On Tuesday, Roy Moore arrived at his polling place, in Gallant, Alabama,
wearing a cowboy hat and riding a horse named Sundance. Polls were
showing him with a comfortable lead in the Republican primary for Jeff
Sessions’s old seat in the U.S. Senate. The horse seemed a good sign
that Moore was feeling confident. Tuesday night, after the results had
come in and his opponent, Luther Strange, had conceded, Moore appeared
onstage in Montgomery and pledged to “return the knowledge of God” to
Congress. In Ted Cruz, of Texas, and Rand Paul, of Kentucky, the
Republican caucus in the Senate already has a full allotment of preening
extremists, but, relatively speaking, those senators are just the chips.
Moore—who once argued that Congress should refuse to seat the
Democratic Representative Keith Ellison because he is Muslim, who once
suggested that 9/11 might have been punishment for America turning away
from God, and who was twice forcibly removed as the chief justice of
Alabama’s Supreme Court for breaking the law—is the old block.

Alongside Moore at his victory rally was Steve Bannon, President Trump’s
recently ousted adviser, who has been using this race to reclaim his old
position as the free radical in conservative politics. (Moore wore a
white shirt and a red tie, and his wife a red dress; Bannon wore black.)
Bannon had arrived in Alabama over the weekend, for a Moore rally on
Monday in Fairhope, for which he’d gotten the Make American Great Again
band back together: Seb Gorka, Sarah Palin, even the Brexit champion
Nigel Farage. Strange, the incumbent, who was appointed to temporarily
fill Sessions’s seat earlier this year, was backed by Mitch McConnell,
the Senate Majority Leader, and much of the Republican Party’s national
leadership. In Fairhope, Bannon had warned that a “day of reckoning” for
these figures was coming. The Republican establishment, Bannon told
Moore’s supporters, “think you’re a pack of morons. They think you’re
nothing but rubes.” Bannon, like the President he helped to elect, is a
vain mash-up of anti-snob and snob—in his speech on Monday, he
name-checked Plutarch—but he understands how last-chance urgency fuels
populist conservative politics. “You’re going to have to fight to take
Washington back,” Bannon told the crowd. “And, by taking Washington back,
take back control of your own lives.”

Bannon had arrived in Alabama, by his own account, “unkempt and
unshaven”; he tends to appear, these days, wearing layered
button-downs underneath a blazer and cloistered in a fog of his own hype. The Alabama
race had been touted, by the Bannon crew, as a fight for Trump’s soul.
The President—perhaps in deference to McConnell, perhaps because Strange
had been a loyal supporting vote for the White House, perhaps because
the President likes to call the six-foot-nine senator “Big Luther”—had
endorsed the incumbent. Bannon and his allies seem intent on proving to
the White House that Trumpism is a more potent force than Trump. On
Tuesday, that message seemed to carry. In the afternoon, Bob Corker, a
relatively moderate Republican senator from Tennessee, announced that he
would not run for reëlection next year. And just after the Alabama race
was called, an Arizona state legislator named Kelli Ward, who is running
a Bannon-style primary campaign against Senator Jeff Flake, tweeted her
congratulations to Moore. By late in the evening, the President himself
(or whoever monitors his social-media profiles) was deleting the various
tweets Trump had written supporting Strange earlier in the day. On Tuesday
morning, the President had tweeted, “ALABAMA, get out and vote for
Luther Strange – he has proven to me that he will never let you down!”
Twelve hours later, that was erased.

Republicans have controlled the White House and both houses of Congress
since January. Having so little to show for these months in power means
that, against the pitchfork populists, conventional Republicans don’t
have much of a case to make. The midterm elections are getting closer.
Fulmination still seems to beat incumbency. How many Republican senators
watched this race with dread? Corker is retiring; John McCain has brain
cancer—“a very poor prognosis,” he told Lesley Stahl of “60 Minutes” on
Sunday; Flake, in Arizona, and Dean Heller, of Nevada, face primaries
that are likely to be fought on the same terms as the one in Alabama. In
reliably Republican states, incumbents fall to insurgents who are more
conservative, not less. On Tuesday, Strange won four counties in the
state, two of which had been carried by Hillary Clinton in November.
Moore won everywhere else.

For as singular a politician as he has been, Moore had little interesting to say on Tuesday night. He promised to support the President, with qualifications: “As long as its constitutional, as long as it advances our society, our culture, our country.” He quoted Scripture, declared that Americans have “distanced ourselves from the very foundations,” and said that “God can still bring us back.” The most pointed articulation of the power of the Moore campaign was still Bannon’s. The exiled Trump adviser seemed the figure to watch. In the White House, Bannon’s ethno-nationalism seemed fantastical, and never cohered into either a program or a coalition. But on the campaign trail Bannonism becomes a vehicle for ecumenical insurgency. The stray bits of conservatism—Roy Moore, Sarah Palin, Seb Gorka, the neo-Confederates, and the message-board doomsday theologians—do not share a program. But they do share a conviction that the American way of life is under grave threat, and that the way to protect it is to rescue the President from the globalists and cosmopolitans lurking in the Swamp.