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1. One of the interesting things about Trump's tweet of the "white power" video is that the cultural civil war has spread inside The Villages, the massive Florida retirement communities that are the heartland of Trumpism.
2. As @MikeGrunwald has wonderfully described, the Villages were crucial not just for Trump's victory in 2016 but the continuing dominance of the GOP in Florida. Huge retirement communities filled with people fearful of cultural and demographic change.
3. Covid -- and Trump's botched response to it -- has made seniors a swing vote in a way they haven't been for last 2 decades. One big question in the election is what do older Americans fear more: covid-19 or people of color?
4. But having the 77-year-old Biden competing against the 74-year-old Trump for the senior vote does reinforces the feeling that America is becoming a gerontocracy: no country for young people but like the USSR of the 1970s dominated by an aging cadre stuck in the past.
5. Recently @cushbomb had some bleak thoughts about what it means for old people to dominate the election as they do: "The electorate is old. The electorate is dying. The country is dying. The contest is between two different ways to be a dying old person."
6. But contra this bleak picture, the fact remains that the gerontocracy can't last forever. As in the USSR, there will have to be a generational shift at some point. More here: thenation.com/article/politi…
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