The Democratic Party is literally dying

In theory, the Democratic Party is a political organization aimed at gaining power and implementing a program. In practice, Democrats are more closely like a hospice, if not a funeral home. An extremely large number of party leaders are so old and infirm that they are at the door of death. This is the most notoriously true of the most recent standard carrier of the party, former president Joe Biden. Recent media controversy on a new book alleging that the Biden’s inner circle had covered its infirmity was overshadowed on Sunday by revelations which he suffers from an aggressive form of prostate cancer.

On Wednesday, the Democrat representative Gerry Connolly – a lightning rod in the debates on the gerontocracy of his party when in December 2024, he defeated the much younger Alexandria Ocasio -Cortez to be the best democrat of the Chamber’s supervisory committee in November in November. His victory over AOC – which is nearly four decades his junior, free from potentially fatal diseases, and one of the most telegenic of elected officials in modern politics – was a dramatic illustration of the quantity of democrats valuing seniority above all other considerations. Connolly’s brief mandate as a democrat of the supervisory committee suddenly ended in April after his cancer prevented him from doing the work. Unfortunately, instead of being a strong career moment, Connolly’s truncated time in this position relegated him to the growing list of American public figures who did not know when to stop. This infamy room also includes Joe Biden, the late Senator Dianne Feinstein and the late judge of the Supreme Court Ruth Bader-Ginsburg.

In an article, political analyst Lakshya Jain listed certain surprising facts showing how much the elected democrats are suddenly biased towards the elderly:

Three of the 215 Democrats in the House have died this year, all of the States that Trump has won (TX / AZ) or has a republican governor (TX / VA). Six Democrats in the House have died since April 2024. The last eight members of the House to die were democrats, dating back to 2022.

I think the question here is whether we realize that it is simply not a coincidence – it is the result of decisions taken concerning seniority and the race for electricity.

One last point: 11 of the 14 members of the room over 80 are democrats.

In a congress where the Republicans have only thin job on power, each vote counts. On Thursday, the Congress adopted the bill of reconciliation by a vote from 215 to 214, with two Republicans who broke. Like Branko Marcetic from Jacobin Underlines: “Three Democrats who would have made the vote losing 214-217 died in office this year. So, fundamentally, budgetary democrats have warned non-stop is a disaster will pass directly because of their insistence that they remain in the congress until death. ”

Jain is right to insist that the gerontocracy of the Democratic Party is the result of a choice, not just coincidence. While Republicans and Democrats have elderly members, Democrats in particular have raised seniority to a leading principle, which means that party leadership is dominated by the elderly.

In December, Politico stressed that this dynamic remained in place even after the Donald Trump elections, which should have caused a major upheaval in the party, but in fact, the status quo is largely unchanged. Politico Notes:

It is indicative that even after the ousting three 70 years of classification places on committees – represent. Raul Grijalva (D-Ariz.), David Scott (D-GA.), And Nadler-Democrats on 10 different committees from the next congress will be over 70 years old. Two of them are octogenarians, including the 86-year-old representative, Maxine Waters (D-Calif.), Who will be a member of the Chamber’s Financial Services Committee.

The presidents of the GOP House These democrats will face spring chickens. But the Republicans will have half the number of over 70s, the children serving in the front row. Two GOP presidents will have more than 25 years younger than their Democratic Committee counterpart. Partly, it depends on the limits of the term imposed on committee chiefs of the GOP conference of the Chamber. Democrats, on the other hand, are married to seniority as the basis of power.

Their dedication to seniority clearly shows that gerontocracy is only a symptom of a deeper question: Democrats have no ideology or guiding principles that maintain them. The party is a heterogeneous coalition of centrists and progressives which has failed to define a basic objective. Even anti-trumping, which served as an effective glue to maintain the 2016 to 2024 faction party together, is no longer effective. Trump’s victory over Biden has demoralized the party, and some leading personalities in purple states are too impatient to stay on the right side of Maga.

It is increasingly difficult to know what Democrats, as a community, believe. This explains why the party continues to be unpopular even if Trump himself also loses popularity.

Tuesday, Vox reported: “The Democrats of Congress – and the national brand of their party – are lamentable: some 37% of the voters consider the party favorably, while around 60% consider them unfavorably, according to the Yougov follow -up surveys.”

Unshaining a cohesive ideology of the party, each democratic legislator is in fact a warlord governing a small fief. For warlords, the game is to maintain power over the fief until your death. If the Democrats had a broader vision of social good, then we could expect politicians to sacrifice their careers for this objective. Unfortunately, the only common vision seems to be the career.