The thing about a gerontocracy is that it crumbles away at the upper edge: with age comes power, but nobody lasts forever; the same "bathtub curve" that explains why most of a batch of light bulbs or hard drives fail around the same time shows that the men at the top, once they get there, die off.*
Lindsey Graham went last night, younger than many but a year older than the age at which his father passed. His political career followed an interesting path, one that led Anne Applebaum to feature him prominently in a prophetic 2020 article on the compromises some people make and others do not, when power outstrips constitutional limits and trumps political philosophy. It's worth reading.
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* The horrific second-order effect is that the ruling elite of a gerontocracy has little or no interest in the future: they're not going to be around for it, after all, and so they'll take their pleasures now, and leave dealing with the consequences for those who will come after.
That Applebaum piece is harsh but spot-on.
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