WASHINGTON (MarketWatch ) — President Donald Trump evidently is such a disruptive factor that he deserves a special word to describe his “ideology,” however inchoate that may be.

So the liberal establishment press now uses the word “Trumpism” almost routinely without being able to clearly define what it is. Recent articles in the Atlantic, the New Yorker, and the Washington Post busily peck away at Trumpism and why it’s bad.

“Trumpism” is in some ways just a liberal Rorschach test — it can be anything you want as long as it is evil and worth hating.

After all, how better to denigrate and devalue a set of policies than to assign an –ism to it, so that they can join the ranks of Marxism, Leninism, Nazism, fascism, authoritarianism — you get the drift.

Veteran Washington Post reporter Marc Fisher inadvertently revealed this strategy in a front-page article last week, “The political lexicon of a billionaire populist.”

Trump and his chief strategist Steve Bannon “have moved beyond the campaign’s embrace of political incorrectness to shake official Washington with a new vocabulary that breaks from the usual liberal-conservative terms of debate,” Fisher reports.

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It turns out Fisher is referring to words like “corporatist” and “globalist” and “the administrative state” — words that have had currency among many in the past, especially left-wing protesters, but apparently sound new and disturbing to tender establishment ears.

It is comically reminiscent of Harold Hill’s warning to residents of River City about “certain words” creeping into their sons’ conversation — words like “swell” and “so’s your old man.”

And of course, behind Trumpism is Bannonism, which is even worse because it is more coherent. In fact, one op-ed writer in the New York Times, Christopher Caldwell, cautions there isn’t really anything systematic enough to be called “Trumpism,” so we need to study “Bannonism” in order to understand what the administration is up to.

And study it they do. Bannonism, it turns out, is the sum of everything Bannon ever said in public, regardless of its original context, and even every book he ever read (and he’s read a lot of them).

The main tenets seem to include a crisis of capitalism, the need for economic nationalism, and the clash between Islam and “Judeo-Christian” values.

Caldwell, to be fair, concludes that “those focused on Mr. Bannon’s ideology are probably barking up the wrong tree.” The reason to be concerned about Bannon has “less to do with where he stands on the issues than with who he is as a person.”

For Caldwell, that means, ominously, “he is an intellectual in politics excited by grand theories — a combination that has produced unpredictable results before.”

Caldwell suggests that Barack Obama’s references to the “arc” of history might seem equally naïve and unrealistic. (Of course we never had “Obamism,” or “Bushism,” or “Axelrodism,” or Rovism,” but Trump and Bannon are in some mysterious way different.)

For many, Bannon the person is the devil incarnate, more like the unremittingly evil Lord Voldemort than Darth Vader, who turned out to be downright avuncular by the time he revealed himself as Luke Skywalker’s father.

The Huffington Post outed the “stunningly racist” novel that shows how “Steve Bannon explains the world.”

The Huffington reporters cite four instances where Bannon referred to the refugee crisis in Europe as “almost a ‘Camp of the Saints’ type invasion.” The 1973 novel by Jean Raspail about the collapse of Western civilization due to waves of Third World immigration was condemned at the time for its racism and has since become cult reading for anti-immigration activists.

Given Bannon’s fervent anti-Islamism, his reference to the book is probably more serious than one of us viewing a playground fight jokingly as a descent into “Lord of the Flies.”

But there is considerable room for debate on just how the “Clash of Civilizations” that Samuel Huntington wrote about 20-some years ago can be avoided or resolved. It is fairly clear from conflicts in the Middle East, in Europe and here that we’re not doing a very good job of it and pretending that it’s not a problem won’t help.

The chief document for students of Bannonism — a veritable Gospel according to Bannon in the slim canon of received texts — is the skype talk he gave to a Vatican conference on human dignity.

This is the source text for most everything written about Bannon’s fervent attachment to “Judeo-Christian” values, a term that now seems to conjure up dark reactionary forces even though most of us who grew up Catholic recognize it as a familiar term of discourse and perfectly at home in a Vatican conference.

So let’s debate immigration, Islamism, globalism, corporatism, populism. Let’s take sides. Let’s take part in protest marches and vote our conscience when elections come around.

But little is served by dismissively demonizing those with a different point of view and pretending that the issues they raised aren’t worthy of debate.