Books I write are intended to be conversation-starters, rather than conversation-stoppers. That’s certainly true of my latest, Gerontocracy in America. Since it came out last week, the conversation on the left has foregrounded class reductionism, a fancy phrase for all claims of this kind: “The problem isn’t x, it’s class — duh.”
While this p.o.v. appears in a couple of other polemical reviews, it is developed most convincingly and impressively by James Chappel. As James notes, I was his adviser in grad school, but I’ll add that he has always taught me as much as the other way around. Author of the field-defining study of aging in twentieth and twenty-first century America, James has long since forgiven the fact that I am a slow learner, and I hope he will keep on schooling me.
Class reductionism is a non-starter for two reasons. First, it begs the question of what class is and how it is constituted. Second, it is binary and exclusionary, requiring the sole cause of oppression, its true culprit, to be identified — a fool’s errand.
This latter mistake also explains why its advocates frequently help themselves to the conclusion that if you don’t reduce oppression to economic factors, you are dodging the truth about oppression. For the very same reason, if they encounter someone conceptualizing the economic and the non-economic in tandem, they insist that the non-economic part is incidental. Or worse, class reductionists often go on to insist that addressing the non-economic is to suppress the economic. James not only says that to focus on gerontocracy is to deemphasize class; he says that my book disregards class altogether. None of these conclusions is plausible — to his class-reductionist “duh!,” my response is “huh?” — but my point is that it is where class reductionism forces you to end up.
We already know class reductionism is problematic from decades of hard work to recognize its shortcomings when it comes to gender and race. It’s been a breakthrough for social thought, in fact, that the most vulgar forms of the phenomenon are even seen as outrageous, and rightly so. The essential novelty of the Law and Political Economy movement in the last century of legal thought, furthermore, is that it refuses to conceive of political economy except in relation to other forms of subordination. Which makes responding to James and others important, far beyond any petty need to defend an undoubtedly imperfect book. Gerontocracy-denialism puts at risk our progress in learning how to think in other domains.
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It ought to be surprising that class reductionism is alive and well, in pure form, when it comes to how age helps make American class today. Most wouldn’t be caught dead saying the things that have been said about the irrelevance of age, were the conversation about other kinds of intersectional oppression: “The actual problem is class, not patriarchy or white supremacy.” “The oligarchs are oligarchs who happen to be white.” “The fact that men have higher salaries is just a correlation, and there is no causation.” “Race isn’t a cause of oppression, but just a symptom.” “A lot of whites are poor too, and we wouldn’t want to alienate them from the Democratic party!” These lines come almost verbatim from the reviews of Gerontocracy in America I have in mind, with identities changed in each for effect.
A couple of my critics, including James, have converged in insisting that elder poverty means there can be no gerontocratic effect in class formation (or in general). They have cited data — as I already do in the book — about how scandalously high the number of poor senior citizens is. (The increase in benefits for older Americans is one reason the book, which attacks neoliberalism and calls for socialism, is being denounced on the right!) Such arguments about the poor, even when they are based on correct facts, are a classic non sequitur. It is akin to pointing to the existence of poor whites as a rebuttal of the reality of white supremacy. (A full majority of Americans below the federal poverty line are white — so what?) It reveals nothing about how advantage is structured to observe that it leaves some whom it advantages still oppressed.
There is also a theoretical irony in this move. Appreciating the distinctive plight of elderly Americans who are poor clearly requires dropping class reductionism, not indulging in it. After all, there are age-related reasons for the disadvantage and suffering of the elderly poor, no matter how many there are. But my main objection to age-free class analysis is not its selective deployment. Rather, it is that it refuses to see the intersection of age and wealth, not just age and poverty.
As a result, class reductionism misses my main motivation in the book for making our understanding of inequality more complex across the whole distributional landscape. After all, the flaws of class reductionism are no less serious when it comes to the making of advantage as when it comes to the making of disadvantage. If the bottom of the class structure requires an intersectional optic, the top does too. That is why I focus on how age helps define contemporary oligarchy. The perspective does not, of course, tell the entire story of age and class. But the elderliness of oligarchy is a radically under-discussed topic, especially on the left.
The question, then, is precisely how and how far American (class) hierarchy today does in fact depend on age alongside other factors. Respondents have made blithe statements about how the real problem is a tiny number of rich Americans, but that is not how class in the country works, and oligarchy on a mass scale intersects profoundly with how old America has become on a mass scale. The outcome is an extensive set of formal and structural privileges that age-related policies provide to tens of millions. The receipts are in the bag of the book, which I mainly constructed to gather them all together in one place. There are surely more to assemble for the sake of an even more nuanced view. But much is already certain.
Refreshingly, in spite of his class reductionism, James at least concedes that some of the facts from the book about elder advantage are too powerful not to grant. He applauds some of my solutions, even though most are clearly designed to pick out older Americans advantaged at the intersection of age and class. But class reductionism lures him back to bracketing or disregarding the facts all the same. Illustratively, he says that it would be “absurd” to conclude that age is “irrelevant” to producing unequal outcomes in America today. But then he goes on to say that very thing — in the very same review. America today, he writes, is actually a story of “an oligarchy where a disproportionate number of oligarchs happen to be old.” I don’t need to argue against a conclusion that James himself already dismissed as absurd.
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Class reductionists today, if they are open to intersectional analysis at all, restrict it to just one or two other social categories, insisting that gender and race might define inequality but other factors do not. James gives a familiar version of this view. Age, he writes, is a “fundamentally different social variable” than gender and race. He cites two reasons. One is that if it is a factor in oppression, it is not a familiar historical kind, as with patriarchy or white supremacy. Another is that “old age is something that most of us will inhabit one day,” unlike the immutable characteristics on which discriminatory logics often turn.
Fascinatingly, James’s contentions here exactly match Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s explanation for why the Constitution doesn’t protect Americans from transphobic laws. If anyone hates trans people, she argues, it is a new thing (at least on her telling), not like the historically validated sins of patriarchy and racism that the Constitution is meant to stamp out. And, she adds, the entire point of transitioning is exploring the mutability of sex, where the Constitution protects against discrimination based on characteristics individuals are powerless to change.
This agreement isn’t mentioned to imply guilt by association. We now know elevation into substantive process protection is sometimes not a blessing but a curse. Our elderlawyers used to complain that the Supreme Court chose not to make the aged a suspect class under the Equal Protection Clause, but Americans are now very lucky it didn’t: such doctrine might lead the current members of our national council of elders to allow only “age-blind” polices, ruling out affirmative action for seniors, some form of which all progressives (including me) rightly support.
But James’s convergence with Barrett’s Skrmetti concurrence is worth flagging because of what it reveals about his class reductionism. Both refuse to accept that discrimination is always sociohistorical and depends on identities that are inevitably in constructed flux in minor or major respects. And mutable characteristics — like age, which defines phases in a process and marks a process of transition — can serve as a predicate for hierarchies of power in society too. Indeed, a central goal of Gerontocracy in America is to show that, for most of history, age has involved preferment, not just mistreatment, and it is returning unexpectedly to prominence again in this hallowed role.
The fact that the young can become old and can now expect to do so with confidence is distinctive, but class reductionism hardly follows from it. The brilliant analyst of age and the law Alex Boni-Saenz has done the most subtle work concerning discrimination and temporality. (I also had him in my class years ago — more great luck for me.) In a new paper, Alex is now bidding to become the most important elderlaw scholar in the LPE movement. But even he gets a bit skittish, after surveying those (many) legal regimes that are unfair to older people, when it comes to gerontocratic privileging thanks to legal regimes.
The intersection of age and oligarchy, Alex writes, is “in part a function of time, as older individuals have had more time to accrue economic assets.” But no one in LPE should imply that anybody’s accumulation of wealth — whether through appreciation of assets or through salaries rising through seniority — is a natural process. Acquisition and retention over time are made materially significant only through moral and political choices, in relation to legal arrangements. They have led in time to many unfair outcomes.
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Contemporary talk about the irrelevance of age to class advantage in America today isn’t due mainly analytical and theoretical mistakes. I actually think those are pretty obvious. They are interesting because they are premised on beliefs about political strategy that, I believe, may also turn out to be dubious at best, and disastrous at worst.
James’s book review is clearly predicated on his view that focusing on age as a factor in class rule would shatter the coalition necessary to push for economic justice. In this sense, too, he offers a paean to class reductionism, the most familiar versions of which have always guarded against dividing the working class against itself.
In his piece, James reiterates his older argument that age-based politics and remedies are divisive, and coalitionally unviable. This is, I suspect, the beating heart of his class reductionism. This is an important point of disagreement, and in the book, I directly respond to his views on this score (though his review doesn’t respond in turn). Here, let me augment what I said. If raising consciousness of gerontocracy in our time is divisive, it’s not clear how James can back some of my prescriptions for reform — like age limits for political office, which he concedes are wildly popular — rather than reject them all. More broadly, it strikes me as a considerable shortcoming of his age-free politics that it cedes the essential importance of fairness across age cohorts to our enemies. I wrote the book to urge progressives to embrace intergenerational ethics and work it into their search for a supermajority, especially when doing so is not as divisive and unpopular as James contends. Popularity aside, it is also right thing to do.
The truth is that coalition-building is hard, and no one on the left (or right) knows how to break the impasse of American hierarchy at the moment. But just as liquidating gender or race will not magically unify progressives, the same is true of age, especially if it distracts older voters themselves from just how unjust our arrangements sometimes are in their favor.
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Class-reductive thinking definitely has a salutary role to play both analytically and strategically. Outside the left, class-free understandings of advantage and disadvantage have always been hegemonic. Such understandings have been embraced, to take two prominent examples, by those aiming to desegregate elite private schools after the attempt to do so to the public schools failed, and by a fully neoliberal feminism that leaned into, well, leaning in. Class reductionism has offered an important corrective to these views. For example, taking political economy seriously in its relation to patriarchy and white supremacy forces the abandonment of immutability theory. But that is no warrant to replace class-free understandings with class-exclusive ones.
Class reductionism is on the rise on the left for more recent and very understandable reasons. In recent years, progressives have been forced to revisit the optics through which so many of them interpreted Donald Trump’s first term — when they strayed in the direction of the corresponding mistake of race reductionism and embraced a crude form of “identity politics.” Nowadays, more progressives than in living memory have begun to grant the continuing importance of class, including to understand the electoral constituency for Trump’s catastrophic second term.
But even correctives are not analytically or strategically correct if taken too far. A class-free understanding of white supremacy by no means compels a race-free understanding of class domination, let alone a race-free politics of change. Suppressing just how gendered and racialized class oppression is in America is unlikely to work wonders for working class solidarity — even if you think, as I do, that the “white male working class” current alienated from the Democratic party needs some love too.
At some point, then, correctives can become evasions. Age ought to be the latest case in point of the limits of class reductionism: without reckoning with age, there is no understanding class. Nor is the need to build a successful political coalition an excuse for ignoring where it fits.
No book about the reality of contemporary gerontocracy or suggestions for undoing it could help if it just scapegoated the old, merely treated them as the new ruling class, and completely shortchanged their potential importance for politically good causes. Fortunately, if you decide to check out Gerontocracy in America, you’ll find it does none those things.
