The prospect of an African-American president is bringing white supremacist subculture in the US out of the shadows

Daniel Cowart and Paul Schlesselman, the two Tennessee neo-Nazis arrested for plotting to kill 102 African-American schoolchildren and then assassinate Barack Obama, clearly drew inspiration from a violent white nationalist group called the Order. In the 1980s, members of the Order carried out a crime spree that included several high-profile murders.

The connection to the Order is evident in the numbers the two men scrawled on their car on Saturday shortly before they were arrested: 14 and 88. The so-called Fourteen Words is a slogan - "We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children" - coined by Order member David Lane, who also wrote an essay called 88 Precepts. In white supremacist circles, 14-88 is a shorthand expression of allegiance to the beliefs put forth by Lane and the Order, who wanted to found a white homeland where they could preserve the "Aryan race" from being polluted by non-whites and enslaved by the "Zionist-occupied government" of the US. Lane also advocated polygamy and a kind of European paganism he called Wotanism.

The plot by the two Tennessee men, grotesque as it may be, seems not to have got beyond the half-baked stage. But in the early 1980s, the Order - also known as the Brüder Schweigen or Silent Brotherhood - was active, violent, and deadly.

In order to finance their mission, the gang robbed a series of banks and armoured cars and ran a counterfeiting operation. Cowart and Schlesselman are also said to have planned a series of robberies to support their plot - another indication that they modelled themselves on the Order.

Order members were best known for the 1984 murder of Denver talkshow host Alan Berg. The group's leader, Robert Jay Matthews, was killed soon afterwards in a shootout with federal agents. David Lane was arrested in 1985 and died in prison last year while serving a 190-year sentence. Both men have become heroes and martyrs to the white supremacist movement.

During the heyday of the racist far right in the 1980s, the Order was only one of the groups active across the US. I wrote about that subculture for years, and made a film about it.

During that time, I visited one of the meetings that brought the various groups together, hosted on the Michigan farm of Bob Miles, the Grand Dragon of the local Ku Klux Klan (and also a former finance chairman of the Michigan Republican party).

Miles sought to unite the divergent factions - the various Klans, the Aryan Nations, the National Alliance, the Posse Comitatus, the Order and others -into a serious revolutionary movement with an armed underground. This would be built around leaderless cells and have an overground political presence. In some cases, efforts were made to influence the most rightwing reaches of the Republican party.

Bob Miles's dream of a united front never materialised. And those who track the white power movement generally view it as having been in decline after the 1980s, floundering around without purpose or leadership. Yet remnants of it have clearly survived. They surfaced with horrific results in Oklahoma City in 1995, and they can be found among today's skinheads and their fellow travellers.

Some of these are part of biker gangs, including the Sons of Silence, who were implicated in a threat against Obama at the Democratic convention in Denver. Some have joined the anti-immigrant vigilante movement, committing drive-by shootings of Mexican labourers. Others are scattered around doing their own thing: picking fights in bars, beating up gay men. Some are clearly being brought out of the dark corners by the prospect of an African-American man as president. That's the case with the subject of our video, the National Socialist Movement's Steven Boswell, who talked to us in Columbia, Missouri.

• James Ridgeway is the author of Blood in the Face: The Ku Klux Klan, Aryan Nations, Nazi Skinheads and the Rise of a New White Culture

