Cory Doctorow used his July 14 Pluralistic newsletter to make a blunt point about American power: the U.S. has a formal plan for a mass-casualty attack during the State of the Union, yet its political class is much worse at planning for the more ordinary risk that elderly officials get sick, decline or die while holding decisive offices.
Doctorow’s example is the designated survivor, the Cold War-era practice of keeping one official in the presidential line of succession away from the Capitol during the State of the Union address. The mechanism is not complicated. If the president, Congress and senior officials are killed in one attack, the government has someone legally positioned to take over. It is bureaucratic paranoia with a checklist, which is often the better kind.
His complaint is that no comparable discipline governs the slow-motion succession problem created by gerontocracy. Doctorow wrote that U.S. institutions now sit on narrow margins: Congress, federal appeals courts, the Supreme Court and presidential contests can all turn on one person staying alive and able to work. According to Doctorow, the Senate currently includes one nonagenarian, five octogenarians, 27 septuagenarians and seven late sexagenarians, with a 53-47 partisan split.
The issue, Doctorow argued, is actuarial rather than a claim that older people cannot serve well. Older officials face higher odds of severe medical events or death than younger ones, and that risk becomes politically explosive when a majority depends on one or two seats. That is not a spicy take. It is the kind of thing insurance companies price before breakfast.
Doctorow tied the argument to recent and familiar examples. He pointed to Politico’s 2025 reporting on former Rep. Kay Granger, who, according to that report, had been absent from Congress and was later found living in a care facility while still in office. He also cited Dianne Feinstein as an example of a senior lawmaker who remained in office despite questions about capacity near the end of her career.
He extended the same critique to the courts, citing Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s decision not to retire during Barack Obama’s presidency. Doctorow argued that Ginsburg’s refusal to step down, reportedly because she wanted her successor chosen by the first woman president, helped produce the Supreme Court’s current conservative majority after Donald Trump appointed Amy Coney Barrett following Ginsburg’s death.
The essay also invoked an American Prospect piece on the budget consequences of Lindsey Graham’s “sudden departure,” using it as another example of how a single vacancy can scramble long-term political plans. Doctorow did not present the problem as confined to one party. He wrote that both Democrats and Republicans rely on elderly leaders while simultaneously pursuing projects that require years of execution and tight institutional control.
Doctorow’s proposed standard is less glamorous than most political reform talk: treat succession as a design problem. He compared it to his own estate planning, saying he added writer Molly White as a second literary executor alongside John Scalzi because Scalzi is close to his age and White is younger. The point was not the literary paperwork. It was the model: assume frailty, plan around it and stop pretending the calendar is a negotiable instrument.
That is the practical indictment in the piece. Washington can imagine a decapitation strike and stash a backup president in a bunker. It has a harder time admitting that a senator in their 80s may not be the load-bearing component a party wants for a decade-long plan.
This story draws on original reporting from Pluralistic.