I am 79 and am lucky to be able to speak my mind, so as eight Democratic-aligned senators with an average age of about 70 voted with Republicans to end the 40-day shutdown without the health care concessions I ask how old is too old to fight Republicans?

Let’s look at how this capitulation and the subsequent anger played out in the arguments. So many members of Congress who are at (and well beyond) retirement age.

Democrats are denouncing Mr. Schumer and this deal to end the government shutdown that their voters hate. But they offer no plausible account of how they would have done better, because maybe there isn’t one.

It’s a lot easier to vote for something your base hates if you’re too old to worry about re-election.

Of the Democratic-aligned senators who voted for the shutdown deal, two are not running again: Dick Durbin of Illinois, 80, and Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire, 78. Angus King of Maine is 81 and Jacky Rosen of Nevada is 68. Both Tim Kaine of Virginia and Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire are 67.

All would be past 70 years old if they decide to run again when their terms end.

The other “yes” votes were from Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada, 61, representing a state where the Las Vegas tourism industry feared taking a major hit from canceled flights, and from John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, who is just 56 but has embraced Trump on a slew of issues.

This is called a gerontocracy. When you have older leaders who are never going to face re-election again, you make decisions that can be disconnected from what their voters believe.

Yet the age issue is likely to keep flaring up. Senator Chuck Schumer’s top three midterm recruits would be in their 80s by the end of a second term.

This is a matter of how much to fight, and who should lead the charge. Remember, Democrats were less than a week removed from sweeping victories in California, New Jersey and Virginia. For many in the party, Tuesday’s elections were the first time in a year that they could feel good about their collective ability to punch back against extremism.

They wanted the Republicans to fund Affordable Care Act subsidies — with polls showing that voters were generally on the Democrats’ side.

Many progressives and younger Democrats have argued increasingly loudly that Schumer, 74, is no longer up to the fight.

Feeding the discontent are memories of the last shutdown fight in March, when Schumer led Senate Democrats to make a deal with Republicans to keep the government open. Then as now, the party’s base and most of its members in Congress wanted the fight against Trump and his allies.

In one sign of how far out on an island the eight senators are, they drew backhanded scorn from the Democratic National Committee, which rarely intervenes in intra party disputes.

This is all taking place as Trump issued preemptive pardons to Rudolph Giuliani and a host of people who tried to overturn the 2020 election results.

In a world without the Democratic senators’ capitulation, the pardons might have been a galvanizing issue for the party’s elected officials to rally around while continuing to press their case that spiraling health insurance costs were too high.

Fortunately for Democrats, they had some wins that should not be discounted. They raised the salience of soaring health insurance premiums and sent the message that Republicans made the policy that caused them. They goaded Trump into making unpopular moves to withhold food stamps that appear to have hurt his poll numbers. It’s possible the shutdown has still been a net political gain for the Democratic Party despite its necessarily ignominious end.

Grocery prices remain high. Energy prices are high. Our values are on the side of people at the margins who are suffering endlessly with the extremists world view.

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