Looking at the names being floated over the past week, there are two possible successor generations: Generation X and millennial. Yet of those being touted — Vice President Kamala Harris, Governors Gavin Newsom, Gretchen Whitmer, Josh Shapiro, J.B. Pritzker and Andy Beshear, and Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg — only one, Buttigieg, does not belong to Gen X (while Harris, born in 1964, straddles the line). This is a shame. For while there is little doubt that the United States is overdue for generational change, it is not at all clear that Gen X embodies the kind of change that America needs.

Both these generations have been known to chafe under the suffocating domination of their Boomer predecessors; and both have gone through phases of rebellion against the same. Yet there are also crucial differences: one generation came of age in the heyday of globalisation, before Y2K and the other reached adulthood at the tail end of it around the 2008 crash. This has resulted in two distinct forms of political consciousness. As a consequence, beneath the question of which geriatric party establishment shall hold the keys to power in the next four years, a more important one looms: which generational value set will prevail over the next 40? For the present era is a one of paradigmatic transition: the days of Reagan, Clinton, and Bush are at a close, but what will replace it is still far from certain.

To answer this, we must return to the Boomers. Born after the war, this cohort grew up amid the greatest expansion of middle-class wealth ever recorded — the product of the dynamic industrial economy left behind by the G.I. generation. By the Seventies, however, it began to stagnate, and their response was to build a new economy based largely on financialisation, real estate and tech. As a result, between 1983 and 2023, average house prices rose by 500% and the value of stocks as measured by the S&P 500 benchmark index grew by 2,800%. Cheap credit, free trade, and a tech-driven productivity boom in the Nineties combined with these trends to give the impression of an economy growing in leaps and bounds. And it paid dividends, mainly for the Boomers, who got to keep the lion’s share of the gains, amounting to half the nation’s assets ($78.3 trillion in 2023), even as later events, such as the Great Recession and the reckoning over “the China Shock” exposed the growth of this era as illusory and unsustainable.

By the 2020s, as Boomer retirements accelerate, Gen Xers and millennials are set to inherit this wealth, in what’s been dubbed “the Great Wealth Transfer“. To what end this wealth is deployed will be the defining question of the next paradigm. And it is here where the divide between the Gen X and millennial political value sets come into play.

The romantic self-image of the Gen Xers is grounded in traits such as independence and stoicism: they were the “latchkey kids”, or as Rich Cohen put it in Vanity Fair, “the last Americans schooled in the old manner [who] know how to fold a newspaper, take a joke, and listen to a dirty story without losing their minds”. In their youth, anti-political cynicism formed the basis of their own counter-counterculture against the passé idealism of the Boomers.

Yet in its maturity, around the turn of the millennium, this cohort failed to produce a properly political expression that was practically distinct from the post-Reagan status quo, which they could only assent to, notwithstanding the directionless anti-corporate currents of the Clinton years or the anti-war movement of the Bush years. After all, these were peak “End of History” decades and the free market appeared to be humming just fine. Though not as socially mobile as the Boomers and despite having had to deal with recession in the early Nineties, Gen Xers still benefited from the boom times that followed; they had an overall easier time starting careers, forming households, and joining the middle class than the later post-2008 millennial cohorts. The same individualist ethos extolled by the likes of Cohen or Bret Easton Ellis worked well within the parameters of the highly atomised post-industrial paradigm that existed before the big crash: Gen X could afford to retain the apathy and detachment of their youth because, structurally speaking, there were little to no stakes.

Of course, Gen Xers were, like everyone else, affected by the Great Recession. But by this point, their institutional conservatism had arguably been baked into their generational character; and it would, in any event, have been unlikely for them to develop revolutionary aspirations in middle age (something left to the millennials). In the contest for a Biden replacement, this conservatism is discernible, albeit very subtly concealed, in the stances and rhetoric of the Gen Xer candidates.

In a recent New York Times interview, for instance, Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer, born in 1971, made her case for generational change: “We recognise that our parents’ generation has had a lot of excess. So I’m hopeful that we can really move the needle, whether it’s bringing down our nation’s debt or ensuring that we are active when it comes to climate and solidifying and protecting individual rights.” Here, strikingly, Whitmer’s unit of analysis remains “individual”. She also lists the debt as her leading issue, reflecting a scale of priorities unchanged from Boomer liberalism’s high noon in the Nineties, when fiscal rectitude, environmentalism, and social progressivism were the orders of the day.

Listening to Newsom, Pritzker or Harris, one also struggles to find awareness of political horizons outside this paradigm. Indeed, it may very well be that the whole idea of thinking in terms of material economic structures is anathema to the Gen X as well as the Boomer mindset, having been conditioned against that possibility by the “post-materialist” abundance of their formative years.

Contrast this with Buttigieg’s words when he was last a presidential contender in 2019: “A lot of this is the consequence of what you might call the Reagan consensus… The empirical collapse of that supply side consensus, I think, is one of the defining moments of this period… It turns out a rising tide does not lift all boats. Not on its own.” Where Whitmer has “the individual”, the unit of analysis here is “the paradigm” — that is, the web of structures, norms and rules which set the range of possibilities for most Americans.

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In recognising the passage of paradigms, Buttigieg is arguably closer to fellow millennials on the progressive, post-Occupy Left and the heterodox “New Right” than he is to his ostensible fellow centrist liberals from the Gen X cohort. While late Boomers like Barack Obama and Gen Xers like Jake Sullivan might have also acknowledged the need to transcend Reaganism-Clintonism, they have often had to come to their conclusions through reflection. But what is merely theoretical to them is all too real to most politically conscious millennials, who grew up in the wreckage of the old order. Unlike the Gen Xers, their youthful rebellions were explicitly political on both ends of the ideological spectrum.

In particular, there is a compelling parallel between Buttigieg and fellow millennial rising star (and prospective Trump VP candidate) J.D. Vance. Both hail from de-industrialised hinterlands, are veterans of Bush-era forever wars, and have expressed desires to break from their parties’ Boomer-era orthodoxies on political economy, even as they continue to hold opposing views on social issues. It recalls the dynamic between Clinton and Bush: they might have disagreed on abortion or gay rights, but the common denominator between them — support for financialisaton and globalisation — nonetheless underpinned the last consensus.

And today, so too might the common denominator between the millennial Right and Left give rise to a new consensus based on de-financialisation and national re-industrialisation, a worthy goal to which the flow of American capital and investment may be directed, as “the Great Wealth Transfer” begins to unfold. Unlike the Boomers, who sucked the world dry, or the Gen Xers, who failed to do anything about it, the millennials may yet leave a better and fairer country to those that follow in Generations Z, Alpha, and beyond. The elevation of a president from this generation, from either party, would likely hasten the realisation of this hopeful future.

The escalator in question had been installed in the South Bank’s futuristic Dome of Discovery, allowing visitors to travel quickly up to the special gallery on the solar system.

The story goes that when the saviour of the free world arrived at the Dome of Discovery that grey, drizzly day in May 1951, he rode up with the other dignitaries, looking around him in childlike delight, got off at the top, and then rode down to the bottom again. Then he went up again. Then he went down again. And again, and again.

The point of this story — apart from proving that the national-hero-on-the-Tube scene in Darkest Hour is a total invention — is that it reminds you how ridiculously old Churchill was. He was 70 when the voters rejected him in 1945, and by any sensible standard ought to have retired then and there. When he returned to office six years later, he was about to celebrate his 77th birthday.

He was a great man, of course, but as a dyed-in-the-wool Victorian, he was an absurd candidate to lead Britain into the new challenges of the atomic age. And not surprisingly, given his champagne-sodden lifestyle, he was not in the best of health. A severe stroke in May 1953 almost killed him, yet still he refused to step down. Only in April 1955 did he finally agree to go, ten years too late.

Which brings me to poor Joe Biden, whose health has been somewhat under the spotlight this summer. I say “health”, but what I really mean is his age. As it happens, I have a lot of time for Sleepy Joe, a politician with brains, decency and the common touch. But let’s be honest: he should have been President at least a decade ago.

The American media, especially on the Right, had a field day with Biden’s gaffes during his summer travels. He called Vladimir Putin “President Trump” – something of a Freudian slip — having previously called his own Vice President “President Harris”. At the G7 in Cornwall he got mixed up between Syria and Libya, confused Covid and Covax, the world vaccine programme, and got himself into a laughable mess when he jokingly reprimanded Boris Johnson for not introducing the President of South Africa. In fact, Boris had just done so seconds earlier. By the time Biden returned home, a group of Republican congressmen were even calling for him to undertake a “cognitive test”, having presumably booked him into a maximum-security retirement home beforehand.

All this might seem very unfair. Politicians make so-called gaffes all the time, and Biden’s slips weren’t especially glaring. The problem, though, is that Biden is very old, and looks it. He’s 78, fully eight years older than the next oldest US president, Donald Trump, and almost a decade older than the bronze medallist, Ronald Reagan. This might be a dreadful thing to say, but when I watched him give his inaugural address in the January cold, I was half-expecting to see him keel over half-way through.

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When reporters ask Biden about his great antiquity, he often quotes the former baseball pitcher Satchel Paige, who played his last professional game two weeks before his sixtieth birthday. “Age is a question of mind over matter,” Paige supposedly said, though he almost certainly didn’t. “If you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter.”

That’s a nice line, but it’s too glib. Age does matter. If a younger man had been in Downing Street in the early Fifties, a man who knew that escalators had been around in London for more than half a century, then he might also have known that Britain’s industrial economy badly needed radical modernisation.

And there are other obvious examples. When William Gladstone took office for the fourth time as Prime Minister in 1892, he was a staggering 82, simply too old to lead effectively. In the words of his admiring biographer Roy Jenkins, he was half-deaf, half-blind and “over the hill”, the conduct of political business patently “beyond his capacity”.

“I live in fog that never lifts,” Gladstone said. He too was a great man. But if he’d been able to see and hear, isn’t it possible that Britain would have entered the 1900s in a better condition?

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In politics, as in life, looks matter. The fact that Fifties Britain was led by a man who marvelled at the sight of an escalator spoke volumes about its obsession with its own past and inability to embrace the post-war world. And even if Mr Biden really is a dynamo of energy and master of detail, as his supporters insist, his appearance hardly proclaims the virtues of youth and vigour. Indeed, if the United States’s enemies wanted to paint it as a decadent, decaying, senescent society, unable to move on from its Cold War heyday, then no casting agency could have supplied better rivals than Biden and Trump, two ageing prize-fighters who made their names when Bill Gates was still at college.

Why has the United States, so often the herald of modernity, become such a gerontocracy? There’s no easy answer, but an obvious place to start is a political system that rewards years of contacts, lobbying and fundraising, instead of promoting young blood and fresh ideas. To put it bluntly, its politicians are so elderly because its politics are so corrupt. In that respect, the obvious comparison is the Soviet Union when Biden and Trump were in their twenties — another self-consciously youthful society that had simply grown old.

Under Leonid Brezhnev, who stayed in the Kremlin until his death at the age of 75 in 1982, people often joked that the USSR was being led by a dead man. There was a lot of truth in that. By his final years, Brezhnev had suffered several strokes and at least one near-fatal heart attack and was also afflicted with emphysema, memory loss, bronchitis and gout. Contemporary news footage shows his aides manoeuvring him about like a department-store dummy, not unlike the heroes of the film Weekend at Bernie’s. No doubt Brezhnev, too, would have insisted that he had the wisdom of experience, that age was just a number, and that you’re as young as you feel. Then he ordered the invasion of Afghanistan.

There is, of course, an obvious rejoinder to all this. At the first US presidential debate in 1984, the 73-year-old Ronald Reagan put in a dreadful performance against the 56-year-old Walter Mondale, forgetting that he was in Kentucky rather than Washington and admitting that he sometimes felt “confused”. At the second debate a fortnight later, one of the interrogators asked him about it, and Reagan had the perfect comeback. “I will not make age an issue of this campaign,” he said, trying but not quite succeeding to hide a smile. “I am not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent’s youth and inexperience.” Even Mondale roared with laughter, and that was that.

Although it would be satisfying to end with some sweeping conclusion about youth always trumping experience — or vice versa — the truth is that there isn’t really an obvious pattern. Do younger politicians make rash mistakes? Yes, if they’re Tony Blair, reordering the world around him. No, if they’re Barack Obama, a case study in passivity.

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Should you weep and wail if your paramount leader looks like an extra from One Foot in the Grave? Maybe not. When Deng Xiaoping won an internal power struggle to become master of China at the end of 1978, he was 74. A chain smoker, he was very far from being one of life’s gym bunnies. He was, in other words, one of the last people you would pick to catapult his country into a new age of economic reform and breakneck change. But we know what happened next.

And here’s an even better example. The most celebrated doge in Venice’s history, the enormously cynical Enrico Dandolo, was 85 when he took power in 1192, and ruled for another thirteen years. Dandolo might have lost his eyesight, but he had all the ruthless greed of a much younger man. He kicked out foreign residents, launched an attack on the Dalmatian coast and, most infamously, bankrolled and orchestrated the Fourth Crusade’s sack of Constantinople, one of the most appalling atrocities in medieval history. Among the looted treasures were the four Horses of St Mark, which stand in Venice to this day. So every tourist postcard is, in its way, a tribute to this malignant but undeniably vigorous old man.

In any case, when it comes to politics and age, perhaps the venerable antiquity of our leaders is the wrong question. Who cares how old Biden is? It’s the age of his voters that’s the real problem. Surely now, after all we’ve been through, it’s time to wake up to the realities of the modern world, and to reform the age at which young people can vote. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: 18 is far, far too young. But I suppose that’s an argument for another day.