THE RIGHT IS THE LEFT:

Stephen Miller has a lower profile than either Sessions or Bannon, but he's made his mark as a staffer for the former. "You could not get where we are today with this movement if it didn't have a center of gravity that was intellectually coherent," said Bannon of Miller in an interview with Politico Magazine. "And I think a ton of that was done by Sen. Sessions' staff, and Stephen Miller was at the cutting edge of that." As a student at Duke University, the now-30-year-old Miller worked closely with Richard Spencer, then a graduate student who would leave the academy and become an intellectual leader for the "alt-right," an online movement of white nationalists. And as a columnist for the campus paper, Miller worried that "immigrants from non-European countries were not assimilating."

Last year, as a key member of Trump's presidential team, Miller had a strong hand in guiding the Republican nominee's rhetoric on Muslim immigration. My colleague Ben Mathis-Lilley notes that Miller likely wrote the Trump speech that "complained darkly that Muslim communities within the United States were sheltering terrorists." "[I]mmigration is probably the most, in Stephen's view, one of the most existential issues facing us right now," says a former colleague of Miller in an interview with the Atlantic. He is just as instrumental to the direction of the Trump White House as Sessions and Bannon, just as committed to an ideology of exclusion and white hegemony.

We can't know for certain how many Americans voted for these ideas and this approach. What we can say is that tens of millions experienced Donald Trump's campaign, heard his racist appeals, and set them aside to take a chance on an "outsider." Now we're faced with the extraordinary: A White House whose chief thinkers and architects are white nationalists, keepers of a dangerous tradition in our history, with an unprecedented opportunity to pull the United States back a century to an era of unvarnished nativism and prejudice. The past three weeks are likely just the beginning; we are sure to see even more action against immigrants and Muslims, even more tolerance for the worst forces in American life.

In this usage, white nationalist isn't a pejorative; it's the best term we have for the ideology of the Trump administration, one that gives coherence to its actions and approach. White nationalist helps us see how the expansive refugee ban is tied to the efforts to deny government benefits to legal residents and is tied to the promise by Trump to protect entitlements for those who receive them. It helps us see how his "populism" excludes tens of millions of Americans, and why he seems more interested in narrow enthusiasm versus broad popularity. And it gives a sense of what might follow in a Trump administration: not just demonization of disfavored minorities but possible attempts to expand the welfare state for the "deserving," defined by race--a kind of welfare chauvinism. As he did during the campaign, Trump may adopt slogans and ideas from the left and right, not because he's really a conservative or really a liberal, but because white nationalism exists outside the familiar divide. It confounds the left-right spectrum as we understand it in the United States. Trumpish policy won't fall neatly into our old categories of liberal and conservative. 

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