The election of Donald Trump, and subsequent events, many of them involving Steve Bannon, have opened up whole new vistas of moral and political calculus for the G.O.P., whole new standards for what ends justify what means. The allegations by nine women that Roy Moore, candidate for Alabama Senate, pursued them sexually when they were teenagers, may present this new discipline its hardest problem. Even some people who are close to Bannon have qualms about the decision. “It gives me no pleasure to see a pedophile win. That’s not something I’m happy about,” a Bannon confidant told me, just one week before the Alabama Senate election. “I think he’s not helpful” to the long-term success of the populist-nationalist movement, this source continued. “But being brutally cold and just analyzing it, there’s so many people who have been accused of so many things in the last three weeks that it makes no difference.”

An entire parallel universe exists where Breitbart, Trump, and Mitch McConnell could have collectively won the moral high ground in the Moore debacle, Bannon could have easily disavowed the judge, McConnell could have snuck Luther Strange past the finish line and gotten a reliably conservative vote, and Trump could have easily buried any discussion about the Access Hollywood tape under the sexual harassment allegations roiling the mainstream media and the Democratic Party. But that universe is one where Moore had enough shame to drop out of the race. Instead he adopted the Trump playbook—deny vociferously, attack the victims’ credibility, and barrel ahead full steam until the party bends and voters acquiesce. The far right have now handcuffed themselves to Moore’s ride, wherever it may lead.

Some former allies see deep flaws—they had to destroy the village in order to save it—in this new political logic. “If their goal is to cultivate an audience outside their base, you’re not going to win over converts with credibly accused child molesters,” Ben Shapiro, a former editor at Breitbart who left the site criticizing Bannon’s transformation of the site into “Trump Pravda”, told me. “I don’t think anything is inevitable, but binary logic combined with unwillingness to accept cognitive dissonance led us here.”

Bannon campaigns for Moore in Alabama on December 5th. By Nicole Carine/Bloomberg/Getty Images.

Bannon, who was in Japan at the time the scandal broke, himself pondered whether to drop Moore, allegedly saying that he would “put [Moore] in a grave myself” if the allegations were true. He's since gotten over his qualms: “‘I can’t believe we got this guy,’‘’ the source recounted Bannon saying. “But that’s the hand we were dealt.”

“Steve legitimately doesn’t believe that any of those things are true,” he continued. “If there’s positive evidence that he did those things, Steve would drop him.”