Politics & Power Quote by Lionel Trilling

Trilling is diagnosing a kind of cultured anemia: politics, as practiced by the “educated class,” has become a set of correct positions that never metabolize into art, myth, or felt moral risk. The line is an accusation, but also a lament. It suggests that the people who most loudly claim to steward society’s values have lost access to the psychic engine that makes values more than slogans: the “deep places of the imagination,” where contradictions live, where sympathy can attach to the wrong person, where dread and desire complicate tidy programs.

The specific intent is to separate two kinds of seriousness. One is the seminar-room seriousness of ideas that can be repeated, defended, and safely shared. The other is imaginative seriousness, which is unstable by design and forces the mind to inhabit experiences it would rather condemn. Trilling’s subtext is that modern liberal intellectual life risks producing politics that is cosmetically humane but emotionally thin, incapable of grappling with tragedy, aggression, or the lure of authority - the very forces political life is made of.

Context matters: writing in midcentury America, with the shadow of totalitarianism, mass propaganda, and the culture wars inside liberalism itself, Trilling worried that “progressive” certainties could harden into their own orthodoxy. The sting is aimed at a class that prides itself on sophistication yet treats literature and art as tasteful ornaments or moral confirmation. Trilling is asking for an educated politics that can survive contact with the darker, weirder materials of human nature - because if it can’t, someone else’s imagination will fill the vacuum.