, William Brennan in 1906, Chief Justice Warren Burger and Lewis Powell in 1907, Harry Blackmun and Thurgood Marshall in 1908, and Potter Stewart in 1915. In contrast, the two dissenters were both born later than all seven justices in the majority. Byron White was born in 1917 and William Rehnquist in 1924. The younger justices were actually more conservative on social issues than the older justices, who experienced the Great Depression and the Second World War as more full-fledged individuals.
A famous quote by French politician Anselme Batbie goes, “He who is not a republican at twenty compels one to doubt the generosity of his heart; but he who, after thirty, persists, compels one to doubt the soundness of his mind.” Batbie’s quote does not contain a self-evident truth. It hardly contains any truth at all. While people may change their ideologies significantly after experiencing certain circumstances or reading a particular book or books, such changes usually take much longer and react to various experiences. Which leads to my main alternative to age as an explanation for someone’s beliefs. Age never
matters, but experience always matters. Humans can overcome unfortunate actions being committed against them by doing good actions, but that does not mean that the pleasant and the tragic circumstances they went through did not irrevocably affect them.
A final case to consider is the Supreme Court’s decision in Furman v. Georgia that briefly ended the death penalty in the United States due to its arbitrary application by the state judicial systems. The justices were the same as in the Roe v. Wade decision, but the makeup of the majority and the dissenters was markedly different. Douglas, Brennan, Stewart, White, and Marshall were in the majority while Burger, Blackmun, Rehnquist, and Powell dissented. The four dissenters all started their tenure during the Burger Court that began in 1969. The other five, while having wildly different judicial philosophies from others in their camp, all served during Chief Justice Earl Warren’s court during the 1960s. Despite White’s conservatism, he wrote the opinion for the court in McLaughlin v. Florida in 1964 that ended state bans on cohabitation between interracial couples. The five justices in the majority saw the most terrible sides of state governments and did not want them to run roughshod over the rights of Americans. Their age did not matter, but their length of tenure and their experiences during that tenure affected them profoundly for the remainder of their service on the Court. All people can ponder the example of the Furman Court and how it signifies the insignificant role that age plays as a motivating factor in people’s decision-making.
Luke Voyles ’18 studies in the College of Arts & Sciences. He can be reached at lrvoyles@wustl.edu.