WHAT PART OF OLDER WHITE MEN CONFUSED THEM?:

The origin of the right-wing movement that unites Proud Boys, militias, Blue Lives Matter police nationalists, and, frankly, the current mass of the Republican Party is not Donald Trump's 2016 presidential candidacy but the 2009 Tea Party movement. At the time, the cosplay quality of its participants, from the tricorn hats to the Gadsen "Don't Tread on Me" flags, seemed like a harmless, even laughable feature. But the myths of the founding embraced by the Tea Party are perhaps the most sustaining force in the imaginary of the contemporary far right--particularly now as it is faced with the growing popularity of a counter-national origin story: that of 1619.

It is "precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service," Marx said about the coup of Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte in 1851, "borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language."

Trump was a product of this movement, having been a prominent purveyor of the "birther" conspiracy. As a presidential candidate, he used the language of popular sovereignty to combat other institutions of government and claim representation of the common man against the machinations of elites. Rather than call for a national refounding of the republic, as the Tea Party had, he offered himself as Caesar, who alone could cure the nation's ills. He also embodied a slightly different sense of the nation's founding than the Tea Party's--one that emphasized genetic over political origins, racial rage over racial denial.

Trump's racial signaling, which was magnified by luminaries in his circle, such as Steve Bannon, Jeff Sessions, and Stephen Miller, emboldened a new, openly racist alt-right movement that sought to extend and radicalize the new administration's tendencies in this direction. The alt-right marched confidently from the internet message boards and into the street, but its direct influence would be short-lived.

Two weeks before the infamous Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in the summer of 2017, the white supremacist American Renaissance magazine held a conference outside Nashville, Tennessee. Prior to Trump's election, this obscure "race realist" journal had a tiny membership of eugenic pseudoscientists and Aryan mythmakers. Now it pulsed with the energy of new relevance. Rumpled, older race polemicists mingled with physically fit young men sporting "high and tight" haircuts and clustering around new celebrity leaders like Richard Spencer. The notoriously violent Nathan Damigo, founder of the white supremacist Identity Evropa, gave a detailed slide presentation about his organization's new 50-state college campus recruitment strategy. Former Forbes editor Peter Brimelow, the founder of the anti-immigrant website VDare, gave Trump a "C-" for his efforts on immigrant restriction and deportation thus far, but was optimistic for where things were headed. There was a giddiness about the prospects of the newly militant racist right, itching to prove its ferocity.

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