Corbyn and Sanders are riding a wave of respect for elders

For connoisseurs of the great American maverick, 1941 was a vintage year indeed. In May, Robert Zimmerman saw the light in Duluth, Minnesota, and two decades later– as Bob Dylan – began to sing the country and the world into a different era. Over in Brooklyn, in September 1941, Bernard Sanders came along. Around the time, in the mid-Sixties, that young Bernie was still getting himself arrested on civil-rights and anti-war campaigns, young Bob sneered at the archetypal corporate suit (in “Ballad of a Thin Man”) that: “Something is happening here but you don’t know what it is, do you, Mr Jones?”

With those twin grizzled heroes of dissent both now 74 and quite undimmed by age, Mr Jones still has trouble as he tries to figure out what’s going on. The Economist slaps down Sanders as a “dishevelled septuagenarian”. But not only does the “democratic socialist” Senator from Vermont have the effrontery to trounce Hillary Clinton in the New Hampshire primary this week, he takes the votes of Democrats under the age of 30 by an extraordinary margin of five to one (and handsomely beats Mrs Clinton among all women too).

By the time we get to South Carolina, let alone Phoenix (that’s on 22 March), machine politics-as-usual will have shifted up a gear. The Clinton juggernaut might well leave Sanders’s young pioneers on the kerb as electoral roadkill. Still, the red – or maybe cupcake-pink – dawn in snowy New England has cast new light on a hopeful realignment. Could the mass appeal of the Vermont veteran to progressive-minded 20-somethings – when set alongside the mobilisation of youth that propelled Jeremy Corbyn to the Labour leadership – signal a retreat from the fragmenting assumption that young and old must fight over ever-diminishing spoils?

Let’s not get carried away by visions of a grand cross-generational alliance, as shorts-wearing striplings and gnarled ancients stride (or shuffle) together towards utopia beneath a scarlet banner in the style of some Stalin-era poster. At 68, Mrs Clinton is older than Corbyn. Yet she belongs in spirit if not in years to the sleekly coiffed and tucked elite who glide with steel-tipped smiles through a perpetual mid-life. Let no one blame her for that. Neither political nor business life gives a free ride to ageing leaders. And it makes women pay a far heavier tariff than men. Still, the hard-won eternal prime that buys political longevity for her, or other female contenders, also makes it near-impossible for them to relax into the sort of defiant informality that benefits a Sanders or a Corbyn.

Let the guard drop, the foundations flake, or the hair muss, and the political credentials also slide. So sexism as well as socialism may benefit never-say-die radicals of the Sanders stamp. Remember, however, the ordeal of Michael Foot and his “donkey-jacket” at the Cenotaph. The senior male scruff will come under equally vicious scrutiny once he begins to pose a threat. Menace the establishment and that quirky thrift-shop charm will soon translate, under the spotlight of partisan media, into manifest unfitness for a serious office of state.

For the moment, though, mid-life Mr Jones is worried and baffled by this unheralded compact of young and old. Think of politics as a family romance writ large, and what we now witness on both sides of the ocean feels like one of those conspiracies that brings grandparents and grandchildren together against the paranoid and punitive control-freaks in between. Traditionally, what oldsters give to youngsters involves, first, a sense of freedom from anxious conformism. The Sanders or Corbyn cults show ample evidence of that. Those mischief-making seniors may also share occult knowledge of a kind that the parents’ generation either never had or chose to throw away.

On this front, the “big data” pollster Nate Silver has reported some unexpected findings about young Americans’ attitude towards the once-taboo badge that Sanders wears with pride. Last year, he writes, “a plurality of voters aged 18 to 29 had a favourable view of socialism”. The S-word is now seen as European-style welfare and protection rather than, as in the past, one step away from Kremlin-mandated slavery. Silver doubts that young voters have, in fact, turned far left of late. All the same, the Sanders wave has helped to neutralise a term that once struck fear into mainstream US hearts.

It might, however, be a while before a socialist-backed Progressive Party can gather almost a fifth of the votes in a US Presidential election. That occurred in 1924, when Senator Robert La Follette of Wisconsin led a farmer-labour coalition that shook the traditional party duopoly. La Follette’s platform, by the way, included public ownership of railroads and utilities, stronger civil liberties, and a compulsory referendum before any future foreign war. He would draw a crowd in 2016.

In politics, eccentric retirees and elder statespersons may harvest an indulgent sympathy denied to younger colleagues. I used to watch Tony Benn charm the thermal pants off silver-thatched crowds at literary festivals in bastions of shire Conservatism, and wonder how many of the adoring throng in the marquee would venture out on polling day to cast their votes for a hard-left package. Some, for sure – but not nearly as many as tittered at the gags or even bought books for Benn to sign. Not every national treasure converts to legal tender.

The Sanders-Corbyn novelty stems from the pair’s ability to speak a language of social transformation rooted in the past and yet make the voters of the future heed its message. And their success in throwing a line across a presumed generational abyss comes after years of antagonistic headlines. This language of suspicion has sought to cast “Millennials” and “Baby Boomers” (or whichever label you prefer) as sworn enemies. In an age of falling expectations, every snarl-up in social policy – from house-price bubbles to pension shortfalls, tuition fees to health-care shortages – could be blamed on some essential conflict between the needs of the young and the demands of the old.

Divide-and-rule: the cheapest elite ploy of all. I should resent you because my taxes pay for your pensions. You ought to hate me because my free TV licence hikes up your student-loan repayments. And so on… Politicians in thrall to the idea of extreme inequality as the dynamo of growth have found in the phantom war of age against youth a handy scapegoat and diversion. It’s no accident that one of the most-cited chastisements of the “selfishness” of the post-war boomers came in a book from a state-shrinking Tory politician: David Willetts’ The Pinch. Last year, however, the Ready for Ageing network of charities published a detailed rebuttal of almost every divisive boomer myth. Beyond their data about the 24 per cent of people aged 55-64 who rent housing, the 37 per cent of women with zero private-pension assets, or the 6.7 million between 45 and 64 with a serious illness or disability, I relished the truth about tees. Thirty- and 40-somethings play much more golf than their elders.

Even if the Sanders-Corbyn cavalcade slows down, the demographic breadth of their constituencies indicates that voters in all cohorts have the wit to dismiss this generational tribalism. Old can be cool, although the prospect may feel inconceivably distant to Bernie’s – or Jeremy’s – disciples. It won’t, however, do to sentimentalise about the innate wisdom and virtue of senior statespeople. True, William Ewart Gladstone – acclaimed as the reformist “People’s William” – became PM for the fourth time in 1892 at the age of 82. He had recently hailed the triumph of striking London dock workers as a vital advance to help secure “a fair principle of division of the fruits of industry”. What a scary subversive. On the other hand, the oldest US President to enter the White House, two weeks before his 70th birthday in 1981, was Ronald Reagan: nobody’s idea of a late-blooming leveller, but a revolutionary hero nonetheless for free-marketeers.

In more extreme cases, gerontocracy can pave the way to hell rather than paradise. In a week’s time, the oldest living executive leader celebrates his birthday. Robert Mugabe will be 92. Then again, Zimbabwe’s incorrigible tyrant had committed massacres in Matabeleland before he turned 60. Age may harden the hide but it seldom changes the spots – for better or for worse.

Active seniors with supportive juniors deserve to thrive not only in the top flight of politics, but across the professional spectrum. After all, the grandparental generation will not (as 72-year-old Sir Mick Jagger still sings) fade away. New longevity research from Public Health England reveals that men aged 65 can look forward to 19 more years of life, and women to 21. They can’t all lead political parties. Which other twilight pastimes might the drop-in centre advise?

Achingly trendy rock star, for a start. As 81-year-old Leonard Cohen croaks on his latest album, Popular Problems: “You got me singing/ Even though the world is gone/ You got me thinking/ I’d like to carry on”. If they do carry on, the timeless troubador’s counterparts in politics should sing loud about a politics of intergenerational solidarity to defeat the rhetoric of resentment. Plenty of voters, whatever their vintage, would say “Hallelujah” to that.