Anyone who has read Dagblog for a good length of time may remember when and how I came here. I started by blogging about white supremacists. At the time, there was a resurgent website up called Alternative Right, which had a pretty good layout and presented white supremacy as "alternative" and "neo-reactionary."

I blogged for Talking Points Memo about all of it and wrote about it a bit here but Alternative Right shut down. John Derbyshire was kicked out of National Review for overt racist comments and the Republicans ran a mild Mormon as their candidate in 2012. I haven't written about it since as in combination with the topic dying down many people were dismissive than white nationalism and supremacy could ever take off as a political force in the United States.

Fast forward to 2016. I was more right than I possibly could have imagined. White racialism has not only returned but with full force, with a presidential candidate who not only embraces white racism but the full panorama of fascist attitudes and policy ideas - from shutting down relationships with democratic allies to embracing authoritarian despots like North Korea and Russia. If Donald Trump actually became president, based on what he has been saying to us, America would be a country that deport and exclude a great deal of people based on religion and ethnic origin while also embracing authoritarian regimes in an alliance that would look more than a bit like the Axis alliance of the 1930s.

I am currently working on a full length article about this for the Hampton Institute. Hampton is a socialist think tank I have been contributing to since 2012. In the making of it, I have interviewed Augustus Invictus, an out there but charismatic "neo-reactionary" with significant ties in the white nationalist world, who has been running for Marco Rubio's seat in Florida as a libertarian. One thing I talked to him about was my seeing the ascent of the alternative right years ago and how largely dismissive most people were of it. He said that even he didn't see this coming.

I unfortunately did. There are 42 million Americans in this country of Germanic descent. Like Germans of the 1930s, they find themselves sandwiched amongst other peoples and both told they are privileged while being largely working class. (The Germany of the Weimar era was blamed and punished for World War One despite not starting that war, despite largely not having the imperialist track record of countries like the United Kingdom or France.) That sort of social dynamic leads to frustration, contradiction when one both relates to people who also are working class but is hostile to accusations of privilege (this can explain the contradictory statements in candidate Donald Trump when he makes deragatory statements about meeting Barack Obama on a basketball court and then condemns racist statements by Supreme Court Justice Antonine Scalia - like Trump, many white Americans likely feel ten different ways in their racial attitudes) and outbursts, of which I think we've seen enough that I don't need to point them out. Most of those 42 million aren't really in touch with their German heritage or history and just describe themselves as "white," albeit a bit more enthusiastically than other people in the country of European ancestry. Without that historical knowledge and with all the feelings of marginalization built up, someone who repackaged the old Nazi approach could have quite an audience.

It's hard to tell how all this will turn out. Trump dominates Republican polls and has for some time but overall Americans are hostile toward him and embracing of policies he disagrees with. Polls also show Democratic opponents beating him. Nevertheless, if he wins or loses, Trump has helped insert white nationalism in to the American political world for the first time since the Civil Rights Era.