The issue of gerontocracy consists of the donor class.
Senator Susan Collins (R-ME) poses with President Joe Biden within the East Room of the White Home on January 5, 2025, in Washington, DC.
(Kent Nishimura / Getty Pictures)
Republican Senator Susan Collins is dealing with a troublesome reelection bid in Maine subsequent 12 months, however she has an ace up her sleeve: Hollywood Democrats who love her and are able to refill her election coffers.
On August 19, The New York Occasions reported that Collins will likely be attending a fundraiser on her behalf on September 26 within the Bel Air residence of Sherry Lansing, the previous Paramount Footage chair and a distinguished Democratic Occasion fundraiser. Media-industry bigwig Casey Wasserman, who shares the identical political profile as Lansing, is cohosting the occasion. Harry E. Sloan, onetime chairman of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, who prior to now supported reasonable Republicans reminiscent of John McCain however extra lately has donated closely to Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, will likely be in attendance. The reception is geared towards the well-heeled, with ticket costs starting from $3,500 to $10,000.
Because the Occasions notes:
That Ms. Collins is the toast of some liberal donors is one thing of an odd-bedfellows second. However the senator has prided herself as impartial, with followers amongst reasonable Democratic voters and donors.
The Collins dinner presents a snapshot of the particular world of rich Democratic donors, who get pleasure from outsize energy despite the fact that they steadily make selections which can be horrible for each their social gathering and their nation.
Backing Collins is an ideal instance. One would suppose that donors who determine as Democrats and even take into account themselves pleasant to the social gathering would acknowledge that defeating Collins is important—significantly since Maine, the place Kamala Harris defeated Donald Trump by 7 percent in 2024, offers Democrats a uncommon likelihood to flip a Republican Senate seat in 2026.
Collins’s Democratic followers would most likely say that they suppose it’s necessary to help “moderates” like her, it doesn’t matter what social gathering they arrive from. However Collins’s rigorously nurtured repute as a senator keen to counter Trump’s extremism is in tatters. At the same time as centrist a supply as Time acknowledges that her “protest votes are as strategic as they’re symbolic” (in different phrases, nearly by no means solid after they may really cease a coverage Trump needs). Collins voted for all however one in every of Trump’s cupboard nominees. Within the first three years of Trump’s first time period, she supported greater than 96 % of his judicial nominees, together with Supreme Courtroom Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh. She now claims she was misled by these nominees on abortion, however that doesn’t change the truth that the top of Roe v. Wade, together with different authorized horrors, rests on her shoulders.
Present Difficulty
Past the truth that her claims to be a reasonable are fictional, Collins is price defeating as a result of she’s a member of the GOP, a celebration that threatens US democracy. Undoing the impression of Trumpism would require profitable as many Democratic seats as attainable. The truth that Collins has a political profile that rich Democrats like (fiscally conservative and socially liberal) shouldn’t matter. She has an R subsequent to her identify. That ought to be the top of the dialogue.
The wealthy Democrats elevating cash for Collins clearly both don’t perceive or don’t settle for the common refrain from their party leaders that this can be a second of most peril for democracy. One apparent clarification for his or her conduct is that, as members of the 1 %, these donors know that Collins will are inclined to their monetary pursuits higher than Democratic options reminiscent of Graham Platner, an oyster farmer hoping that a robust message of economic populism will propel him to victory.
Age is one other issue. In an article revealed earlier this 12 months within the Journal of Public Economics, the political scientists Adam Bonica and Jacob M. Grumbach document that gerontocracy is an issue that intertwines each the political elite and the donor class in america. The common American is roughly 39 years previous, the typical voter 47, and the typical member of Congress 57.5. However the age of the typical donor surpasses even that. As Bonica and Grumbach observe that
if we weight donors by greenback quantities, we discover that the typical greenback got here from a 64-year-old (i.e., the imply dollar-weighted age of donors is 63.9). The median greenback got here from a 66-year-old. We additionally discover that solely 9% of contribution {dollars} got here from donors who’re 40 years previous or youthful.
In different phrases, the standard donor is almost 20 years older than the standard voter.
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Older, wealthier, whiter, and extra conservative than the general public at giant, donors are inclined to favor candidates who suppose like them and are additionally nearer to being their age. The truth that Collins is 72 years previous and has been within the Senate since 1997 makes her extra enticing to the donor class, no matter their social gathering affiliation.
The tendency towards gerontocracy amongst donors has a definite ideological solid as properly. It is a group that has responded to Trumpism by adopting a creed of ancien régime restoration that envisions the very best future as a return to the glory days of bipartisan comity. By no means thoughts that this nostalgic imaginative and prescient of the previous has little bearing on actuality (since battle has all the time by definition been endemic to politics). We already know that it’s a political lifeless finish. It’s the form of mythos that Biden appealed to when he waxed eloquent about his friendship with racist reactionaries like Strom Thurmond, and that Kamala Harris tried to exploit when touting the help she acquired from Liz Cheney and her household. As we all know all too properly, voters have been lower than impressed.
Gerontocracy is an issue as a result of completely different age cohorts can have strikingly completely different pursuits. As Bonica and Grumbach observe:
There are additionally robust causes to help better illustration of the younger based mostly on cohort results. Societal crises, technological change, and financial shocks are usually not distributed uniformly throughout time. In different phrases, age in politics is greater than life-cycle results—there are critically necessary variations in generational cohorts that depart us unsure about whether or not youthful and future generations will obtain the identical political dominance as the present Child Boomer era. The Child Boomer era, as an illustration, constructed appreciable wealth by means of housing however then helped to create restrictive zoning legal guidelines and different insurance policies that made wealth-building by means of homeownership harder for youthful generations. In comparison with youthful folks, older generations can even keep away from a lot of the civilizational value of local weather change.
One main purpose Democrats misplaced the presidential election in 2024 was the big erosion of the youth vote. Too many younger voters who had supported Biden in 2020 both sat out the 2024 election or voted for Trump. The alienation of younger folks from the social gathering has many components, however certainly one purpose is that Democrats are in thrall to a plutocratic and geriatric donor class that forestalls the social gathering from embracing financial populism or listening to the deep revulsion of voters towards the genocide in Gaza.
The fundraising social gathering for Collins is emblematic of a donor class deeply at odds with Democratic Occasion voters. It is a donor class that’s extra more likely to sabotage their very own social gathering than assist it win elections.
