David Hogg, a 25-year-old Democratic political activist, debated passionately against a status quo that he said allows older Americans to ‘monopolize’ power.
David Hogg addresses the YPU. (Credit: Sygne Stole)
Lucas Miller
Investigative Reporting Editor, The Buckley Beacon
On Tuesday night, the Yale Political Union invited David Hogg to debate the resolution “No Country for Old Men.” Debaters spent the evening debating the prevalence of older Americans in politics and whether or not the United States ought to elect younger leaders, with Hogg speaking in the affirmative. The Pew Research Center reported in early 2025 that the median age of the House of Representatives was 57.5 years, while Senators were slightly older, at 64.7 years.
Hogg, 25, is a graduate of Harvard College and served as a co-vice chair of the Democratic National Committee. He first rose to national prominence as a student leader in the March for Our Lives movement after surviving the 2018 Parkland shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.
In 2020, he co-founded Leaders We Deserve, a political action committee which he now serves as the president of. The organization describes itself as a “grassroots organization dedicated to electing young progressives to Congress and State Legislatures across the country to help defeat the far-right agenda and advance a progressive vision for the future,” according to a statement on its website.
Hogg began his speech to the YPU with a simple statement: “I’m talking about ending the gerontocracy today.” Hogg defined “gerontocracy” as a “system run by the old, for the old.” He spent the remainder of his time arguing that America should remove what he termed as ‘barriers’ to young people participating in electoral politics.
Hogg cited the lack of representation for young Americans in Congress. “Our country was founded on the idea that for a flourishing republic, representation was essential,” he said. “Our generation does not have representation in Congress… there is only one member of the United States House of Representatives from either party that is under the age of thirty.”
“Right now, the status quo has allowed older Americans to monopolize the seats of power,” Hogg continued. “This has caused them to lead without empathy and hoard wealth, which comes at the expense of younger generations through the corruption of money in politics that has created the situation we’re currently in.”
Hogg spent much of his speech focusing on the issue of campaign finance, citing in particular his opposition to the United States Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission, a 2010 landmark decision in which the Court ruled that the First Amendment protects corporate funding of independent political expenditures and thus cannot be limited by statute.
That decision, Hogg contended, solidified the incumbency advantage, or the tendency of incumbents to win reelection at high rates. According to data from OpenSecrets, a nonprofit organization that touts itself as the “trusted authority on money in American politics,” the reelection rate in the House of Representatives has not fallen below 85% since at least 1964. In the Senate, reelection rates after 1980 have remained above 80% in all but three cycles.
The incumbency advantage’s firm establishment, Hogg argued, reinforces the gerontocracy, which has “resulted in imbalanced representation, and essentially put our democracy, and our generation, and our country, on a reverse mortgage that we will have to foot the bill for.”
When proposing his solution, Hogg resisted imposing upper age limits for elected officials. “That’s wrong. Our goal should not be to simply bar older people from holding office,” he said. “We must remove the money in politics that proves advantageous for older generations, not on the grounds of merit, but resources. It is not that those who have the best ideas get elected. It is those with the biggest war chests, more often than not. And that is wrong.”
Corinne Cowan ‘29, a member of the Yale Political Union’s Conservative Party, opposed Hogg’s remarks. “At the core of this disagreement is an intellectual dispute: whether or not political truth is constant or changes over time. The theory behind politics really matters here, because it informs how we approach political leadership.”
“The affirmative’s complaints about the gerontocracy’s lack of awareness or insight into the current day, such as the ones Mr. Hogg brought us here tonight, depend on the claim that political issues are purely a result of the social and material circumstances of a certain generation,” Cowan said.
For Cowan, because political ideas transcend generations, younger leaders are not necessarily more apt to serve than older Americans. “If we view politics as intrinsically fickle from generation to generation, we risk missing the long-term trends in favor of obsessing over the present.”
Cowan also pushed back on what she perceived as the attachment of Hogg’s argument to identity politics. “Mr. Hogg and the speaker before me commit the leftist blunder of identity politics, conflating demographics with political and intellectual insights; a politics that mistakenly believes that those in the younger generation demographics are the only ones with the lived experience necessary to weigh in on modern issues.”
In his concluding remarks, Hogg further clarified his position in response to the speeches in the negative. “I want to make it clear, I’m not advocating for some kind of quota system where there has to be a certain number of young people in power. I think young people should have to compete and prove why they are the best person anyway.”
The resolution passed by a vote of 65 to 25 with one abstention.