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How the US ‘gerontocracy’ parallels the Soviet Union’s aging leadership: journalist
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How the US ‘gerontocracy’ parallels the Soviet Union’s aging leadership: journalist
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When Ronald Reagan, at 69, enjoyed a landslide victory over President Jimmy Carter in 1980, he was the oldest person in U.S. history to win a presidential election. And during his presidency, Reagan and members of his administration would joke about how the leaders of the Soviet Union were even older than he was. Reagan once commented, humorously, on how Soviet leaders “kept dying” on him.
Reagan was the United States’ next-to-last Cold War-era president. The Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, and by the time Bill Clinton was sworn in as president in January 1993, Boris Yeltsin was leading a post-Soviet government called the Russian Federation.
In an article published by Business Insider on September 26, journalist John Haltiwanger stresses that in 2022, the U.S. has something in common with the Soviet Union during the 1970s and 1980s: a “gerontocracy” and a lot of aging leadership.
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“Reagan was right: Soviet leaders had consistently died on the job,” Haltiwanger explains. “Leonid Brezhnev, who led the USSR for 18 years, died at 75 in 1982. He was followed by Yuri Andropov, who died in 1984 at 69. Andropov’s successor, Konstantin Chernenko, died in 1985 at 73.”
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