American politics has been changing. It’s grown more welcoming to views that, only a few years ago, would have remained on the fringes. This week, we’re bringing you pieces about the rise of extremism in our country—its origins, its consequences—and how it might be resisted. In a dispatch from 2016, Alexis Okeowo looks at the rise in hate crimes after the election of Donald Trump; writing in 2017, James Carroll examines how the history of anti-Semitism converges with our present political climate. In “The French Origins of ‘You Will Not Replace Us,’ ” Thomas Chatterton Williams uncovers the source of a white-nationalist rallying cry, and, in “The Fearful and the Frustrated,” Evan Osnos maps the coalition of racist and nativist groups that rallied around Trump. In “Birth of a White Supremacist,” Andrew Marantz explains how one man, who started out as a “leftist contrarian,” ended up becoming an alt-right celebrity. Finally, in “How Norms Change,” Maria Konnikova explores the psychology of shifting values and how those shifts can be reversed. We’re in an alarming national moment. These pieces can help us understand it.

—David Remnick

“Hate on the Rise After Trump’s Election”

“Since Donald Trump won the Presidential election, there has been a dramatic uptick in incidents of racist and xenophobic harassment across the country.” Read more.

“How Norms Change”

Photograph by Saul Loeb / AFP / Getty

“The voice of authority speaks not for the one but for the many; authority figures have a strong and rapid effect on social norms in part because they change our assumptions about what other people think.” Read more.

“What Donald Trump Doesn’t Understand About Anti-Semitism”

Photograph by Olivier Douliery / Getty

“Anti-Semitism is not a run-of-the-mill example of hate and prejudice and evil, which is why contempt for Jews keeps showing up as a symptom of social stress—even now, and even in the United States.” Read more.

“The French Origins of ‘You Will Not Replace Us’ ”

Illustration by Adam Maida

“The belief that a multicultural society is tantamount to an anti-white society has crept out of French salons and all the way into the Oval Office.” Read more.

“Birth of a White Supremacist”

“The name Mike Enoch might have been unfamiliar to most Americans, but, to an inner cadre of Web-fluent neo-fascists, he is an influential and divisive figure.” Read more.

“The Fearful and the Frustrated”

“Ever since the Tea Party’s peak, in 2010, and its fade, citizens on the American far right—Patriot militias, border vigilantes, white supremacists—have searched for a standard-bearer, and now they’d found him.” Read more.