It is hard to imagine how last weekend’s Unite the Right rally in DC, the nervously awaited second coming of the white nationalist group that wreaked havoc in Charlottesville last year, could have been less successful. A paltry few dozen white nationalists (at most) were swamped by masses of anti-racist counter-protestors. Press coverage was often simplified: Here is the so-called alt-right doing exactly what we prophesied—succumbing to in-fighting and political inexperience, fading fast into obscurity.

It’s true that, in failing to produce significant numbers of demonstrators, white nationalists did flunk a basic test of a movement’s might. But trawling through alt-right haunts, like the social media platform Gab, gives a different take on the situation. Accord to some posters, the far-right wasn’t out in force because they didn’t want to be—there’s no profit in being doxed and losing your job. According to others, the event was all a troll to make antifascists—some of whom carried signs with violent messages, got into spats with reporters, and hurled a few eggs—look bad in a public setting. Either way, they seem happy to ignore their detractors and remain within the relative safety and anonymity of their digital domain.

So why is the alt-right, a media-savvy and optics-conscious group, so relaxed about this very public flop? It’s because white nationalists, it seems, may see success differently.

Determining the success of a particular social movement is a tricky, subjective business. The simplest metric, the one that movements like March for Our Lives are going for, is reforming policy in a given area. Proving your numbers is what gives movements the leverage to petition leaders, hire lawyers, and call for legislative change more effectively. The second is slightly more diffuse—it involves creating enough cultural change to shift social norms, like the American Civil Right movement did and movements like #MeToo or Black Lives Matter seek to. To be sure, white nationalists would love to succeed at either of these options. But there is a third door to success, and that’s the one white nationalism has typically marched through: the continued survival of the movement’s ideas. In other words, persistence.

Over the past few decades, the American far-right has gone underground. Many extremist leaders have instructed their followers to pull away from open confrontation, like rallies, and tweak their aesthetics so they can better infiltrate the mainstream. (Think: skinheads growing their hair out to get better jobs, or David Duke swapping Klansmen’s robes for suits.) In these periods of strategic obscurity, white nationalists have maintained and continued to spread their ideas in ways that seldom make headlines: at small local groups, at underground music venues, and, increasingly, online.

But what is the point of this secrecy? How could they possibly see muttering hate speech in a basement to the tune of Oi! as winning? “If you accept a few premises about the world, it starts to make sense,” says Robert Futrell, coauthor of American Swastika: Inside the US White Power Movement’s Hidden Space of Hate. “Some people believe we’re destined for a race war, and that if that is the case, then all the enlightened group needs to do is prepare and wait and then take over.”

That doesn’t mean that these small underground groups won’t try to ignite a larger movement. “Occasionally leaders will call for ‘lone-wolf actors’ who hope that by massacring people they’ll spark things off,” says Futrell. (That’s exactly what Dylann Roof hoped would happen when he killed the black congregation of a Charleston church.) But because these groups are loosely held coalitions of ideas, not everyone is explicitly waiting for the same race war. Some are waiting for the second Civil War. Some are waiting for a slightly more subtle cue: the right politician taking power.