Sustain the Tragic Sensibility

This is an audio essay from my Substack, Process This.

Look, I wasn't planning to write 5,000 words on Steve Bannon, but then he goes on his podcast and announces that ICE—the same agency that just shot two American citizens in Minneapolis—is going to "surround the polls" in November, and I couldn't help myself. So I went back to Reinhold Niebuhr's 1944 book The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness, where he divided the political world into naive idealists who think reason and dialogue will save us, and moral cynics who understand power but recognize no law beyond their own will. Turns out Niebuhr basically wrote Bannon's biography eighty years early. This essay traces how Bannon evolved from "flooding the zone with shit" to proposing armed federal agents at polling places—and why liberals kept bringing fact-checks to a knife fight. Niebuhr called the children of darkness "wise" because they understand self-interest, but he also called them "evil" because they serve no good beyond domination. The question he leaves us with is whether the children of light can get wise without losing their souls. Spoiler: he doesn't promise we win.

PS. I was in the middle of writing a completely different essay on Niebuhr before Bannon interrupted me. I loved re-reading The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness⁠ recently, and it's way too timely.

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