“[Bannon] lives off other people’s money—Andrew Breitbart, Bob Mercer, a Chinese billionaire. How is he any different from a kept woman? He’s a 68-year-old kept woman,” an ex-colleague tells The Atlantic.

Go read Paul Johnson’s famous book Intellectuals: From Marx and Tolstoy to Sartre and Chomsky. These brilliant men introduced radical, paradigm-shifting ideas that rocked the world. Aside from being almost universally bad human beings, the one thing these intellectuals all seemed to have in common was that they ruthlessly used people. They pretty much all had generous family, friends, and patrons—and most of them gave little to nothing back. Again, this criticism of Bannon does not bring me any relief.

Conservative writer John Podhoretz says Bannon is “an emperor and he has no clothes.” I disagree. Bannon does indeed have clothes—in fact, he has so many clothes that he wears multiple layers. The point is that smart people keep overlooking the obvious. They keep underestimating people like Bannon.

It’s a problem that I suspect many of Bannon’s fans share. If liberals are too quick to dismiss Bannon as full of shit, conservatives are probably too quick to be impressed by Bannon’s dishonest, manipulative, and yet charismatic schtick.