I Am Worth Millions Of You
Check Wikipedia if you don't believe me
Links are at the end, swinging.
Yesterday we were talking about how our political system here isn’t a democracy. Given the unpopularity of all our democratic institutions, at least at the federal level, one might expect that everybody else knows this, but maybe not; maybe a lot of people just think the circuits are temporarily down.
Absent from the discursion were a few examples of notable people meant to work within the democratic process but instead placing themselves immeasurably above it, if it did exist. (None of the examples are Republicans, but not from a lack of material—I just can’t distinguish them one from another.)
The life expectancy of an 80-year-old man in the U.S. is about eight years, and he will have already significantly outlived the life expectancy at birth of U.S. men generally, which is at 74 years and falling as of 2021. The life expectancy of a 90-year-old woman is about four years, as opposed to 2021’s life expectancy at birth of 78-ish years and falling.
(The reason U.S. life expectancies are falling is the abysmal health care and villainous environments enjoyed by the lower classes here. The reason the averages are as high as they are—which is way lower than any other even notionally civilized nation—is the Important White People Bonus (IWPB), which affords its beneficiaries the best health care amid the kindest environments.)
So Joe Biden, who will be 82 in 2024, could somewhat reasonably expect to survive a second term and enjoy a further year or two of retirement during which to amass a fortune for succeeding Biden generations, if he were still functional. And Diane Feinstein, whose wealth already has her descendants generously covered, could expect to live another four years—two years past the 2025 end of her Senate tenure—if she were in better shape than she is now, which she never will be.
Another example which glares is Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who, when she died at 87, had been living on borrowed time for some while on account of her cancers, which is to say that actuarially, she’d been due to kick at any moment for years.
Ginsburg had a statutorily lifetime appointment which she fully indulged. Feinstein is acting like she has one, to whatever extent she’s aware of it. Biden could well wind up with one in practice if he blows out another vein in his brain or the like between now and the end of this term or a prospective second one. Which, yes, an aneurysm could happen to anybody—it happened to him twice when he was only 46—but the odds of something failing in his brain or body are much higher now than then.
People who urged retirement on Ginsburg during Obama’s tenure, in order to more or less assure that her replacement wouldn’t be a reactionary chowderhead, were told that she had earned the right to step down at her own convenience; thinking otherwise, thinking she ought to bow to political realities and medical odds, was at best sexist and possibly reflective of darker instincts.
Hanging on as long as she did contributed to the defenestration of abortion rights and probably also some others she valued, and after behaving as though the consideration of law in her court, among her colleagues, existed on the same plane as theoretical mathematics, operating not in the political realm but in a more sweet and purer one, her dying wish as related by her granddaughter was that her replacement not be decided until after the 2020 election, when the politics might be hoped to have shifted.
Doing that, indulging herself and her determined illusions to within days of the end, blew ill winds into the lives of millions and will end having killed not a few.
The same argument, that she has earned the right to decide when she goes, is made on Feinstein’s behalf despite that her refusal to resign undermines an already battered majority and does bad things to Biden’s modestly ambitious federal courts agenda, and accordingly to the lives of everybody who might benefit from a less feral pack of judges, especially on the appellate courts but downstream as well, since that is whence appellate judges come, and appellate courts are whence come the supremes, usually.
Millions of people; tens of millions and probably more when you look at how long and where those judges will serve, all so Feinstein can maybe retire in her own richly deserved time and with her tenure as the longest-serving female senator setting a record unlikely to ever be broken.
Vice presidents need only one vote to gain their office, which is one more vote than Kamala Harris got in the 2020 Democratic presidential primaries but enough to win her the presidency if Biden doesn’t survive his, the odds of which are substantial—more so than for any president since the most recent world war, at least.
If our democracy were a democracy, privileging individual tenures above the interests of the masses would be even more grotesque than it is. It’s a truly insidious form of corruption.
A democracy it is not, though, and maybe that’s the silver lining. At least they’re not spoiling anything profound.
A minor point of order on the subject, speaking of silver linings: U.S. first ladies oughtn’t be fan-girling over a coronation, or be reduced by it to the most commonplace clichés.
Jill Biden said she paid close attention to Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby’s message that people everywhere seek hope and joy.
“And I thought that was such strong message because I think that is true,” she said. “And it’s true for all people everywhere, but I think it was important at this moment that the clergy brought that in to this moment in history.”
We do, we do seek them, but maybe a celebration of an incredibly wealthy family who stole every goddamn thing they have isn’t the best vehicle for the sentiment.
Good music, the best music
Brimheim, “can’t hate myself into a different shape;”1 Maita, “Best Wishes.”2
I really like both these groups. Good music, intelligent lyrics.
Bonus Anglophile track from a splenetic drummer: "T.U.S.A."3
That, Comrades, is all there is
Share if you like, subscribe if you’ve not—it’s free unless you want to pay.
Take care, be well.
In a system as corrupted by/dependent on other people's money as this one, a less-damning interpretation might be that once people position themselves to win an election they maintain it rather than having the prospect they an unpositioned newcomer will run and lose the seat. The degree to which that constitutes a narcissistic indulgence is another discussion.
Framing matters though. It's always troubled me that the people with the more objective, less beguiled-by-the-dysfunctional-system-under-discussion commenters end up placing people in a double-bind, where they're forced choose between stopping their ears/maintaining their worship of their favourite political figures, or listening/realizing they were wrong the ten-thousand previous moments where they faced that sort of choice.
I see this as one of the greatest weaknesses of modern political discourse, magnified by reliance on soundbites/performative identity, rather than thoughtful analysis of delineated positions--even if the latter were performed by trusted experts rather than voters themselves.
The gerontocracy problems you cite are all just consequences of this problem, that we have let our govt devolve away from "a govt of laws and not of men".
The underlying problem is that so much hangs on exactly who the president is, and who the SCOTUS justices are. Had we not, over centuries, by inertia in letting destructive norms gunk up the actual rules by which govt works, let SCOTUS and the presidency get as powerful as they are today, it would not matter much at all who exactly the justices or the president might be at any given time.
The actual written rules in the founding document give Congress all the final say on every question. It is only in the power vacuum created by the progressive shirking of successive Congresses of their duty to run the govt that the presidency and SCOTUS have grown in power outside all bounds, to the point that one or just a handful of incumbents can use their offices to frustrate democracy.