A revealing quote from an early letter to a girlfriend:
Remember how I said there’s a certain kind of conservatism which I respect more than bourgeois liberalism—Eliot is of this type. Of course, the dichotomy he maintains is reactionary, but it’s due to a deep fatalism, not ignorance. (Counter him with Yeats or Pound, who, arising from the same milieu, opted to support Hitler and Mussolini.)
And this fatalism is born out of the relation between fertility and death, which I touched on in my last letter—life feeds on itself. A fatalism I share with the western tradition at times.
He gets tragedy, which is why he gets Niebuhr. And this sense of benign fatalism is rare among Americans and American presidents. Maybe that's where he gets his long game from; or his otherwise freakish calm under pressure.
The Dish 