The Washington Post has a deep peek into the West Wing in which, in demonstrating why Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III is important to the administration, White House adviser and descendant of House Harkonnen Steve Bannon has this to say:

In a lengthy email, Bannon described Sessions as "the clearinghouse for policy and philosophy" in Trump's administration, saying he and the senator are joined at the center of Trump's "pro-America movement" and the global nationalist phenomenon. "In America and Europe, working people are reasserting their right to control their own destinies," Bannon wrote. "Jeff Sessions has been at the forefront of this movement for years, developing populist nation-state policies that are supported by the vast and overwhelming majority of Americans, but are poorly understood by cosmopolitan elites in the media that live in a handful of our larger cities."

"Cosmopolitan elites"? Didn't know I was living in Weimar. At least he didn't say it from atop a banquet table in a beer hall.

Drew Angerer Getty Images

That is the straight stuff. From the top now, right from the Oval Office, the Republican Party is attaching itself to contemporary white nationalism the world over. (Here, from ThinkProgress, is my old TV pal Congressman Steve King, going around the world to kiss jackboots of many lands.) If the Republican Party doesn't like the way that sounds, it can distance itself from its president and from his handlers. Or, it can own this particular political strategy lock, stock, and armbands.

The party is daring the country to stand by the progress it has made on its founding principles ever since the ink dried at Appomattox. It is trying to bluff a self-governing republic into committing suicide just the way those renegade CBP officials are trying to bluff people out of their green cards. It is relitigating the Civil War and World War II at the same time, and right out in public. Damn, things are fragile right now.

Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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