The real Republican Platform, a Banana, and the Gray Champion

An editorial cartoon, an animation, a Candorville Comic Strip, and some thoughts

Paid subscribers can scroll down below the cartoons to view a time-lapse video of the creation of this editorial cartoon:

I was as disturbed then as you must be right now to realize that I had something in common with Steve Bannon.

It was 2009, and we were still mired in the worldwide economic crash of the Great Recession. I’d just spent four years watching Ron Moore’s version of Battlestar Galactica, which began with the Cylons’ nuclear annihilation of mankind, and ended with the remnants of mankind deciding (and failing) to avoid repeating the cycle of events that nearly led to its extinction. The central conceit of the series was that history is cyclical. The tag line was “All this has happened before, and all this will happen again.” That’s when I heard Neil Howe discuss his and William Strauss’s book The Fourth Turning on the Thom Hartmann show on the progressive Air America radio network.

Steve Bannon heard Howe speak too, probably years before I did.

Both of us were enamored with the concept of The Fourth Turning, in which Howe and Strauss fit the tides of American history into a predictable pattern governed by the length of a generation’s lifespan. According to their theory, every eighty years or so, America cycles through four distinct eras: A high (or golden age) in which society

unifies around a set of principles beliefs and actions, an awakening in which a younger generation rebels against the conformity of the golden age, an unraveling in which the next generation becomes disillusioned and loses faith in society’s institutions, and a final era — a crisis, usually involving death, massive economic upheaval, and destruction.

The twenty and thirty-somethings who fight through the crisis are that era’s “heroic” generation (e.g. “The Greatest Generation”), and they’re led through the crisis by older figures from the previous generation who Howe and Strauss called “Gray Champions,” after a Nathaniel Hawthorne short story in which a mysterious old champion appeared out of thin air at pivotal moments throughout the colonial and revolutionary eras, and stepped between oppressive imperial forces and freedom-loving puritans to inspire and guide the puritans as they fought through moments of crisis, before vanishing again. In fiction, we know Gray Champions as Gandalf. As Admiral Adama. As Obi Won Kenobi. In real life, they were FDR and Churchill, Lincoln and Douglass, and Benjamin Franklin.

The last Fourth Turning began with the Great Depression and ended with Europe in ruins, two atomic bombs detonating over Japan, and the Allied forces creating the UN and establishing a new, bipolar world order that’s more or less lasted until now. I would argue that the Fourth Turning prior to that one, began with the 1857 Dred Scott case, in which Clarence Thomas — I mean, in which the despicable Chief Justice Roger Taney’s Supreme Court — legalized slavery in the new Western territories, declared Black citizenship throughout all the states to be unconstitutional, and struck down the Missouri Compromise, which had been maintaining a fragile peace between free and slave-states since 1820. That turning culminated in the Civil War and Reconstruction.

The Fourth Turning prior to that one began with the British trying to force the colonies to repay them for their defense of the colonies during the French and Indian War, and ended with a war for independence and the signing of the Constitution. The book traces the pattern as far back as 1689, when America was still part of the British Empire. That era’s Fourth Turning began with the 1685 accession of King James II to the throne (whose Roman Catholicism alienated much of the population) and culminated just a few years later in the bloodless Glorious Revolution, in which James was deposed and the Parliament was permanently elevated over the monarchy as the ruling power of England.

What I found enticing was that the book made the case that we were entering our very own Fourth Turning right then, beginning with the 2008 economic crisis. The book predicted the Millennial generation would be the heroic generation that would fight through the crisis, and the United States would emerge transformed from the rubble by around 2030.

In 2015, both Steve Bannon and I believed we’d seen the emergence of the Gray Champion. That’s where we differ. I believed it was Bernie Sanders, who drew crowds numbering in the tens of thousands with the promise of single-payer healthcare, social justice, an attack on corruption, and a rejection of 35 years of supply-side economics. Steve Bannon, on the other hand, believed the Gray Champion was Donald Trump, who promised to repeal FDR’s legacy both foreign and domestic, and to transform an increasingly diverse America into the white supremacist, fascist ethno-state the Confederacy and the Jim Crow South had been.

Democrats rejected their Gray Champion in the primaries. Republicans embraced theirs. Steve Bannon (before he was thrown in prison) spent the next decade trying to make the Fourth Turning happen the way he wanted it to, so that the next Golden Age would resemble his disgusting vision of America’s future, in which our civil rights are erased, minorities and women are disempowered, and the USA is aligned with autocracies, not democracies. In Bannon’s world order, America’s allies would be both existing right wing autocracies, and ones of his making.

Hillary Clinton was right when she said there was a “vast, right wing conspiracy” in this country. Through the machinations of billionaires, think tanks, and political operatives, it seized AM radio and the courts, its infiltrated school boards, police departments, state legislatures, and college campuses. After I won the Pulitzer Prize in 2019, one such college-based group asked me to draw propaganda for them. They told me they had two million members across the nation, unlimited funding, and said I could name my own price. Cartoonist Keith Knight told me he’d received similar offers. I politely declined. But as I saw the Candace Owenses of the nation rise to obnoxious prominence, I wondered how many minorities groups such as that one had approached, and how many of them had chosen differently than Keith and I had.

Who knows where those two million members are now, or how far this cancer has metastasized. America was spared a terminal diagnosis in 2020 only because Bannon’s Gray Champion was an inexperienced, naive buffoon who’d surrounded himself with staff who refused to enable his most despotic, illegal, and unconstitutional tendencies. The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 is evidence that the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy won’t let that happen a second time.

Donald Trump supposedly influenced the RNC to 'soften' its draconian platform to be more appealing to voters, while at the same time influencing some of his former aides, who teamed up with the Heritage Foundation to write a fascist manifesto that'll be the actual blueprint for a second Trump term. It doesn’t matter that Steve Bannon’s in prison. The Republican Party has been co-opted by its radical right wing think tanks. It’s become Steve Bannon, and it’s determined to make the Fourth Turning happen Steve Bannon’s way.

President Biden is not the Gray Champion I wanted, but he’s the one we’ve got. He’s what stands between the forces of despotism, and us. In Hawthorne’s short stories, it wasn’t the ancient Gray Champion who defeated the enemies of freedom, it was the people who the champion inspired. Hopefully such an ending doesn’t just happen in fiction. We’ll find out in less than four months.

Meanwhile, in Candorville, we’ve got another unintended but perfectly serviceable President Biden analogy:

Don’t forget to scroll down to see the timelapse video!