Perhaps the only surprising thing about Steve Bannon’s self-immolation is who he handed the match to: a bearded liberal editor he’d never met named Robert Kuttner.

But Kuttner isn’t just a generic liberal Washington editor — liberals come in various stripes — he’s a leading figure of the labor left, an enemy of Bannon’s neoliberal enemies, and a voice of what’s long been a losing stream of Democratic policy: the Bernie-Warren-Brown camp, the ones who believe that the harm trade has done American workers outweighs the growth that cheap Chinese labor has given the American economy.

Bannon called Kuttner as part of what Kuttner paraphrased as a strategy “to battle the trade doves inside the administration while building an outside coalition of trade hawks that includes left as well as right.”