Samuel Moyn

And that raises a series of difficult questions.

What happens when the people at the top don't leave, or when there exists a gap between a nation's demography and its leadership class? And at what point does an aging society become a gerontocracy? My guest is political theorist and professor at Yale University, Samuel Moyn, and he's the author of several books, including Gerontocracy in America.

[upbeat music] Hey, Samuel.

Thanks so much for coming on the show.

Welcome to Digging a Hole, the Legal Theory Podcast.

In this podcast, my co-host, colleague, and friend, Sam Moyn, and I talk about legal theory and whatever else is on our mind.

How was your summer, Sam?

It was great.

I got a lot of hate mail from older Americans for some reason.

I don't know.

Well, I, I think they're gonna love it and, uh, embrace me as a hero.

Listeners, get ready, 'cause coming down the pipe at some point, we will do an episode about Sam's book on his deep, deep abiding disdain for old pe- no, Jaren Tauber say.

Great to be back.

So before we get into the essay, I just have to give people a little context because your piece, Cradle to the Grave, intervenes in a debate that's been happening around Samuel Moyn's work on gerontocracy, which was put forth in his recent book called Gerontocracy in America.

And Gabe, in this essay, you're responding specifically not to the book itself, but to Moyne's shorter form writing about it, shorter exchanges around the book.

It's not a review of the book.

So it's still the most substantial.

We did a show with another historian, Samuel Moyn from Yale, who has a book, Gerontocracy in America, how the older hoarding power and wealth and what to do about it.

Is this hoarding of power and particularly wealth, is it mostly concentrated in real estate? And ultimately, will the crisis manifest itself in generational terms? I mean, these people, and there have been lots of books and articles about this, these old people will eventually die and presumably pass on their real estate to their kids and their grandkids?

Yeah, so that's an interesting point.

Because any order that eventually replaces this one has to actually reckon with the injustices that this one spent decades systematically ignoring.

There's a really interesting article in The Guardian titled What Should Replace the American-Led Order by Asli Bali and Samuel Moyn.

I'll put them in the show notes.

And I think it's an interesting argument about how to stop mourning what they call the old order and build the foundations of a new world.

Peter E. Gordon, a professor of modern European intellectual history at Harvard, called the refusal to use it a game of privilege on the grounds that those who would burn the whole house are not the ones who will feel the flames.

But the ever-contrarian Yale law professor Samuel Moyn replied that abnormalizing Trump disguises that he is quintessentially American, the expression of enduring and indigenous syndromes, seemingly attacking the MAGA as fascism school from the left.

Quote, "Our politics of comparison doesn't do the work we hoped it would." But Doran is not primarily concerned with the intricacies of the fascism debate.

His purpose is polemical, and the book is compelling.

There's an interesting, hard to predict quality here.

I read Samuel Moyn's book about gerontocracy in America, where he more or less says, not that you can't reconcile his view and your view, I think you can, but he's emphasizing a very different part of the problem, which is that you just get kind of slower and stiffer and less dynamics as a society.

Whereas you can also see, and maybe this is true for us as well, as blockage means all that energy has to route elsewhere, potentially in revolutionary outpourings.

Right.

But what the early cold war did was completely narrow that in, Lots of people have written about this.

There's a great recent book by Sam Moyn about the sort of like liberals killing themselves.

Whatever sort of radical imagination liberals had, they completely closed off in the early Cold War out of their vehement anti-communism.

To me, you can see this in the intellectual sphere.

Oh my God.

So the two books I got are The Second Estate, How the Tax Code Made an American Aristocracy by Ray D. Madoff.

And then the second one is Gerontocracy in America, How the Older Hoarding Power and Wealth and What to Do About It by Samuel Moyne.

And it's really great so far.

The chapters for Gerontocracy in America are...