IT IS TIME FOR THEM TO GO.

That's the refrain from Al Gore's acceptance speech in 1992, when it was the Cold Warriors of twelve years of Reagan and Bush (quite possibly the last time responsible adults were the norm in Washington.)  It's also long been a theme of mine, particularly where the victory-dividend squandering Silent Generation and early-cohort Baby Boomers and their irritable mental gestures are concerned.

Modern medicine has been successful at keeping people alive longer, and the Rising Stars of the Watergate era are ... still in charge.  That might not be a good thing.  Back in 1998, William Strauss and Neil Howe's The Fourth Turning offered this outlook for circa 2020, at page 324 of the paperback edition.

In the Fourth Turning, the Silent will be fading from power, with less chance to veto (or, as always, to entangle) the actions of others. Their vestigial powers will reside mainly in courtrooms. If they block the Next New Deal, Silent jurists would follow in the Crisis-aggravating saecular footsteps of Roger Taney in the 1850s and the "nine old men" in the 1930s. They should avoid intruding on the moral judgements of Boomer legislatures and avoid using detail, complexity, and delay to stifle the recrudescence of civic authority. Crisis-era antagonisms will not be amenable to being smoothed over, and warring sides will refuse mediation. Decisions will not be improved by adding new layers of procedure, and urgent problems will not await further study. The Silent should defer to the 13er view that experts can be dead wrong, that professional elites can stumble over simple choices, and that kind intentions do not produce kind results. As the Crisis deepens, 13er-style survivalism will trump Silent-style procedural democracy every time.

Twenty years on, the detail, complexity, and delay are still with us, if not in the courts.  Perhaps a Federalist Society long march through the institutions paid off there.  In the rest of the government, though, well, there's the incoming president^*, Joe Biden; there's the continuing speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi; should the Republican base come through in Georgia, Mitch McConnell will continue as majority leader in the Senate; and Anthony Fauci will probably find new layers of procedure to lay on a population smothered by the failed mitigations of the past nine months.  Octogenarians all the way down.  Why should the next set of comprehensive plans turn out any differently from the past sets?

Rebecca Gordon, of Tom Dispatch, likely views many of the events of the past fifty years differently than I, and yet, she and I are in accord on one thing.

Today, however, boomers like me stand on the other side of a new generation gap. We’re the ones younger people increasingly feel they shouldn’t trust. And who can blame them? If we ever consent to get off stage along with Donald Trump, Joe Biden, and the rest of them, we’ll be leaving behind a shattered planet, including the most profound economic inequality in a century, mass extinctions of every sort, and a climate crisis that threatens all of humanity, starting with the poorest of us.

The good news is that most of the bad news in that excerpt is wrong.  But where is the current middle-aged leader to make "it is time for them ... the late Silents and early Boomers in particular ... to go" the rallying cry?