New York Times: Can Bannon Realign American Politics?

Sam Rosenfeld writes in the New York Times:

Steve Bannon stumped for Roy Moore on Tuesday in Fairhope, Ala., telling a crowd that establishment Republicans “think you are a bunch of rubes” and urging them to be “the voice of the deplorables” in their efforts to elect the former judge and accused child molester to the United States Senate next week. The rhetorical bombast may have overshadowed his broader project, of which the Alabama contest constitutes only one small, if unexpectedly lurid, part.

Mr. Bannon has insisted that his intraparty efforts in a “season of war” on the Republican establishment are about nothing less than a basic reorientation of what the parties fight about and who is on which side.

The term for that is “party realignment.” Overhyped claims of an overturned political order are a staple of American politics — just ask the last would-be architect of a new Republican majority coalition, Karl Rove. Mr. Bannon is hardly alone, however, in seeing the potential for realignment in the volatile electoral party dynamics that carried Donald Trump to the White House.

Full article here.