“Stephen Miller is a very intense and obsessive person,” McHugh, who broke from the far right earlier this year, told NBC News. “He’s one of those white nationalists who puts a veneer of intellectualism on things, so he was able to get away with them.”

There were never that many neoconservatives. The term was coined to describe a group of formerly liberal and leftist intellectuals who, disillusioned with Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society and the cultural revolutions of the 1960s, drifted to the right. During the George W. Bush administration, though, on the left, the term became little more than an epithet for the president’s hawkish brain trust.

Yet the term was something of a misnomer—most Bush officials were not neocons, and many of the most influential neocons never served in the administration.

Nevertheless, neoconservative did once serve as a useful descriptor—and despite their small numbers, neoconservatives did have an impact. They believed that their duty was to wage a global battle for democracy in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union, but soon after 9/11, they turned their eyes to the Middle East. Their ideas and arguments found admirers and advocates at senior levels of the Bush administration, those with access to the president himself.

The neoconservative conviction that Middle Eastern autocracies once backed by the United States could be remade into liberal democracies at gunpoint led to one of the greatest foreign-policy debacles in American history. The invasion of Iraq under false pretenses exacerbated all the regional trends—Islamism, terrorism, and authoritarianism—that it was intended to combat. It has been more than 15 years, and American troops remain in the region, trying to contain the aftermath of catastrophe.

The Iraq War was a disaster, and Bush left office an unpopular president, and left the nation in the midst of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. The neoconservatives and their ideas fell out of favor. But their impact on a president who had campaigned on a “humble” foreign policy, only to initiate an armed conflict with the globe as its battlefield, shows how a small ideological vanguard can have a profound influence on the course of the country and the fate of the world. The Republican electorate was never made up of committed neoconservatives. But that electorate gave neoconservatives the power to shape the beginning of the 21st century when it elected Bush. In his aspirations and character, and fundamentally his political success, Republican voters saw themselves; partisanship did the rest.

That example of a small but influential ideological vanguard provides the proper lens with which to view white nationalism and the Trump administration. The president himself has an instinctive affinity for the idea that America is a white man’s country, expressed in both word and deed. Long before the presidency, he refused to rent apartments to black people and called for the execution of black and Latino youths for a crime they did not commit. Prejudice itself can exist without taking an ideological shape, but ideology can forge it into the sharpest and most deadly of weapons.