AMERICA is not about to be overrun by neo-fascists. Most politicians have no difficulty condemning the far right. The Republican National Committee chairman has told white supremacists, “We don’t want your vote.” Yet this floppy fringe should not be taken lightly. “As a speaker, Hitler exercises astonishing sway over a German audience, presumably because public speaking is an unknown art in Germany,” was the British embassy in Berlin’s snarky verdict in 1937. European fascists were a bit of a joke, until they were not. Nor was America immune from swastika-waving wingnuts.

On February 20th 1939 the German American Bund, a group founded in 1936 to promote Nazism in America, held a rally at Madison Square Garden in Manhattan that drew 20,000 supporters. The Bund had about 25,000 members, and worked closely with the Christian Front, a militia linked to Charles Coughlin, an anti-Semitic priest whose radio shows drew millions of listeners. But after the second world war began, the Bund’s leader was convicted of embezzlement and eventually deported to Germany, while Coughlin was ordered to cease non-pastoral activity.

In 1925 the Ku Klux Klan, a violent group formed in the South after the civil war to intimidate newly freed black southerners, marched on Washington, and boasted more than 4m members. It gained adherents in the north and Midwest by opposing immigration, particularly of Catholics and Jews. The Klan’s influence waned, but then rose again in the 1960s, in opposition to the civil-rights movement. The Southern Poverty Law Centre, which monitors hate groups, estimates that today the Klan has between 5,000 and 8,000 members in dozens of individual chapters.

The closest the far right came to the White House was in 1968, when George Wallace, an ex-governor of Alabama, took five states in the presidential election running on the American Independent Party’s ticket. Wallace began his career as a relative moderate, then found that inciting racial hatred won him more votes. But his appeal was clearly limited, even though he won more states than some subsequent Democratic candidates have. Since then, most mainstream politicians have found it easy to condemn overt bigotry.

There were few if any Klan hoods on display in Charlottesville. Instead, marchers bore a variety of other iconography. Some brandished white shields with a black cross—a symbol of the League of the South, a secessionist group that believes contemporary America is unacceptably “egalitarian and Marxist”. Before driving a car into a crowd of protesters, James Alex Fields junior was photographed holding a shield with the symbol of Vanguard America, a white supremacist group (which denies that Mr Fields was a member). Many carried Confederate flags.

All these groups came together for a “Unite the Right” rally, ostensibly to protect a statue of Robert E. Lee, a Confederate general, but also to show real-world strength. The loose grouping known as the alt-right began on internet message boards. Its adherents have proven more adept at tinkering with Photoshop—their favourite symbol is a green frog called Pepe, though they also seem to enjoy sending Nazi-themed imagery to their opponents—than marching. Stephen Bannon, Mr Trump’s strategist, once called Breitbart, the website he used to run, “the platform for the alt-right”.

Working out precisely what that means is challenging: the alt-right does not have a unified set of beliefs. Some fashion themselves champions of free speech and whine when challenged—ignoring the distinction between government suppression of speech, and the social or professional consequences of spewing racist bile.

Some insist that they do not hate non-white people, they just want their own ethno-state—a distinction without a difference, and one that shows why “alt” (for alternative) is misleading: racial separation is not a new cause for the far right. Jason Kessler, who organised the Charlottesville rally, denied being a white supremacist. He was, he said, just “trying to show that folks can stand up for white people.”