David Shribman is the former executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post Gazette.

One candidate worried about the country being a “house divided” by slavery but saw a future where “it will cease to be divided.” Another spoke amid the wreckage of the Great Depression, declaring, “I decline to accept present conditions as inevitable or beyond control.” A third said the country required “a new generation of leadership.” And one campaigned for a second term to have a chance of “building a bridge to the 21st century.”

None of these candidates is running this year. None of this year’s candidates is speaking an idiom remotely like Abraham Lincoln (1860), Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1932), John F. Kennedy (1960) or Bill Clinton (1996).

Some American elections — eight by my count, perhaps more according to academic presidential historians or armchair pundits — clearly have been about the future and are marked by clashes between different visions of the country in coming years or decades. They speak more of getting the country ready for new challenges than about critiques about the past.

This is not that kind of election.

It is more than the fact that President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump are old men, their formative years far in the past. Biden was born as the Germans and the Soviets were struggling in the World War II Battle of Stalingrad. Trump was born the day the United States, the only nuclear power in the year after the end of World War II, proposed to the new United Nations that the production of additional atomic weapons be banned.

It is more than the fact that 77% of the country is younger than the two men who are the major-party candidates for the White House. That figure is unusually low; a century ago, more than 95% of the country was younger than Trump and Biden are today.

It is, instead, that the two candidates are rooted in a long-ago America, a country less complicated, less diverse, less challenged by multiple power centers abroad.

Even applying my guiding principle to the question of generational politics — that how old you are matters less than when you were young — the sell-by date of these two candidates has passed long ago.

In the America of their birth, there were no major-league baseball teams west of St. Louis or south of Washington, the AFL and CIO had not yet merged, the Philippines were still under American rule, India was still a British colony, and the state of Israel did not exist. Biden turned 18 during the Congo Crisis. Trump turned 18 during the Beatles’ first appearance in Australia. Today, the Congo Crisis is all but forgotten in the United States. The Beatles disbanded 54 years ago — before Republican Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, a leading candidate to become Trump’s running mate, was born.

Biden went to Washington when Richard Nixon was president, Mike Mansfield of Montana was Senate majority leader, Carl Albert of Oklahoma was speaker of the House, Rep. Wilbur Mills of Arkansas was an important power broker as chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, and more than 10% of his Senate colleagues were segregationists. All these people are now dead.

Trump first appeared on the front page of The New York Times the year Biden joined the Senate. Three years later, the newspaper carried a picture of him standing beside his Fleetwood Cadillac, which carried the New York license plate “DJT,” the letters by which he was known before he became POTUS. That was the year in which Biden, delivering the commencement address at the University of Scranton, said, in words his rival (and perhaps Biden himself) would employ today, “I don’t think there has ever been as much doubt in America as there is today.”

It wasn’t always this way in the United States. In 1828, Andrew Jackson ran for the White House with a new vision of the nature of American democracy. In 1896, the fight was between an advocate of a monetary system based on silver (the view of William Jennings Bryan, the Democratic nominee) or gold (the view of William McKinley, who prevailed in the contest). In 1980, Ronald Reagan ran against President Jimmy Carter and offered a different view of the size and reach of the future of the federal government. A dozen years later, a young governor with the ore tailings of the baby boom (Bill Clinton) ran against a World War II veteran (President George H.W. Bush, marked by the Cold War). And the mere appearance of Barack Obama as the Democratic nominee in 2008 was a shout about changing American demographics.

Trump’s campaign speeches are laced with venom about the grievances he says he has experienced and are marked by talk of “retribution” for past offenses. (Some of his allies, to be sure, have been assembling a package of dramatic changes in the federal bureaucracy, but the candidate rarely mentions them, and whether he has the memory, will or desire to pursue that blueprint is uncertain.) Biden wants to “finish the job,” which is to say to push priorities he already established.

All this seems congruent with the sullen mood of the country. Writing in 1953 about the beginning of the fourth year of the Civil War in his classic “A Stillness at Appomattox,” the historian Bruce Catton wrote, “What lay ahead was almost certain to be worse than what had gone before.” That’s a concise assessment of the country’s outlook today, when talk of a civil war is tossed around promiscuously.

Overall, the campaign, like all elections where the past is a bigger factor than the future, is a policy desert.

“Actual policy is playing a far smaller role this year than in past elections,” said Jake Haselswerdt, a political scientist at the University of Missouri’s Truman School of Government and Public Affairs. “For Biden, the vision of the future is what he’s already tried to do. For Trump, his plans to revamp the executive branch is essentially all about himself, giving him a chance to address his grievances.”

The 2024 election should be a chance for the nation to address its grievances. Instead, there is a sense in the country that the race between two men the public would rather not have as their major-party finalists is itself one of the country’s grievances.