A FAN of military history, Stephen Bannon may know of Nikephoros, a Byzantine emperor who was vanquished and decapitated by a Bulgar khan who, for extra humiliation, then fashioned his skull into a drinking cup. President Donald Trump’s erstwhile muse might even feel he has experienced something similar, at the end of a week in which he has been denounced and excommunicated by the president, jettisoned by his conservative benefactor, Rebekah Mercer, and, on January 9th, shunted from his position at the helm of Breitbart News, a hard-right website which gained huge exposure from his former success. The same day, in a jaw-dropping televised meeting with congressional leaders, Mr Trump airily suggested he might support a package of liberal immigration reforms. This was the modern-day equivalent of supping from Mr Bannon’s gilded skull.

The spur to his demise was Mr Bannon’s lead role in briefing Michael Wolff, author of the caustic takedown of the Trump administration, “Fire and Fury”, that has titillated Washington and enraged the president. Mr Bannon offended especially by describing a meeting between Russian operatives and members of the Trump campaign team, including the president’s eldest son and son-in-law, as “treasonous”, “unpatriotic” and “bad shit”. The Trump team had previously dismissed it as a non-event. Yet Mr Bannon’s astonishing rise to, arguably, the second-most-powerful position in America, and precipitous fall need to be understood more broadly, especially by the Republican Party.

He had terrible flaws and American politics is, for now at least, well-rid of him. Yet Mr Bannon was largely motivated by his concern for an issue of existential importance to Republicans: a widening gulf between their mainstream leaders and the disaffected white working-class supporters who represent a big chunk of their support. Given power, on the coat-tails of a victory for Mr Trump that he did much to bring about, Mr Bannon had an opportunity to narrow that gap, and thereby transform America’s political landscape. He blew it spectacularly, for many reasons, including hubris, the intemperance of his character, the nastiness of his tactics and the incoherence of his ideas. The gulf persists. And if the Republicans learn nothing from Mr Bannon’s missed opportunity, they will suffer for it.

Unlike Mr Trump, Mr Bannon is intellectually curious, obsessed with history and well-read. Like his former patron, he is a successful man of rough-edged stock, who spent years trespassing in elite circles: in Mr Trump’s case, Manhattan society, in Mr Bannon’s, Goldman Sachs and Hollywood. That perhaps helps explain their main point of convergence—a resentful conviction, which Mr Bannon suggests came to him after a spell in Asia, that working-class Americans have been screwed by immigration, globalisation and adventurist foreign policies perpetuated by both parties, at the bidding of the fat-cat donors who have benefited from them the most.

There is plainly some truth to that; economic disruption and wage stagnation, in part fuelled by globalisation, are the central problem of rich democracies. Lamentably, none of Mr Trump’s and Mr Bannon’s main solutions, an “America First” mix of border controls, protectionism and isolationism, provide a convincing answer to it. Yet Mr Bannon, unlike Mr Trump, who is probably more fussed about the stockmarket than working-class Americans, has at times broached more imaginative fixes.

For example, he has espoused better union representation for workers, higher taxes on the rich and a crackdown on corporate tax-dodging. He also has a well-judged sense that if the Republicans, many of whom would consider such steps heretical, could only find answers to working-class economic grievances they might rule, in a culturally conservative country, almost untrammelled. That is a sort of imagination and ambition the American right, held captive by its donors, badly needs.

The trouble is, Mr Bannon’s record in and since leaving government has been so dismal and self-defeating as to discredit his views and even his values. Many of his policy proposals, especially those most challenging to conservatives, would require bipartisan support. Yet he dedicated himself to offending the left at all costs—thus, for example, his disastrous early attempt at a Muslim travel ban, timed, on a Friday evening, to cause maximum distress to unwitting travellers. And so, too, in his support for Mr Trump’s baffling equivocations on the white supremacist violence that rocked Charlottesville last year.

“Race-baiting” is still race-baiting

Mr Bannon justified his divisive methods in Machiavellian terms—arguing that outraged liberals would lurch ever further to the unelectable left. Yet the Democrats, riding a wave of revulsion with Mr Trump’s and Mr Bannon’s chauvinism, have instead won most recent elections—including in Alabama’s Senate race, where the self-consciously intellectual Mr Bannon disgraced himself by stumping for a lascivious philistine.

Mr Bannon’s incessant anti-establishment scheming, including manoeuvres against Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell, has meanwhile prevented him interesting almost any mainstream Republican in his novel ideas, except sometimes the president, who now says he is insane. Republican leaders instead executed a tax reform so loaded for the rich that it is unclear whether they will even campaign on it ahead of the mid-term elections.

Thus has Mr Bannon, following and enabling Mr Trump, helped infect his party with a cultural populism in which racism and authoritarianism thrive, and to which the president, despite his conciliatory words on immigration, will probably return. At the same time, he has done nothing to bring about an urgently required reappraisal of the Republicans’ stale economic agenda. Indeed, by discrediting radicalism with his performance, he has probably made it less likely. He will not be missed.