The Gray Champion
We are living through one of the great transitions of history.
When ancestral generations passed through these great gates of history, they saw in the Gray Champion a type of elder very different from the bustling senior citizens of America’s recent past and from the old “Uncle Sams,” the Revolutionary War survivors of the 1830s, when Hawthorne wrote his tale. Who were these old priest-warriors? They were elder expressions of the Prophet archetype. And their arrival into old age heralded a new constellation of generations.1
Popular culture follows power and nothing else.
A culture shift is happening.
People who were pop stars yesterday are invisible today. They’ve been replaced in the imagination by a different cast . . . some familiar, some new. The very definitions of “cool” and “connected” were surgically removed from the old and reattached to the MAGA set.
Henry Kissinger Was the Sexiest Man Alive in the 1970s
We’ve seen something like this before.
Richard Nixon rode the biggest popular vote landslide in modern history into his second term as President of the United States in 1972. Suddenly, everyone wanted a photo with Nixon and his inner circle.
Nixon acolytes started showing up on popular TV shows like Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In. And one man epitomized this cultural phenomenon more than any other: Henry Kissinger.
Mark Tooley wrote in Providence Magazine last year (my emphasis):
Beyond any other Secretary of State in history, much less National Security Advisor, Kissinger was a superstar. After his shuttle diplomacy between Israel and Arab capitals during and after the 1973 Yom Kippur War, he became known as “Super K.” His reputed romantic life with Hollywood stars, supposedly suggested by Nixon to make him appear human, was much reported. He was declared the “sexiest man alive” based not on his short and pudgy looks but his brilliant mind.
When a CIA plot forced Nixon’s resignation in 1974, Kissinger remained a cultural and Washington institution. He continued as Gerald Ford’s Secretary of State, successfully ending the Vietnam War. He advised, in one way or another, every president through Joe Biden. Until Kissinger’s death one year ago this month, Kissinger was my generations human link to 1970s politics.
But the political wave that lifted Kissinger to the heights of pop stardom failed to sustain itself. Nixon’s resignation following the Watergate op sent an already weird and synthetic pop culture into something like a tailspin. By 1976, when the country celebrated its 200th birthday, the vivid colors of the early 70s were fading, replaced in spots by traditional red, white, and blue. Jimmy Carter’s work shirts and jeans, down home farmer accent, and “natural” style appealed to a culture tired of plastic and polyester.
Unfortunately for Carter, attire and accents weren’t authentic enough for a nation sick of the sixties and dizzy from the seventies, so the people retired Carter after his first term and replaced him with a man equally cotton-clad but more in tune with the interior desire for authenticity and tradition: Ronald Wilson Reagan.
Now, in the waning hours of the year of our Lord twenty twenty-four, a culture shift larger than Nixon’s, Carter’s, or Reagan’s is underway, and it’s washing over America faster than a tsunami.
The New “It”
America has turned the page, but many pages remain to be turned. While everyone knows Trump will close the border, deport the invaders, end wars and support of wars, unleash oil, and Make America Great Again, there are larger changes in store. Trump 47’s administration will be dramatically different from Trump 45 simply because, not only has Trump learned from his first administration, but he has had four years to fully grasp how rotten Washington, DC, and the Republican Party are. It’s no mistake the people most associated with Trump today are all from outside the GOP establishment. To name a few:
Tucker Carlson
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
Tulsi Gabbard
Kid Rock
Elon Musk
Joe Rogan
Dana White
While Conservative Inc. laments that “these people are not conservatives,” all are Americans in the truest, interior, organic sense the word. They value the things we once all agreed on:
Faith
Family
Prosperity
Vigorous health
Peace
Independence
Opportunity
Work
Service
National pride
People
Their adherence to these core values put many of them at odds with the party they were, until now, associated with: the Democrats. What many on the right still fail to admit is that the people who ran the Republican Party for the past 20 years have more in common with the Democrats than with the people on Trump’s BFF list. Mitch McConnell and John Thune are much more comfortable with Kamala Harris and Nancy Pelosi than they are with Joe Rogan or Kid Rock.
Both Democrat and Republican lifers put the DC cabal far ahead of the American people or even American interests. Democrats and Republicans alike turned the federal government into a private operation whose sole interest is concentrating more and more power into fewer and fewer hands, so long as those hands were reachable by the political elites. Most important to keep in mind, both Democrat and Republican establishmentarians exist for the edifices and pop-star aspects of politics, wanting to see and be seen at the “it” events with the “it” people.
Soon after the catalyst, a national election will produce a sweeping political realignment, as one faction or coalition capitalizes on a new public demand for decisive action. Republicans, Democrats, or perhaps a new party will decisively win the long partisan tug-of-war, ending the era of split government that had lasted through four decades of Awakening and Unraveling. The winners will now have the power to pursue the more potent, less incrementalist agenda about which they had long dreamed and against which their adversaries had darkly warned. This new regime will enthrone itself for the duration of the Crisis. Regardless of its ideology, that new leadership will assert public authority and demand private sacrifice. Where leaders had once been inclined to alleviate societal pressures, they will now aggravate them to command the nation’s attention. The regeneracy will be solidly under way.
Over the past 4 years, enough Americans have realized that old labels for parties and ideologies lost their meaning. Terms like liberal, conservative, Democrat, and Republican have melded into the same blob of “them.” All four groups are the “them” that wants to screw the “us.” It’s a blob that is adamantly in favor of:
War and global belligerence
Laissez faire treatment of large corporations, especially pharmaceutical companies but micro-management of entrepreneurship
Strict limitation and regulation of small and medium business
Coddling criminals
Preferential treatment of illegal aliens over American citizens
Ridicule and belittlement of the working class
Racial segregation
Synthetic food and food laced with potentially dangerous chemicals
Sexual exploitation of women and children
Prohibition of Judeo-Christian beliefs and practices
Unlimited debt
From 1945 until 2020, these issues were the issues the two parties, the two ideologies, fought over. Then, suddenly, both parties and both ideologies embraced them all. War, corporatism, artificiality, synthetics, subservience, dependence, and conformity became the de facto planks of both Democrat and Republican Party platforms. Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell, John Cornyn, Trey Gowdy—all considered emblematic of “conservative” just a few years ago—are suddenly the poster children of the Washington establishment, a true bi-partisanship like no one’s every imagined possible. Dick Cheney’s equally warmongering daughter Liz is a hero of Code Pink, if that gives you any idea how things have changed.
I get the feeling, though, that the weird period of 2020 to 2024 is akin to the Ford and Carter administrations—an interlude of subterranean change in which everyone knew there was no going back but uncertain about what was to come. The pieces were in place: cotton and wool over nylon and polyester, authentic over synthetic, organic over artificial, individual over the collective. The amorphous era of the late 1970s rallied around the Reagan Revolution, buoyed by his trouncing of Jimmy Carter on the backs of Reagan Democrats who broke with their union bosses to vote for the guy they’d like to have a beer with. The “Reagan Democrat” was born.
Similarly, from the outbreak of Covid in the winter of 2020 through Trump’s inauguration on 20 January next, we have been in the midst of a transitional era of American culture. Not just politics, but the culture itself.
Hard Death and New Beginnings
In other words, we are standing on the threshold of great change, possibly as great as the Revolution, the Civil War, and World War II. And we should be prepared for turmoil and disruption and, even, deaths that rival or surpass those inflection points wherein the old order’s death throes resist, but succumb to, the birth of the new.
Decisive events will occur—events so vast, powerful, and unique that they lie beyond today’s wildest hypotheses. These events will inspire great documents and speeches, visions of a new political order being framed. People will discover a hitherto unimagined capacity to fight and die, and to let their children fight and die, for a communal cause. The Spirit of America will return, because there will be no other choice.2
Frightening, right?
But wait; there’s more.
Just as a woman bears the pain of pregnancy and labor to bring forth a new life, made in God’s image and likeness, so nations and civilizations must endure the sufferings of a dying regime to arrive at the next golden epoch. As Strauss and Howe forecast in 1997:
Emerging in this Crisis climax will be a great entropy reversal, that miracle of human history in which trust is reborn. Through the Fourth Turning, the old order will die, but only after having produced the seed containing the new civic order within it. In the moment of maximum danger, that seed will implant, and a new social contract will take root. For a brief time, the American firmament will be malleable in ways that would stagger the today’s Unraveling-era mindset. “Everything is new and yielding,” enthused Benjamin Rush to his friends at the climax of the American Revolution. So will everything be again.3
Not to be a downer, but Donald Trump is of that old order, just as FDR was, just as Lincoln was, and just as Benjamin Franklin was. These great turnings cannot be led by the young who have no memory of their era’s founding and lack the perspective to see the entire period with clear eyes. Only someone born around the birth of the era can recognize its unfitness. When a man my age meets a peer, we both know that, at some level, we know the same things. My counterpart remembers the waning days of Vietnam, the debuts of certain television shows, the fashion trends that emerged and disappeared, the introduction of personal computers and and the audio cassette, the 1980 Winter Olympics, and so on. And, yet, even we are too young to remember the early post-war days of the late 40s or the golden age of Ike, the moment every home had a television, and the terrors of needing a backyard fallout shelter. The safe transport from the old to new must be led by someone who remembers the birth of the old, not through books, but through lived experience and oral tradition.
In The Fourth Turning, Strauss and Howe introduce us to the Gray Champion, an elder member of that generation that lived through the entire era, a man of 80 years who had seen it all. He emerges only at a make-or-break moment and plants himself, his ideals, and the society’s fundamental values between the people and the approaching menace:
One afternoon in April 1689, as the American colonies boiled with rumors that King James II was about to strip them of their liberties, the king’s hand-picked governor of New England, Sir Edmund Andros, marched his troops menacingly through Boston. His purpose was to crush any thought of colonial self-rule. To everyone present, the future looked grim.
Just at that moment, seemingly from nowhere, there appeared on the streets “the figure of an ancient man” with “the eye, the face, the attitude of command.” His manner “combining the leader and the saint,” the old man planted himself directly in the path of the approaching British soldiers and demanded that they stop. “The solemn, yet warlike peal of that voice, fit either to rule a host in the battlefield or be raised to God in prayer, were irresistible. At the old man’s word and outstretched arm, the roll of the drum was hushed at once, and the advancing line stood still.”
Inspired by this single act of defiance, the people of Boston roused their courage and acted. Within the day, Andros was deposed and jailed, the liberty of Boston saved, and the corner turned on the colonial Glorious Revolution.4
Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote in 1837 of the next coming of this Gray Champion, as retold by Strauss and Howe:
Posterity had to wait a while before seeing him again—the length of another long human life, in fact. “When eighty years had passed,” wrote Hawthorne, the Gray Champion reappeared. The occasion was the revolutionary summer of 1775—when America’s elders once again appealed to God, summoned the young to battle, and dared the hated enemy to fire. “When our fathers were toiling at the breastwork on Bunker’s Hill,” Hawthorne continued, “all through that night the old warrior walked his rounds.” This old warrior—this graying peer of Sam Adams or Ben Franklin or Samuel Langdon (the Harvard president who preached to the Bunker Hill troops)—belonged to the Awakening Generation, whose youth had provided the spiritual taproot of the republic secured in their old age.5
Everyone who remembers either Hawthorne’s Twice-told Tales or its references in The Fourth Turning recalled the tales on 6 July, no doubt.
Once again, Hawthorne might say, the Gray Champion has appeared at the moment of greatest danger to the republic, to walk amongst the young and inspire them, not with academic lectures on the nature of freedom and liberty nor rousing speeches like Henry V’s “band of brothers,’ but to stand in the breach and prove that the fight is worth the blood, the war is worth cost, and the victory to come will be all the sweeter for it.
It is the Gray Champion who rips way the facade of culture to reveal the granite substance upon which that culture rests, shifting and morphing on a whim while the base remains firm and permanent, rooted, not in man’s whimsical tastes, but in God Almighty’s fixed and knowable plan.
The Gray Champion walks among us once again.
Strauss, William; Howe, Neil. The Fourth Turning: What the Cycles of History Tell Us About America's Next Rendezvous with Destiny (p. 141). Crown. Kindle Edition.
ibid., (p. 278).
ibid.
ibid., (p. 139).
ibid., (p. 140).