Heroes of the Fourth Turning, by William Arbery, Theatre Communications Group, 120 pages.

Donald J. Trump is a prophet. It is the sort of thing a writer is supposed to say about Pat Buchanan, but no, despite the foreshadowing, Buchanan is an artist. So is Joe Biden, an artist, too. You see, Trump was born in 1946, in the midst of the last civilizational High, the first turning. Buchanan and Biden were born in ’38 and ’42, in the midst of the Second World War, the previous Crisis, the prior fourth turning. Eighty years have come and gone since then, a saeculum, the life of a modern man. The screw of history has turned three times again and Crisis has returned. 

It’s dizzying stuff. The typological and cyclical paradigm comes from William Strauss and Neil Howe’s books Generations (1992) and The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy (1997). Like any number of the fin de siècle historical theorists a saeculum earlier who wrote against modern linearity and enlightenment history’s unidirectional arc—especially Oswald Spengler—Strauss and Howe trace a seasonality in the lives of human things. Prophets and nomads and heroes and artists live through civilizational Highs, Awakenings, Unravelings, and Crises, again and again and again. Each generation takes its turn at leadership, whether in shaping culture or public life, creating the conditions for the next turn and a new generation to be born. 

Strauss and Howe predicted our fourth turning would begin sometime in the 2000s and, lasting a couple decades, close sometime in the late 2020s. Howe has suggested in the years since their book was published that the latest Crisis began in 2008. In theory, our time should see old artists disappear, prophets enter elderhood, nomads enter midlife, and heroes enter young adulthood, as a new generation of child artists are born. But there is an artist in the White House and more in Congress still. The transition from Unraveling to Crisis should also see a faction of prophets come to dominate cultural and public life, positioning a few exemplars to give moral authority and direction to younger generations. To wage war against whom, for what? 

In Heroes of the Fourth Turning, the millennial playwright Will Arbery takes the Strauss-Howe theory above as his background, a secular frame for understanding the heightened civilizational drama that is life in these times for religious conservatives. Five serious Catholics, twenty-five to sixty-four, are in small-town Wyoming; it is August 19, 2017, two days before the solar eclipse and a week after the Charlottesville riot. The play, which premiered in New York City in late 2019 to wide acclaim, has been a hit up and down the Acela corridor, including with those inclined to ironic use of the phrase “coastal elites.” A PDF of the script was immediately passed among friends and acquaintances as email samizdat. It is now available in book form, from Theatre Communications Group. 

Arbery describes himself as “a playwright from Texas + Wyoming + seven sisters.” He is the only son among seven daughters. He attended a Cistercian Preparatory School and his parents are on the faculty of Wyoming Catholic College. Glenn Arbery, his father, became president of Wyoming Catholic in 2016. Kevin Roberts, now head of the Heritage Foundation, was president before him. Arbery attended Kenyon and Northwestern. The occasion of the play is the inauguration of a new president of “Transfiguration College of Wyoming.” The promise that this biography makes to viewers and readers—especially the sort whose politics and lifestyle we might associate with New York theater—is that Arbery knows what he’s writing about, knows this sort of people. There is pleasure in this zoo-glimpse of educated religious conservatives; the audience gets to enjoy feeling like they understand a little better people whose liberal arts education didn’t make them a liberal, who might even have voted for Trump. 

Write what you know. I’m not Catholic, but a lot of my friends are. I’m not from Wyoming or Texas, but I am from out West. I didn’t go to a college that is a cross between a Deep Springs cowboy school and the Thomas Aquinas great books program, nor are my parents on the faculty of such a college, or president thereof. But I did go to Hillsdale, and my parents started a classical Christian school I attended K-12. Like Arbery’s creations, I too was miseducated for modernity. We build things, teach things, for the future, for generations, and we look around and see collapse. Heroes of the Fourth Turning fans are right: Arbery’s characters are ripped from life. They might talk in unreal paragraphs, but it is only a concentration of reality, a distillation of many nights and many conversations into one. 

It is my freshman year of college and I am in the backyard of the Donnybrook. It is a house where men who should really be earning better grades in their English and history and classics degrees smoke endless cigarettes—American Spirits, light blues—and host poetry readings fueled by whiskey that would run a motorcycle. As some old anon of 19th-century Oxford said, “Chestertonian youths who five things revere: Beef, noise, the Church, vulgarity and beer.” And this is the way it begins for me, this memory: It is late, and Lizzy is singing, cradling a guitar on a stump, and her ex-boyfriend is studying abroad and her future husband is not here and all of us have been standing in a circle, arms around each other, shouting Irish drinking songs, but now there is a group of young men and a few women watching and listening to this fair lady with reverent attention and the beginnings of tears—for Christ plays in ten thousand places, Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his To the Father through the features of men’s faces.

Heroes of the Fourth Turning is not about such moments. Rather, it is a chatty play about people who are convinced that those moments are under threat. There is a war on, a Crisis, and the rising generation wants leadership—to hear the voice of prophets—but they do not have it. Teresa, the conservative political pundit living in New York, almost thirty, engaged to be married but scared of having children, is back for Gina’s inauguration as president of the college, back at boot camp, because she is a foot soldier in need of reassurance she is on the right mission. That is not what Gina wants to be, a general in a war, and that is not what she sees the Transfiguration College of Wyoming as being for. As Justin, older than the other alumni, who found God late and works for the college and might join a monastery, observes to Emily, Gina’s ambiguously ill daughter, “Everyone else is pretty great. I felt so heartened tonight seeing how everyone’s ended up. Healthy. Happy. Humble. Building families. This school makes 99 percent great people.”

Those happy families would make for a boring play, probably, one in which even less happens. These are the weird lingerers, apparently more broken than their peers. Rounding out the cast is Kevin, aggressively confessional to the point of logorrhea, a porn addicted alcoholic spinning his wheels since graduation, desperate for a girlfriend, dressing up his weakness with literature and theology and performative self-condemnation. Like real people, these characters can be unpleasant. But the scandal of the particular is one of Arbery’s themes—“The scandal of this particular person getting this particular revelation”—and I know a real Kevin who has gotten his life together; he’s sober now, happily married, with a kid and the self-assurance to sit in comfortable silence. Yet there is still something between sadism and masochism in the irony of Heroes of the Fourth Turning, this juxtaposition of the best that has been thought and said with such sad people. 

Arbery’s characters are didactic, but his play defies accusations of didacticism. Throughout Heroes, Teresa, Gina, Kevin, Emily, and Justin process and rearticulate, accept and reject, the Western canon and Catholic social teaching to each other in seminar style, so that even the most straightforward statements become open to questioning and reinterpretation “I think you blame your problems on demons, but really you’re just morally lazy,” Teresa tells Kevin at one point. That is true of him. But there is an ambiguity about the demonic and spiritual warfare in the play as a whole, which culminates in its disturbing and unsatisfying ending. Whether Arbery has not himself decided if the little world he grew up in is subject or object of diabolical malevolence, which may or may not be real, or whether he has picked an answer for himself and simply wishes to leave the question open for his actors and his audience remains in the last unclear. Are these victims? Or people complicit in their own pain? 

More importantly, who are the heroes? Introducing and explaining the Strauss-Howe paradigm, Teresa says, “Heroes are born during an Unraveling. They’re team-oriented. They’re optimistic. They’re civically engaged. They fight bravely during the crisis. They’re the generation that fought in World War II. And they’re us. Right now.” She tries; she wants to be. But despite their training—the excellent education, the Wyoming wilderness skills, the Roman religious devotion—Gina’s students and daughter hardly seem to fit the bill, nor is Gina the prophet they want. This team is fragile. There is no optimism. Civic engagement, like volunteering at a crisis pregnancy center, is draining and disorienting. Teresa will have to fight alone. 

Indeed, if we force or find a fourth turning in the last decade and a half, there has been little optimism in a would-be hero generation and few reasons for it. The cultural stagnation is obvious, universally recognized, but the idea that this necrotic inheritance might be cut off once and for all to make room for a new birth of freedom seems wishful thinking. This especially for Christian conservatives, even if they believe that what, so contrary to nature, cannot go on will not go on, for they are the insurgency. The civically engaged among this generation with money and influence, the ones with some shared idea of a revolution, are on the left. Say what you want about the tenets of wokeness, at least it’s an ethos. They have a prophet in Trump, a negative prophecy, a union by negation. Perhaps these are the real heroes of this fourth turning, the foot soldiers of a new regime.  

Must I play the villain? In theater, at least, it is often more fun. But then again, the woke are at war with nature and with history and with marriage and with children, and little pockets of counter-cultural, counter-revolutionary religious zealotry do make 99 percent great people, and the Kevins of these worlds do grow up and become husbands and fathers, and Teresas do get married and have children despite their fear, and God moves in a mysterious way His wonders to perform. And I remember: It is my junior year of high school, or Rhetoric three, and I am working on a junior thesis about superheroes, heroic archetypes, and the Western canon. And at a Portland admissions and donor event, I met Hillsdale College President Larry Arnn (a prophet, born 1952) for the first time, as he made sure to greet each prospective student in attendance. And he told me I was an eager young man with lots to say, and that I needed to be challenged and set to the right tasks—to be tempered. And he gave a short speech about the purpose of education and the future of the country, and I turned to my parents and said that here was a man I could follow into battle.