Since the fall of 2019, I have read a series of articles in mid-brow American news magazines lamenting that a crop of aging politicians born in the 1940s, these Soixante-Huitards and the tailend of the Silent Generation, maintain their deathgrip on American politics.[1] These include Derek Thompon’s “Why Do Such Elderly People Run America?” in The Atlantic, Ian Prasad Philbrick’s “Why Does America Have Old Leaders?” in The New York Times, and, most recently, Eve Peyser’s “Gerontocracy Is Hurting Democracy” in New York Magazine.[2]
I stumbled upon the first of these articles lamenting America’s gerontocracy in 2019 around the same time when I was researching for my post “This Election Has Not Been About Serious Issues: The Very Unserious Issue of Dual Citizenship”, in which I noted that only three prime ministers since Confederation (Kim Campbell, Stephen Harper, and Justin Trudeau) were, in fact, born as British subjects. At the time another thought occurred to me: aside from Kim Campbell’s irrelevantly short tenure as prime minister for a few months in 1993, Canada has never had a proper Soixante-Huitard Boomer, born between 1946 and 1953 or so, as prime minster; mercifully, we now never will. For whatever reason, federal Canadian politics largely skipped over this cohort who established themselves as activist generation in the United States in favour of a plethora of long-serving politicians of the Silent Generation (those born in the 1930s), with Joe Clark, John Turner, Brian Mulroney, Jean Chretien, and Paul Martin in 24 Sussex for all but five years between 1979 and 2006.
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