On Tuesday, President Joe Biden announced he will run for a second term as president of the United States. He claimed his campaign will serve as a “bridge” to new, younger leadership in the Democratic Party . Instead, his move only continues the Old Guard’s increasingly desperate attempt to keep power.

Biden’s announcement means he will be the Democratic nominee absent a health problem intervening. On the Republican side, former President Donald Trump has a strong chance to be that party’s standard-bearer, setting up a rematch of 2020. Trump is of the same generation as Biden. While Biden already has passed his 80th year, Trump will do so in the second year of the next presidential term. Thus, while the Democratic Party has a broader age problem, both sides remain wed to octogenarian rule.

This hold contributes to a broader, sadder set of circumstances. Politics today seems like a strange mixture of panic and exhaustion. Rhetorically, we have raised the stakes of every contest so as to paint a loss as an extinction-level event. I am not old but have lost count of how many “most important election in our lifetime” my lifetime already has included. After each one, of course, life goes on, sometimes a bit better, sometimes a bit worse for the electoral and subsequent policy results. The general stasis following the panic helps breed the exhaustion. Until the next cycle, in which the new panic acts as a temporary shot of adrenaline prior to a resetting of fatigue.

The Old Guard’s unending grip on political office aids and abets our cycles of panic and exhaustion. It aids the panic because that generation faces the twilight of its own existence: much less influence. Used to power, it cannot let go and sees the end of that power as a tragedy, if not the very destruction of the country.

This grip contributes to exhaustion in part due to the limitations of strength that come with age. But more than that, our politics is exhausted because the older generation’s ability to face our nation’s problems has generally passed. The problems it sees increasingly are not the problems of the country as a whole but of a subset. The solutions it has to offer seem increasingly tired, rote, and beside the point. Much of it stems from a longing for a return to some idyllic past that partly never was and certainly never can again be. In fact, the generation both Biden and Trump represent have much to answer for in our current economic, social, and political condition. Its vices triumphed much more than its virtues. Now, that generation seeks to make its vices permanent and recast them as goods.

This diagnosis of our politics does not mean that a shift of power to younger generations will fix all that ails us. Youth, even middle age, has its own vicious tendencies, its own blind spots to truth, justice, and the common good. Still, we must take up that role. We must make our own contributions, both good and mistaken. We must build our own future. Perhaps even our vices might moderate those of our fathers and grandfathers. But we might even have our own virtues that meet the moment in which we live. We might have it in us to realize the reforms needed to place the country on better footing economically, socially, and spiritually.

That is, if we are given the chance. That is up to the past generation. But it also is up to us.

In his first inaugural address, President John F. Kennedy declared that “the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans.” More than 60 years later, Biden, and even Trump, refuses to pass the torch again. Our panicked and exhausted politics is poorer for it. Let us hope and work for better.

Adam Carrington is an associate professor of politics at Hillsdale College.