The fact that the Republican Party is home to white supremacists isn’t a new thing. When President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and commented that Democrats “have lost the South for a generation,” it wasn’t because there was some sudden flux of “economic anxiety.” It was because white supremacists saw acknowledging the rights of all Americans as an assault on the special position that whites had held, and continue to hold, in the United States. Johnson’s signature served to concentrate white supremacists within the Republican Party. And there they have remained.

Republican politicians have known this. They’ve known that defending white privilege has been a linchpin of their party’s power. Whether fueled by images of Willie Horton or stories of “welfare queens,” they’ve gone over and over to fear of black Americans as a touchstone of the party. They’ve known that whether they call it the Silent Majority, or the Moral Majority, or the Forgotten Majority, what they really mean is the white majority.

Anytime Republicans have worried that their voters might fail to toe the line on tax cuts for the wealthy or loosening regulations on investment banks, they always had a dogwhistle in their back pocket. It’s not even as if all those Republicans required a dog whistle. There have always been those who flew their banner of racism proudly—David Duke was, after all, a state representative, and he was far from alone.

The only difference over the last election cycle has been the number of Republicans who simply stopped pretending that they were embarrassed over racist policies and racist comments for racist purposes. Buzzfeed’s otherwise excellent reporting on the actions of Steve Bannon and the Breitbart staff in uniting the Republican Party with splinter white supremacy movements isn’t really the tale of a party taken over by outside ideas.

It’s the story of a party surrendering to its own worst elements—and the story of how Breitbart is just like the party it serves.