Party unity is not desirable when it means uniting with undesirable elements, people, and ideas. There isn’t any common ground to be had between classical liberals (we call them “conservatives” in the United States) and the blood-and-soil tiki-Nazis of Charlottesville. As Lou Reed once told Jesse Jackson after he embraced Louis Farrakhan: There’s no ground common enough. The same goes for Bannon, who prided himself on turning the website soiling the good name of the late Andrew Breitbart into “a platform for the alt-right,” “alt-right” being a nice way to characterize daft race cultists, half-baked national socialists, Jew-hating weirdos of various persuasions, warmed-over Buchananites, Putinists, Confederacy romantics, and that gaggle of sad and occasionally homicidal masturbators in Charlottesville.

All this talk of “unity” — by which Bannon et al. mean obedience to a mere politician — is creepy. It is also distinctly un-American, as indeed is the alt-right at large, which turns its eyes not to Plymouth Rock or Philadelphia but to nationalist figures and fascist movements in Europe. “Support the president!” has become a moral imperative for some Republicans, who have descended into the classical error of conflating loyalty to the nation and loyalty to its political leader. That isn’t patriotism — it is cultism, and a creed of serfdom. The ritualistic praise of the president from men such as Mike Pence is nauseating.