Dianne Feinstein and the Centrist Gerontocracy

Dianne Feinstein and the Centrist Gerontocracy

Rebecca Traister on a venerable senator and an out-of-touch elite.

Jeet Heer
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Dianne Feinstein, who will soon celebrate her 89th birthday, is currently the oldest member of the Senate. In recent months, a controversy has swirled around her due to reports of her alleged cognitive decline in outlets like The New Yorker, the San Francisco Chronicle and The New York Times. Some argue that this debate is sexist and ageist.

Rebecca Traister recently wrote a profile of Feinstein for New York magazine that opened up this debate by situating it within Feinstein’s life trajectory and the story of the cohort she belongs to: a generation of septuagenarians and octogenarians who now hold the commanding heights of power in America.

This week, I learned a lot in a spirited talk with Traister, in which we took up Feinstein as an emblem of the ruling class, the years of turmoil in San Francisco that accompanied her rise to power, the way the political system values seniority, and the reasons the gerontocracy is so committed to a politics of elite civility.

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Jeet Heer Jeet Heer is a national affairs correspondent for The Nation and host of the weekly Nation podcast, The Time of Monsters. He also pens the monthly column “Morbid Symptoms.” The author of In Love with Art: Francoise Mouly’s Adventures in Comics with Art Spiegelman (2013) and Sweet Lechery: Reviews, Essays and Profiles (2014), Heer has written for numerous publications, including The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, The American Prospect, The Guardian, The New Republic, and The Boston Globe.


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