I kept thinking there must be something more. In the days since the first presidential debate, every article and interview I read that called for President Joe Biden to exit the race used the same reason: He is too old. Is this it? I wondered. Is this all it takes to sideline a sitting president from pursuing a second term? A wobbly debate performance, quickly formulated, dire presumptions about his universal capacity to lead, and a chorus of pundits and politicians pronouncing him too old?
I thought I might encounter other, more nuanced arguments for this late-inning alarm—concrete appeals concerning, say, Mr. Biden’s record—but I found only the circular logic that says he is just too old, and he’s incapable of leading and/or vulnerable to losing the election because he’s just too old (never mind that Donald Trump is but a few years his junior).
Over the past 15 years, I have worked with older adults in my profession, advocated for aging justice, and written about dementia, ageism and spirituality. I am angered but not surprised when people are reduced to their age—or, for that matter, any single aspect of their identity—and dismissed because of it. Ageism, or discrimination against older people due to negative and inaccurate stereotypes, is so ubiquitous in American culture as to be invisible. While most people would find repugnant calls for someone to step down from a post because they are “too female” or “too Black” or “too gay,” it is somehow acceptable to dismiss someone for being “too old.”
Like other forms of prejudice, ageism inflicts serious damage on people’s health and well-being. In addition to the daily insults older people endure (just walk down a birthday card aisle or notice the deluge of “anti-aging” products), older adults are at risk for employment discrimination, negative biases in health care that lead to shoddier care, and mistreatment and neglect so pervasive that they constitute a distinct category of harm: elder abuse.
Stigmatizing images of old age abound, creating and amplifying aversions to old age and frailty. The cover of this week’s The Economist pictures a walker adorned with the presidential seal, next to the headline “No Way to Run a Country.” Apparently, by this logic, the use of an assistive device disqualifies someone from leadership positions, making their removal a given. The title of a recent article in The Atlantic, “Someone Needs to Take Away Biden’s Keys,” renders the sensitive and complex topic of facilitating someone’s transition away from driving as a cheeky jab at Mr. Biden’s age, laced with infantilizing and paternalistic overtones.
It is hard to imagine these otherwise-sophisticated publications so readily caricaturing and lampooning another identity marker. I doubt an Economist cover would reference a female candidate by featuring a high-heeled shoe with the presidential seal and the headline “No Way to Run a Country.” But instead of challenging the “too old” assault for what it is—a generalization propped up by the false equivalence of incompetence with old age—many in the Democratic Party have accepted and perpetuated this ageist language.
The truth is, I don’t know if Mr. Biden should run again. I am less concerned with weighing in on this decision—a calculus I am neither qualified nor equipped to make—than I am with uncovering the ways ageism distorts our approach to the question itself. Ageism, with a good dose of ableism, is warping media coverage and the calls for his resignation. We must begin to notice, name and resist these distortions so that more clear-eyed assessments are possible.
Vacillating between hyper-visibility and invisibility
We see ageism’s warping effects in the vacillation between old age’s hyper-visibility and its invisibility. Mr. Biden as an old man is hyper-visible in his stumbles and far less visible in his governing know-how or aptitude for diplomacy. This hyper-visibility scrutinizes all slip-ups, stumbles or slow-downs and assigns them to old age. Because ageism promulgates the notion that old age spells universal diminishment, all these highly tracked lapses are said to simply prove the point—thus concealing ageism under the guise of “just what is.” Every flub from Mr. Biden gets routed back to the “too old” evidence pile.
The flipside of hypervisibility is the invisibility associated with old age: the dearth of representation of older people in everything from films to clinical drug trials, the discrimination that pushes or keeps people out of the workplace, the “social death” older people experience in their own communities (especially when illness strikes), and even the lack of awareness about ageism itself. This erasure hides older people’s gifts, knowledge, potential and accomplishments, and it disassociates positive attributes and contributions from old age. Decline—often conceived of in the most narrow and shallow of terms—is presumed to be the hallmark of old age, and any kind of strength or ascendency, if noted at all, is taken to be incidental or accidental to old age. Eclipsed by his perceived age-associated weaknesses, Mr. Biden’s accomplishments are rendered invisible.
This no-win, double bind of visibility—being most seen in one’s faults and most unseen in one’s capacities—likely rings true to people from other nondominant groups. When any of us is most defined by our deficiencies, it is a struggle to see ourselves clearly, to maintain confidence and to flourish. This lopsided, dysfunctional dynamic creates a stifling and stilted context in which to fairly evaluate Mr. Biden.
Ageism’s warping effects also emerge in the strategies for dealing with it, which often involve doubling down on claims to youthfulness—taking the “super senior” tact. A few years ago, at a campaign event, when an attendee told Mr. Biden he was too old to be president, Mr. Biden responded by challenging the man to a push-up contest. This response troubled me. Instead of countering the premise—that old age is an inherent liability—Mr. Biden took the bait, offering to defend his worthiness through a physical feat of strength. I am not saying older people should eschew their physical abilities or power, but the “super senior” script props up ableist and ageist notions that able-bodied youth defines one’s value, or that one remains viable insofar as one remains juvenile.
Unfortunately, Mr. Biden and his team—and the journalists who cover him—have rarely seized the opportunity to foster a different narrative of his aging. What if they had focused on how his judgment has gotten keener, or on how he is not the person he was a decade or two or three ago (the man who maligned Anita Hill and voted for the Iraq war), and that is a good thing? What if they had emphasized what he has learned through his life experience, professionally and personally, and how this learning helps him better connect to the real needs of others, including those who are growing old in America?
What if, without shame, they acknowledged that Mr. Biden cannot zig-zag the globe and be in top debating form—or keep “burning the candle at both ends,” as my mother would say—but he knows how to build and lead a team, delegate appropriately, and ask for help when he needs it? Maybe it is too dangerous to admit and embrace aging in this way, and maybe ageism’s stranglehold is so strong that it would not help anyway, but it seems equally counterproductive to ignore aging altogether and cede the premise that being “too old” is automatically disqualifying.
Ageism further complicates the situation by warping the capacity for hope-filled, graceful later-in-life exits and transitions. Absent firm mechanisms—and the accompanying values—that enable people to fully contribute as respected advisors and repositories of wisdom in old age, deciding when and how to leave a job or let go of fulfilling roles is a fraught calculation, especially with the specter of erasure beyond them.
The anti-ageism activist Ashton Applewhite speaks to the heart of this conundrum: “I don’t want a better candidate. I want a better world. One that offers more options than ‘step up’ or ‘step down.’ One that doesn’t impose false binaries—employed or useless, competent or incapacitated, ‘independent’ or burden—onto the messiness and ambiguities of being human.” That all positions, even the presidency, can involve adaptation and accommodation provides a humane model of what work could be for all of us.
I am not suggesting that aging leaves us unchanged. It is not “just a number” of little consequence. Fresh limitations and challenges arise as the years go by, but other things can emerge too, such as refined perspective, greater discernment about what is important and deepened relationships. Mr. Biden possesses many positive attributes that become possible with accumulated life experience, something that may not necessarily be true of his opponent in this election. Instead of relying on push-up contests or doctors’ pronouncements of fitness or an air of defiance (or panic), the Biden camp and the rest of us would do well to acknowledge the limits, the gifts and the highly variable experiences of aging, and to bring to bear on this situation a deeper understanding of and resistance to ageism.
This approach would help to move the conversation beyond the arrogant certainty of both those shouting for Mr. Biden’s immediate departure and Mr. Biden’s “only-God-Almighty-can-remove-me” stance—and to chart a more honest and hopeful path forward.
