But the images we saw in Charlottesville today and yesterday convey an entirely different sort of threat. They draw their menace not from what is there—mostly, young white men in polos and T-shirts goofily brandishing tiki torches—but from what isn’t: the masks, the hoods, the secrecy that could at least imply a sort of shame. We used to whisper these thoughts, the new white supremacists suggest. But now we can say them out loud. The “Unite the Right” rally wasn’t intended to be a Klan rally at all. It was a pride march.

The shameless return of white supremacy into America’s public spaces seems to be happening by degrees, and quickly. It wasn’t until most journalists left the conference of the innocuously named “National Policy Institute” in November that my colleague Daniel Lombroso captured Richard Spencer leading the attendees in open Nazi salutes. Spencer’s intention—to make normal that gesture and all the sentiments that underpin it—is no more secret than the identities of his tiki torch-wielding bannermen. "I don't see myself as a marginal figure who's going to be hated by society,” Spencer said to Daniel. “I see myself as a mainstream figure.”

For the moment, you can still spot the subtle boundaries that will have shifted if Spencer and his fellow-travelers succeed. One appeared, for example, in Graeme Wood’s June 2017 Atlantic story on Spencer, when one of his associates requested anonymity: “I have a ‘normie’ [conventional] job,” the young man said, “and I don’t want to get punished for this.” How soon until that young man no longer fears the consequences of his ideas?

“Norms” is such a bloodless, abstract word, which is a shame, because it describes such a bloody real thing. Norms impose genuine and manifold restraints on human behavior. They undergird all the gentle, civic niceties that make human society possible. Laws can codify and reinforce these norms, but the norms are what keep us from savagery.

It would recently have been normal for a president to condemn in harsh tones the participants in a march for white supremacy on the streets of an American city. Today it is not.