I was in the car with my parents and kids and my kids were like “who’s in charge here?” It’s a good question, though they just wanted to resolve some inane point of order like ‘whose feather is this?’ The best rationale we could settle on for self-governance was averageness. We added up the ages of everyone in the car (6, 7, 41, 70, 72) and divided by 5, giving about 40. AKA me. This seems obvious enough in a car, but not in any political cartography. That’s one reason the whole clown car they call the ‘rules-based order’ is crashing.
If you look at the vehicle of state, the dying White Empire is driven by a visibly dying octogenarian, as are many ‘liberal’ democracies. These ‘democracies’ are actually naturally conservative. Rulers fail upwards forever and pass on power to their children. There are lower age limits on civic rights but no upper, so people literally die in their seats, thinking they can take it all with them. And so they actually do. This ending generation is ending the world with them, leaving everybody else with the consequences.
In Foundation, Isaac Asimov (and the new show runners) imagined this demographic problem quite graphically. He posited one ruler, composed of three identical clones, decanted at different times…
