Millenial here, I would do it this way:

• Lower age limit for any leadership position would be 18.
• Certain positions would require adequate qualifications, no Fox News hosts for positions about nuclear safety.
• Regular tests for drug use. If too drunk to drive, then also too drunk to govern.
• Above 70+, mandatory mental fitness checks, also can no longer run for elections unless incumbent (proven popularity).

Aside from the very valid points that others have already made, I have some input.

First of all, I do agree that there should be a maximum age limit for positions of great power. But it should be like 80 or 85 years old imo, so it wouldn’t really change much.

Older people are actually far more concerned about the future than younger people in many ways, usually because of their experience and their children. Whereas younger people don’t quite grasp how critical our actions are in shaping the future.

Secondly, and tangentially, I wouldn’t be so sure that Gen Z will ever be a dominant political faction. Similarly to how Gen X was basically steamrolled by the baby Boomers, Gen Z is likely to be the victim of millennial elites. Gen Z is a smaller cohort than millennials, partially due to declining birth rates but also due to the ripple effect.

There were a fuck ton of baby Boomers (1946-1964) due to high birth rates, and most of their kids were millennials (1981-1998). Conversely, there were much fewer GenX kids (65-80), partially because many of their potential parents were killed in wars and also because of rapidly declining birth rates. This demographic reality has spilled down to Gen Z, which is less numerous as well.

Then you’re also going to have to deal with Generation alpha right behind you, who are largely the children of millenials and have grown up in a chaotic environment. Who knows how the fuck they’re going to turn out.

So yeah, good luck wresting political control from the millenials, because it’s unlikely at best.

The thing is, this is imo the most problematic problem of democracy. It is also not an age thing.

Political leaders normally don’t stay long in any specific office. E.g. most finance ministers are just finance ministers for a few years. If they survive one term that is long. During the term they are oftentimes planning their follow up career in the private sector. This can takes up more of their efforts than national politics.

It is even worse in local politics. Many mayors of large cities are already planning their career in national politics. They don’t care about what happens to the city once they switched over.

So, I wouldn’t limit myself to “old politicians”, because they might die before seeing the consequences of their fuck ups. Young politicians also almost never see consequences for their fuck ups, because they will have moved on before it gets problematic. The politicians know that!

This is a much larger problem than your question let it seem to be, it is imo the biggest problem democracy in itself inherently has.

Rule limits actually make this worse, because it leads to short term thinking. But not having a rule limit is also not an option as it opens up roads to autocratic behaviour.

I work in local infrasrtructure management now and worked in science before. I despice politicians, be they young or old. We administrators are constantly fighting them to keep our city/country livable (and we lose more than we win).

Fuck the age limit,

Just elect me as President for Life and I’ll fix everything, pinky promise 😉

(just trust me bro)

I gotta wonder if people that propose this kind of thing have only interacted with older people in nursing homes or something.

If you think that age is some kind of limit to long term thinking, you definitely have little or no contact with older people that aren’t impaired.

If anything, the older people I’ve been around, even the ones in nursing homes, are better at long term thinking and planning. Comparing that to coworkers, fellow students in college, you know, the 25 to 50 range of people, I’d say that increasing age gives more perspective on what long term thinking really means because they’ve already seen the consequences of previous choices.

You think age removes a vested interest in the future? Nah. Capitalism does, greed does, but age means you are more likely to have kids, and grandkids, and great grandkids. That’s the future older folks start worrying about.

You don’t have to be a narcissist just because you’re old. Why the fuck do you think that someone hitting an arbitrary age means they don’t have a concern for the future? That’s a serious question, not rhetorical. What kind of people are in your life that you think that way?

People talk shit about boomers, but I’ve sat with people of that generation, and the two before them. Sometimes on their death beds. Usually when they’re facing the specter of their mortality, even if it isn’t that close. You have no idea how rare it is for them to not worry about the world they’re leaving behind.

The whole idea of their kids having a better life was so damn central a thread of the literal boomers that it might as well be their motto. The bad, short term decision-making they did wasn’t in their sixties or seventies, it was in their twenties and thirties.

This whole concept of generation warfare, and ageist bullshit is nothing more than a smoke screen blinding us from working together in constructive ways.

Like, I get that you think this is some kind of great idea, but it shows exactly how little perspective you have. We need the experience and considered decision making that’s the hallmark of the typical “senior citizen”, just as much as we need the energy and out of the box of the young. And we need the direct, hands on per perspective of the ages in the middle that are finally seeing what their decisions have led to, and know how things are working currently to help implement the new ideas and guide the long term ideas into the future.

Seriously my homie, don’t buy into the bullshit that the politicians are actually good examples of their generations. They aren’t. They’re the power chasers, the ones that hold the system as a goal in and of itself. They’re gaining their power in a system that rewards narcissism and sociopathy with more power.

You want to change who can hold positions of power? You gotta break free of the idea that those positions are the positions we need. The more power that is vested in the people, the more checks we have on the bigger picture, the better. Just limiting the ages of the people in office only means we get younger power mongers and sociopaths tearing things apart.

Go look at the young right wing. You think they’re going to be better than the older right wing? I mean, c’mon. They aren’t any more forward thinking than their older counterparts at all. If anything they’re worse because they rush shit along and do shit so they can gain power faster.

This is just such bad thinking.

What’s your plan when your preferred party nominates someone above your maximum age?

Our whole society is broken. We need a shift to collectivism. This rugged individualism bull shit idea our society has embraced is a recipe for weakness and collapse. It’s been happening since we moved away from the collectivist attitude popularized during world war 2. Humans are pack animals.

That would require a constitutional amendment in the US.

I’m very slightly too old to be part of Gen Z and can tell you that teenage and early-20s me also thought that surely the future would be awesome because then people like me, people who see the world the way I do, would be in power and fix all problems I see with the world.

Now there are plenty of politicians and other public figures who are my age or younger, and I can tell that they are not all like me, they do not all see the world the way I do, in fact they are just as diverse as everyone before them and make the same mix of good and bad decisions as everyone before them.

Can you guys get us on https://www.starvoting.org/ instead? plz. thx.

Age is a red herring. The president is always going to serve the capitalist class, no matter their age. The problem is bourgeois democracy; it’s oligarchy.

People in your generation will still be corrupt and think that money/power is more important than anything else. They’re usually the people in those positions, why would they give up changes for power?

America isn’t going to change.

In my opinion best age for president and parliament members would be cca. 30-60 years old. People older than 60-65 and younger than 30 can still be active in politics and do some paperworks etc, but can’t be on actual important positions like president or parliament.