It's useful to have known history
It's useful to have known history
As Patrick Leahy leaves the Senate, a few thoughts about age and politics
Earlier today, as some of the first snows of the winter fell on Montpelier, Patrick Leahy announced he would not be running for another term in the Senate. He might as well have announced he would not be winning another term, so deep is the affection for him here: he was first elected to the Senate in 1974, and though the margins in his first two elections were close (he was the first Democrat Vermont had ever sent to the Senate, after all), for the last six contests he’s crushed his opponents, although usually in a kind and neighborly way.
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His retirement announcement made me think of a conversation I had with him some years ago, a conversation that reminded me of the value of long experience and institutional memory. We were talking about the threat of domestic surveillance in the wake of the Snowden revelations, and he was remembering all the way back to the 1960s when he was a state’s attorney in Burlington (that’s what we call a DA here.) Anyway, he said that he and his colleagues had been called to Washington, where they met with…J. Edgar Hoover, then in the very twilight of his truly evil career at the FBI. (This was a man who, among many other things, tried to push Martin Luther King to kill himself, and who had used blackmail as a tool with a series of presidents and politicians. dating back to the 1920s). Anyway, Leahy said his take on limiting powers of the government to spy on its citizens dated back to that encounter because “if the government has information on people, eventually it will fall into the hands of someone like that.”
Which was just right. You could have reached the same conclusion in other ways, and some did; but others were too caught in the moment, fulminating about Snowden’s treachery and so forth. It helped immensely to have someone with a robust and personal sense of the nation’s history. Leahy did his best to safeguard the Constitution, right through the impeachment trial last year. “A lot of us don't realize how much of our privacy we're exposing by the internet,” he said at the time of the Snowden affair. “You can imagine what it would be like if the local police department said, ‘We’re just going to break into your house, steal everything out of your files and out of your records because someday we may need it.’ Everybody would be in an uproar. But they could do the same thing electronically.”
I think Leahy was wise to retire, and I think it’s a very good idea in general to be turning important offices over to younger people; one glance at our government and its easy to see the downsides of gerontocracy. But I also think older people bring some important assets with them to public service—especially now, when the world seems to remake itself almost hourly. It’s easy to make fun of aging Senators who ask dumb questions about how to use the internet—but in truth it’s probably useful to have some people around who remember the world before the internet. And sometimes there are truly powerful partnerships, as when AOC (32) and Sen Ed Markey (75) became the co-sponsors of the Green New Deal. Markey’s support, in turn, won him the backing of young people in the Bay State, and they powered his come-from-behind reelection bid over Joe Kennedy (then 39) whose entire platform was ‘time for a change.’ If you’re going to get big things done, some combination of youthful exuberance and institutional gravity can go a long ways. As Rep. Ocasio-Cortez put it in ad for Markey, “When it comes to progressive leadership, it’s not your age that counts, its the age of your ideas,”
As we organize those of us over 60 in Third Act, we’re cognizant that we have an important role to play still, and not just because we have plenty of economic and political power (more, really, than we should). We also have that sense of the past. Sometimes we think of it as a more civil place, but as Pat Leahy reminded me, that’s not really the case: even Trump’s henchmen had nothing on Hoover.
But that sense of the past is only useful when it’s joined to those who must inevitably build the future. The best example of that I can think of is our other Senator here in Vermont. Bernie became, despite his years, the most beloved American politician among young Americans, and he channeled their enthusiasms into the legislation now before the Senate: the Build Back Better bill that (if it passes and if Joe Manchin (74) does it no more damage) will move us more sharply in a progressive direction than anything since—well, anything in all the years that Senator Leahy spent in office.
Ah Bernie. The terrier of the senate with a fierce bite. Thanks for this.
The most valuable tool that the elder Democratic statesmen possess is an understanding of the dangers of autocratic rule. Most people are unaware of the massive changes that accompany authoritarianism, the loss of freedoms, the loss of stability, the neverending anxiety...but there has been almost radio silence through 5 years of Trumpism and the first year of Biden's administration. The wisdom and perspective of age is invaluable if these gifts are actually exercised. I hope BBB passes, I'm not optimistic, but the terrible moniker notwithstanding, it will help people if correctly implemented. But if legislation doesn't pass which hardens our democracy, a dictator can demolish legislation and reallocate funds. I hope, for all our sakes, that Sen Leahy is remembered for passage of legislation that protects our democracy for the next generation.