In the winter of 1999, the Kansas City Star asked several local dignitaries and writers to herald the upcoming century by writing predictions, replicating an exercise that the paper had conducted a hundred years earlier. Some of the Victorian-era predictions had proved pleasingly prophetic: “the rays of the sun will be bottled up and made to do the bidding of man.” Others, less so: “there will be no great war in the twentieth century.”

This time around, one of the invitees was Leonard Zeskind, a Kansas City-based researcher of the American far-right, who had recently been awarded a “genius” grant by the MacArthur Foundation for decades spent in immersive study of extremism and racism. Zeskind, the director of the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights (IREHR), did not offer soothing sci-fi imaginings. He wrote, “Two hundred years after this country fought a civil war to ensure that black people were officially citizens, and a hundred years after a second battle ensured blacks enjoyed the rights of that citizenship, race will once again divide Americans. And this time white people will lose the prerogatives of majority status.” Demographic projections hold that non-Hispanic whites will become a minority around 2050, Zeskind noted. America has always changed, of course, and this shift brings with it the potential of a diverse, dynamic, and flourishing culture. At the same time, Zeskind predicted, a significant number of white Americans would likely mobilize to retain their political and economic influence. “If the past is prologue, a bitter conflict will begin mid-century and continue a full generation,” Zeskind wrote.

“Well, that part has snuck up on us quicker than I thought,” Zeskind told me recently. I had begun reading his work last summer, inspired by a flurry of events: In June, Donald Trump had unveiled a Presidential campaign that singled out Mexican immigrants as a threat (“They’re bringing crime, they’re rapists”) and inveighed against political correctness. (A few months later, Trump would call for a ban on Muslims entering the United States.) Also in June, a young white supremacist killed nine black churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina, and state lawmakers were preparing to remove the Confederate flag from public buildings. The prospect of its removal had galvanized America’s far right. A group calling itself the Conservative Response Team placed robocalls to South Carolina residents, warning them, “Just like ISIS, Obama’s haters want our monuments down, graves dug up and school, roads, towns and counties renamed. They’ve even taken ‘Dukes of Hazzard’ off TV. What’s next?”

Since then, the American far right—a diverse, sometimes contradictory landscape of radical ideologies—has flourished. If its opening days are any indication, 2016 may prove to be the far-right’s most prominent moment in years, fed by a range of factors, including its opposition to the Black Lives Matter campaign, and, above all, Trump’s candidacy. American white nationalists who were, initially, unsure what to make of a New York billionaire like Trump have embraced him unreservedly. Less than three weeks before the Iowa caucuses, voters there last week received a robocall that featured the voices of several white nationalists, including author Jared Taylor, who said, “We don’t need Muslims. We need smart, well-educated white people who will assimilate to our culture. Vote Trump.”

Meanwhile, elsewhere on the far-right frontier, anti-government gunmen have occupied the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, in Oregon, since January 2nd, drawing members and ideas from several movements, including Wise Use (opposed to environmental regulation), Patriots (opposed to federal overreach, which they associate with tyranny), and Sovereign Citizens (opposed to the Fourteenth Amendment, with origins in white nationalism.) J. M. Berger, a fellow with George Washington University’s Program on Extremism, calls it a “gumbo of diverse grievances and beliefs.” Berger, like other specialists, believes that the Malheur occupation is self-reinforcing, “as people from different groups and movements get to know each other face to face and build trust.”

The far-right revival has largely caught the American public by surprise, but it should not have. After Timothy McVeigh, a supporter of the Patriot movement, carried out the bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma City, in 1995, killing a hundred and sixty-eight people, including nineteen children, domestic radicalism declined. But the McVeigh stigma around the Patriots was not permanent. By 2009, Daryl Johnson, a domestic-terrorism analyst at the Department of Homeland Security, was warning that a slumping economy and the election of the first black President was being used to fuel anti-government sentiment and “the potential emergence of terrorist groups or lone-wolf extremists.” But his report, titled “Right-Wing Extremism,” attracted fierce criticism from Republican lawmakers and conservative commentators, who said it unfairly described legitimate grievances. Johnson’s unit at D.H.S., the Extremism and Radicalization Branch, was dismantled in the years after the 2009 report. Johnson, now a security consultant in Washington, told the Times last week, “The same patterns that led to the growth of the antigovernment groups in the 1990s is being played out today. D.H.S. should be doing more.”

Since that unit was shut down, the far right has found new reasons to rise and attract support. The killing of Trayvon Martin, in 2012, by a self-appointed neighborhood watchman, and the protests surrounding his case, caught the attention of white nationalists. Devin Burghart, the vice-president of IREHR, Zeksind’s group, told me that, however irrationally, “The mobilization of a black community intensified the fear among white nationalists.” In response to Black Lives Matter, skinheads staged counterprotests in Olympia, Washington; St. Louis; Cincinnati; and elsewhere. “It has, in no small part, gotten them offline and back onto the streets to start reëngaging in the street battles, which is something we had not seen a lot of during the Obama years.”

White nationalists look at recent American history and see, from their perspective, a series of insults, some well-known, others obscure. They bring up the Duke lacrosse case, in which three white athletes were falsely accused, in 2006, of assaulting a black woman; they seethe over Obama’s criticism of the Cambridge, Massachusetts, police for acting “stupidly” after officers arrested Henry Louis Gates outside his own home; they even point to the moment, in 2009, when Kanye West interrupted Taylor Swift at the MTV Video Awards to say that the award should have gone to Beyoncé. It was, in their view, one in a series of turning points.

For a while, the Tea Party channeled some of that frustration. Tea Party leaders denounced racism, but their rallies contained posters that depicted Obama as an African witch doctor and a character from “Planet of the Apes.” The politics of loss—of desperation and decay and failure—was embedded in the movement’s slogan: “Take it Back.” The Tea Party faded somewhat, even as a raft of candidates it supported entered Congress, but Zeskind, the author of the prediction, never expected it to remain in abeyance. “Nature abhors a vacuum,” he told me. “What is happening is a big change. I don’t know for sure, but my sense is that the White Nationalist movement is ready to take a swing up.”

Burghart, his colleague, is bracing for a long struggle about the definition of America. He said, “This question, about who and what we are as a nation in the twenty-first century, is going to be the defining question for millennials and the generation that comes after that. As we go through these demographic changes, that is the question that we are going to face, whether or not we can truly live up to our democratic ideals.” He saw the taking down of the Confederate flag, and the protests it provoked, as merely the first skirmish. “This round was one of the first early battles in a much larger conflict that’s going to go on over the next thirty years.”