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I wonder how Americans of a certain vintage explain 1968 to their grandchildren. “Well, kid, we had an assassination of a public figure. Then another. No, not those two. Those were gunned down earlier in the decade. Also, a segregationist won five states in the presidential election. Riots happened from which some cities never recovered. The Democrats held a convention in which the police rioted. Vietnam? Such were the protests, the president, who had angled for the job since he was a Texas road digger, relinquished it without a fight. Elvis’s comeback was quite the tonic, but still.”
How is it that America didn’t fall apart soon after all this? Watergate and Opec-induced inflation should have tipped people over the edge. How is it that public life cooled so much that 49 states agreed on re-electing Reagan and a Chicago convention in 2024 is a non-event?
Well, there’s this: the median American in 1968 was 26. Now? 38. And this isn’t an extreme age arc by world standards. At the time of the Cultural Revolution, when students hounded their elders for insufficient fealty to Maoist doctrine, the median person in China was a scarcely believable 18. That number is now almost 40.
In France during its own 1968, when the republic tottered, the median age was a decade less than it is now. The median German is older than in the Baader-Meinhof heyday, as is the median Italian compared with the Years of Lead, when the far left and the far right murdered people. Britain, less of a tinderbox, still suffered a generation of industrial militancy around that time. Legislation then neutered the unions. But it also helps that half the population is now more than 40.
The world should aim to increase the birth rate: for fiscal reasons, for cultural vigour. But an ageing population has one thing to be said for it, and it isn’t said enough. Basic order becomes easier to maintain. The old might vote for such radical propositions as Brexit, and jabber about them online, but street politics? The kinetic expression of grievances? That is a twentysomething’s game. A glut of youngsters, and of prime-age men in particular (testosterone declines after 40, sources inform me) can be too much for even an authoritarian state to contain.
This is often a good thing. I’m glad the median Pole in the 1980s was young enough to mobilise against a decrepit regime. But where democracy is in place, and core rights secured, I’d err on the side of less rather than more action, thanks. The fastest known cure for what Tom Wolfe called “radical chic” is living somewhere in which the state has lost purchase on events.
In retrospect, Elon Musk’s prediction of a civil war in Britain was a heartening moment. If some vicious but containable riots struck an intelligent man as the prologue to civic collapse, it is because he, or we, are so unused to the real thing. The Capitol siege was a monstrous event. But chronic societal disorder was worse in the past. European countries faced paramilitary insurgencies when Musk was a child. The administration of the UK had to ask “Who governs?”, and that was before the miner’s strike. Great cities depopulated as crime rose.
Now? “Activism” has become something of a bourgeois rite, like retraining mid-career as a therapist. “Radical” is a journalistic synonym for “good”, as few remember the last time radicalism got people hurt. I don’t knock this innocence. It is a precious thing. But we have demographic decline to thank for it. For a while now, societies have been too old to run amok.
The most prescient advice I ever received went something like this. At 33, you will feel 21. At 36, you will feel 50. Something happens in those middle-thirties, some internal ebbing, that must be grounded in biological change. (It is the age when athletes tend to retire.) It isn’t, or needn’t be, an unpleasant experience. Yes, the energy goes. But the anger goes too. And if it is enough to subdue an individual, imagine the aggregated public effect. How tempting to take that 1960s motto — don’t trust anyone over 30 — and invert it.
janan.ganesh@ft.com
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