In Errol Morris’s new documentary, American Dharma, Morris asks Steve Bannon — former executive chairman of Breitbart News, mastermind of Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential victory, and subject of the film — if he could pinpoint a defining moment in the crystallization of his political worldview. Pondering the question, Bannon recalls a visit to West Point sometime in the aughts, when his oldest daughter was a cadet there and a member of the volleyball team. Stopping by her practice one day, Bannon says he saw a stack of boxes that contained the team’s new uniforms. Pulling one out he noticed, to his horror, that the uniform had been made in Vietnam.

That his daughter’s army jersey should have been made in Vietnam — a country where thousands of American soldiers had died — was apparently more than Bannon could bear. It reeked of “globalism” — Bannon’s explanation for everything wrong with the world today.

For Bannon globalism encapsulates the worldview of an international elite — the “Party of Davos” — that has lost its way. Instead of the Judeo-Christian principles of piety, thrift, and national pride that purportedly once guided Western capitalism, Bannon sees a world run by a cabal of crony capitalists obsessed with quarterly returns and share prices. The result, Bannon contends, is an alienated working class ready to explode.