Last week the left tried to Bork Steve Bannon, a key Trump campaign aide and proposed “chief White House strategist and senior counselor” and until August executive chairman of Breitbart News, by linking him to the alt-right. The Trumpist response to the attack was haul out Breitbart journalists and others to deny that Bannon and Breitbart had anything to do with the alt-right. Then the NeverTrumpers got into the act to say that while Bannon was innocent of the charges there was no doubt that Breitbart was playing with fire where the alt-right was concerned.

I think that the Trump people should have taken the opportunity to change the narrative. It should have turned the story back onto the left. If the alt-right is beyond the fringe, then what about the left? Is the racist La Raza beyond the respectable left fringe? Or racist Black Lives Matter? Or the racist Nation of Islam? Or radical MoveOn.org? Or socialist ANSWER? Somehow there doesn’t seem to be any group on the left that embarrasses the mainstream left.

And what about the left protesting the results of a presidential election? How fringe and extremist is that?

Moreover, the Trumpists should say, only we have the key that keeps the alt-right in its cage, because we have built a populist electoral coalition that is, for now, willing to be patient while a President Trump makes America great again. So the alt-right is marginalized, for now.

Here is how Steve Bannon views the alt-right, answering a question in Europe in 2014 about how to deal with the racist fringe in UKIP and the Front National.

But there’s always elements who turn up at these things, whether it’s militia guys or whatever. Some [of] that are fringe organizations. My point is that over time it all gets kind of washed out, right? People understand what pulls them together, and the people on the margins I think get marginalized more and more.

So Steve Bannon thinks the we should let the fringes be part of the action and have faith that the mainstream populists will push them to the sidelines in the natural to-and-fro of politics.

And Steve Bannon is the guy that liberals, cued by the New York Times, think is too extreme to advise president-elect Trump.

I’d say, based on another Bannon speech I’ve linked to, that that the real liberal problem with Bannon is that he is liberals’ worst nightmare, a conviction conservative that really believes what he says, and with the courage to make it so.

So of course liberals want to bully Steve Bannon -- and Jeff Sessions, nominee for attorney general -- off the stage right now before Donald Trump even gets inaugurated. Bullying and intimidating is what they do.

But I think that the liberal effort to Bork Bannon and silence the alt-right is worse than a crime, it’s a blunder.

The alt-right is a warning to us all. If lefties don’t tone down the hate and the fear on ordinary conservatives like Bannon and Sessions then the great American white majority will one day decide that more extreme measures are needed. And they might decide that white identity politics, the solution proposed by many on the alt-right, is the only thing to oppose intellectual terrorism of liberal race and gender identity politics.

On that day, there will no longer be today’s Kansas politics anymore where the left can mainstream Black Lives Matter and La Raza, and calmly consider making a black Muslim head of the Democratic National Committee, and quote unverified hate statistics from the Southern Law Poverty Center and lecture vice-president elect Pence from the stage of a hit Broadway musical. We will be instead in a world of dueling identity hate groups where whites add up to 70 percent of the voters.

If that day comes, and the white majority decides it is not going to take the politics of political correctness anymore where liberals get to name and shame and silence anyone who disagrees with them, and white identity politics breaks its leash, it will be the left and its evil race and gender identity politics that will be to blame. But it won’t matter who is to blame, not then, because U.S. politics will not then feature the decorous bleatings of high-minded elite talking heads and leggy blondes. By then it will have a far darker aspect, and in that time the white majority will just roll over the opposition in a flood tide of rage, and after it has finished there will be no left left in America.

So let’s support Steve Bannon and let the alt-right to put its nose inside the tent of respectability, and let us push back hard against the 21st century Borkers. Americans have nothing to lose but our timidity. We have a nation to win.

Christopher Chantrill @chrischantrill runs the go-to site on US government finances, usgovernmentspending.com. Also see his American Manifesto and get his Road to the Middle Class.