• The Boomers expected to take the reigns of power and fix everything. Some things got better, many didn’t.
  • Remember, this was the generation of Free Love, Woodstock and the peace movement.
• Gen X expected to take power and fix everything. They never fully did take power, but some things got better many didn’t.
  • Musk is part of this generation, he’s certainly on track to start “fixing” things. His definition of “fix” probably doesn’t line up with yours.
• Millennials expected to take power and fix everything. Kinda a work in progress, but it’s not really happening.
• And here you are, Gen Z, expecting to take power and fix everything. Maybe you’ll be the generation to break the cycle. And maybe your just as young, dumb and full of cum as all of the previous generations were as teenagers and young adults. I wish you luck. I also don’t see any reason to expect anything different.

I think one of the major problems was best summed up by Douglas Adams:

it is a well-known fact that those people who must want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it.

Gen Z has those individuals in it. The narcissistic, charismatic power seeks who will tell you all the things you want to hear to get them elected, and then turn around and do whatever the fuck they want. And while our current system of Democracy isn’t doing a lot to fix that, it’s also better than a lot of the systems which have come before. The previous systems of “I have the biggest army, therefore I’m in charge” made for pretty terrible governments. Especially when supreme executive power was then vested in a baby because the previous guy in charge shot is load in the right woman and she popped out a boy nine months later. And that sort of system is always waiting in the wings to rear it’s ugly head again. Anytime someone talks about a “revolution”, bear in mind that they are talking about rolling the dice on that becoming the dominant system again. Moreover, the people talking about “revolution” are very often the same people who would implement said system. This is why people are watching Ahmed al-Sharaa in Syria closely. Maybe he’s going to be the guy who hands power to the people in some sort of democratic fashion. And maybe he’s just playing nice with Western media until he’s in a position to be the next Assad of Syria.

And while I think a complete fix is impossible, so long as humans are involved, it is good for each generation to keep trying to make things better. So ya, go for it, try to save the world. But, also keep in mind that your elders aren’t really the problem, you need to look deeper than that and try to root the terrible people out, regardless of their age. You’ll fail, as there will always be another terrible person seeking power. But, maybe you can fail a bit closer and make the systems more robust to corruption than they currently are.

Go ahead and give that a try.

That’d take a constitutional amendment, and I doubt that such a thing would succeed, particularly considering the average age of legislators is “old as fuck”

That age should be 25.

Tons have said this for decades. Good luck.

Please outline your political/electoral strategy to accomplish this.

You would basically have to pass a constitutional ammendment if you wanted this to not just immediately be overturned by the next administration.

That means you need either:

2/3rds of the State Houses and Senates to call for a Constitutional Convention.

or

2/3rds of the Federal House and Senate to do the same.

… and then your new amendment(s) have to be approved by 3/4th of the State Houses and Senates.

https://www.thoughtco.com/how-to-amend-the-constitution-3368310

Unless you have a plan to somehow get a supermajority of support from a supermajority of States, this is magical thinking and will never happen.

My generation, Millenials, tried but ultimately failed to overhaul first past the post voting to break the two party duopoly death grip, and rework the Presidential Electoral College into a popular vote.

Probably both of those are prerequisites for a durable Presidential max age.

Bold to assume leaders would ever suffer the consequences of their own policy.

I find it confusing how much pushback I’m seeing ITT. It’s a good idea. I think 65 is a reasonable cutoff.

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).

Your question is extremely flimsy, first you think the president has the sole power to make those decisions, then you assume that the president is immoral enough to not care about the people he literally is meant to serve

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?