The “free speech” rally in Boston this past weekend was organized by a half-dozen young people, college-aged and libertarian-minded. If on campus they were familiar figures—their designated spokesman was a film major and the leader of his college’s chapter of Young Americans for Liberty—then off campus, as the rally they organized drew widespread attention, they were out of their depth. The young organizers had secured a few well-known figures from the alt-right to speak at the rally. There was Kyle Chapman, the muscular ex-con who became famous after wearing a gas mask to an alt-right rally in Berkeley and hitting a counter-protester in the face with a stick. There was Joe Biggs, the conspiracist radio host. And there was Augustus Invictus, who ran a long-shot bid for the U.S. Senate in Florida in 2016, and whose campaign there was undermined by revelations that he had denied the reality of the Holocaust and, as part of a pagan ritual, had filmed himself stabbing a goat to death and drinking its blood. Before the rally, Invictus was disinvited. The others came.

After Charlottesville, it was obvious that the Boston rally would be a national event. I met the organizers briefly on Thursday, on Boston Common, where they were busy disavowing the more obviously noxious parts of the movement. They said that they had been meeting with officials from the Boston Police Department, which had allowed the event’s permit to stand on the condition that no backpacks or sticks would be allowed. The organizers had issued a statement on the rally’s Facebook page telling members of the Ku Klux Klan not to come (there had been a rumor that some might show up) and asking those people who did attend not to bring provocative signs or materials. They spoke out against the Charlottesville rally and the people who had demonstrated there. They seemed eager to show an ideologically neutral commitment to the principle of free speech, despite the fact that their most prominent speakers came from the alt-right. At the last minute, the organizers had invited leaders of a local Black Lives Matter group to address the rally, though none accepted.

Well before noon on Saturday, the appointed time of the rally, its basic shape was obvious. A few dozen enthusiasts stood inside a gazebo in the center of Boston Common. They were surrounded by a vast, empty perimeter maintained by the police. Outside the perimeter, some forty thousand counter-protesters, by the police commissioner’s estimate, had gathered. The counter-protesters outnumbered the protesters by something like four hundred to one. Inside the gazebo, the rally proceeded, though the scale of the counter-protest and the police presence meant that it ended early. (Chapman, for instance, did not get a chance to speak.) Decorum was kept. There were no deaths or significant injuries, and no property damage. There was also no obvious point. Free speech is a great principle and a fine slogan, but it did little to distinguish the protesters from the vast crowds of Bostonians opposing them, who were also speaking freely. The alt-right, like every political movement, votes with its feet. Fewer than a hundred people attended.

The problem of the Boston rally is the problem of those on the Trumpist right more generally. Their grievances are obvious. What they want is much less clear. We are nearly eight months into Donald Trump’s Presidential term, and he remains a strangely isolated figure, ignored by a growing portion of his own Administration and party—a man on a raft. Trump tweets that he will ban transgender people from serving in the military, and the Pentagon ignores it; he denounces his own Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, in the manner of a cable-news commentator, and Republicans vociferously defend Sessions; he promises to rain “fire and fury” on North Korea, and his own Secretary of State insists that he did not really mean it, that nothing has changed.

Trump’s most basic campaign promises—to build a wall on the border with Mexico, to exclude undesirable immigrants, to tear up trade and military agreements and rewrite them—are not close to becoming real. Part of the problem, as Republicans have said incessantly, though mostly on background to reporters, is Trump’s personality—his inattention to detail, his tendency toward rage and bombast. But it is also starting to seem as if there is a more basic problem: the nationalist wing of the Republican Party helped to give Trump the White House, but it has not given him an agenda.

Last week, Stephen Bannon, the President’s chief strategist and the man who was supposed to provide a nationalist theory for the Administration, left the White House. His departure had been coming for a while; he reportedly submitted his resignation on August 7th, but the announcement was delayed by the events in Charlottesville. In an exit interview with The Weekly Standard, Bannon, who will once again take over Breitbart News, declared that his shackles were now off, and that he would make war on the forces pushing the Trump Administration away from its base and toward “globalism.” He would again become, he said, “Bannon the barbarian.”

But too little barbarism has never been the nationalists’ problem. Instead, the trouble has been that they don’t have a workable idea. Bannon’s program was supposed to turn politics away from the globalists and to protect the jobs and well-being of members of the white working class. But when these instincts collided with debates in Washington about how to actually achieve those goals, they collapsed so quickly that it was natural to wonder whether the President, or those around him, had really believed in them at all. The promises to protect the health insurance of ordinary Americans, for instance, rapidly dissolved into health-care plans that would strip coverage from millions of people while giving enormous tax breaks to billionaires. If you take the rage and partisan feeling away from Trump’s movement, then what is left, beyond an atmosphere of grievance and suspicion? Maybe, after Charlottesville, the nationalist movement will look as meek as it did in Boston: a few dozen men in a gazebo, cut off from the rest of us and abetted, at a distance, by an unspecified number of propaganda bots.