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Paul Manafort’s trial in Alexandria, Virginia, captured most of the nation’s attention this week, but legal proceedings across the Potomac River in Washington may be the best indicator of where the Russia investigation is going next.

Special counsel Robert Mueller’s team questioned Kristin Davis, the so-called Manhattan Madam, before a grand jury at the D.C. federal courthouse on Friday. Mueller is reportedly probing her connections with veteran GOP political operative Roger Stone. Elsewhere in the building that same day, a federal judge held Andrew Miller, another Stone associate, in contempt of court for refusing to obey a grand-jury subpoena also issued by Mueller for his testimony.

It’s increasingly apparent that Stone, a political dirty trickster and occasional adviser to President Donald Trump, may be in serious legal jeopardy. Stone himself told NBC’s Meet the Press in May that he is “prepared” to be indicted by Mueller. In the interview, he suggested that the charges could be related to his business operations instead of Russian electoral interference. “It is not inconceivable now that Mr. Mueller and his team may seek to conjure up some extraneous crime pertaining to my business, or maybe not even pertaining to the 2016 election,” Stone told moderator Chuck Todd. “I would chalk this up to an effort to silence me.”

For what, exactly, would Mueller indict Stone? As with many things surrounding the Russia investigation, the answer isn’t quite clear. Two potential avenues are emerging from the witnesses that Mueller has already subpoenaed and the question that he’s reportedly asked them. If Stone is indicted on charges related to his super PAC or for other business dealings unrelated to foreign election meddling, the political impact could be minimal at first. If, on the other hand, the charges pertain to Russian cyberattacks, it would mark a major shift in the Russia investigation.

Mueller’s operations are largely hidden from public view, making it hard to gauge his progress in the Russia investigation. At the same time, he and his team appear to be taking a heightened level of interest in Stone’s activities. Mueller’s team has called at least a half-dozen Stone aides and confidants before the grand jury this year, often in addition to the more standard interviews with FBI agents. Stone has told reporters that he himself hasn’t been contacted by the special counsel yet, a silence that could indicate he is a target of the investigation.

This would fit Mueller’s pattern so far in the Russia investigation. A similar wave of grand-jury appearances preceded the first indictment of Paul Manafort and Rick Gates last October, as well as the guilty plea of Michael Flynn last December. Other targets had more conspicuous bullseyes on them. Manafort’s history of shady business practices had already raised suspicions long before Mueller’s appointment as special counsel. Flynn’s criminal liability was even more well known: Trump dismissed him from his post as national security advisor after it became public that Flynn had lied to FBI investigators about his conversations with the Russian ambassador a few months earlier.

One possibility is that Mueller is scrutinizing Stone’s business dealings, as Stone himself suggested might be the case. Stone began the 2016 election as an adviser to Trump when his campaign was still in its early stages. Trump severed formal ties with Stone in August 2015, describing him as a “publicity seeker” who “no longer serves a useful function for my campaign.” But Stone kept in touch with the eventual Republican nominee and served as an informal adviser throughout the election.

Stone also formed a super PAC named the Committee to Restore America’s Greatness, a pro-Trump organization that sought to aid his candidacy. Many of the Stone associates that Mueller has questioned have ties to the group. They include Jason Sullivan, a social-media specialist who worked for the group in the summer of 2016, and John Kakanis, who worked as Stone’s accountant and driver. Sullivan testified before a grand jury in June, while Kananis received a subpoena in May. The special counsel’s office is also reportedly probing Stone’s tax returns and other financial information.

Mueller has the legal authority to prosecute “any matters that arose or may arise directly from the investigation” under the orders given to him by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who oversees the Russia investigation thanks to Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s recusal from it. That means the special counsel can bring charges against Stone for any acts he discovers while investigating Russian collusion with the Trump campaign, even if those acts aren’t related to the collusion itself. Indeed, the most prominent figures prosecuted by Mueller so far—Manafort, Gates, and Flynn—all faced charges unrelated to the 2016 election.

A more dramatic possibility is that Stone could be indicted on charges related to Russian collusion itself. Sam Nunberg, another Trump campaign adviser, told Bloomberg in May that he turned over years of emails with Stone to the special counsel’s office, and that Mueller’s team questioned him about Stone’s relationship with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. Assange helped distribute documents stolen from the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton campaign by Russian military hackers, who adopted the persona of a Romanian hacktivist codenamed Guccifer 2.0. In July, Mueller indicted twelve Russians for election-related cyberattacks against Democratic Party organizations and candidates.

Stone was in communication with both Assange and Guccifer 2.0. He exchanged private messages with the WikiLeaks Twitter account on multiple occasions throughout the 2016 election, and at one point told Nunberg he had dined with Assange himself. (The veracity of that assertion is unclear.) Stone also told reporters last month that he was the unnamed person in communication with the Russian hackers behind the Guccifer 2.0 persona in Mueller’s July indictment. The extent and nature of these communications remains murky at best. Stone has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing, including collusion with the Russian government.

If Mueller indicts Stone on unrelated charges, as he has done with Manafort and Gates, it would widen the Russia investigation without deepening the legal and political peril for Trump himself. Indicting Stone on collusion-related charges, on the other hand, would mark a sea change for the inquiry itself. For more than a year, Mueller’s investigation has publicly avoided the question of whether Americans actively conspired with Moscow to subvert U.S. democracy. What has been conjectural and speculative until now could soon become all too real.

Later this year, on the midterm ballot, voters in Los Angeles, California, will be asked an uncommon question: Should the city be to allowed to create a public bank?

L.A.’s referendum, which would not itself create a public bank, has attracted the support of left-wing figures like New York congressional candidate Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and filmmaker Michael Moore, in addition to advocates for legalized cannabis. And the idea is gaining traction to other blue cities and states. New Jersey’s Democratic governor, Phil Murphy, campaigned on the creation of a public bank. City officials in Washington, D.C., held a public meeting last month to discuss the possibility. The movement has also spread to New York City and Oakland.

A public bank is what it sounds like: a financial institution owned by the government, funded with taxpayer money, and directly accountable to elected officials and civil servants. For this reason, supporters believe they offer a transparent alternative to private banks like Bank of America, which was fined $42 million this year for lying to customers about its management of stock trades, or Wells Fargo, fined $185 million for opening fraudulent accounts for customers without their consent.

But the appeal of public banks extends beyond consumer protection to sound fiscal policy. The argument, as articulated by Demos in a 2011 report, says banks can offer lower debt costs to city and state governments, fund public infrastructure projects, and encourage entrepreneurship by providing loans to small businesses at lower interest rates and with lower fees.

“It’s a way to keep our money here as opposed to holding it in these large Wall Street banks that we pay egregious interest and financial fees to,” Kayvan Khalatbari, a mayoral candidate in Denver, told Westword. “This is not a new idea, these exist all over the world. Germany is fueled by public banks, and look, they have the best economy in Europe.”

Press coverage of L.A.’s proposed public bank frequently refers to it as “the weed bank” because activists have trumpeted it as a means to protect growers and dispensary owners. Federal law still prohibits the growth and sale of marijuana, and Attorney General Jeff Sessions has promised a crackdown on states that have legalized it. So private banks often refuse to handle pot profits, which could make the banks legally complicit in money laundering. Banks owned directly by cities or states that have legalized marijuana are a safer option for the industry. Without a bank, dispensaries often rely on cash, which leaves them vulnerable to theft and makes it difficult for them to grow their businesses, as The Daily Beast reported in July.  

But public banks could benefit more than the marijuana industry.  “A public bank is like a bankers’ bank, except that is owned by the state or municipality or county depending upon how the legislation is phrased,” Deborah Figart, a distinguished professor of economics at University of Stockton, told me. “Rather than taking deposits and lending to individual customers, for your mortgage or your car loan, it lends money to the municipality or the state or does public-private partnerships to invest in public infrastructure.”

In April, Figart called for New Jersey to conduct a feasibility study to examine the impact of a public bank. Drawing on earlier feasibility studies in Sante Fe and Vermont, Figart estimated that a state-owned bank would yield $16 million to $21 million in output for every $10 million invested, raise state income from $3.8 million to $5.2 million, and add 60 to 93 jobs. Unlike private banks, public banks would also contribute profits to city or state governments, depending on how they’re structured.

Public banks aren’t purely hypothetical, though. One already exists in America, and it has been thriving for nearly a century.

The Bank of North Dakota, founded in 1919, was created out of economic uncertainty: Farmers, concerned that large grain traders and banks based outside the state threatened their economic sovereignty, saw a public bank as a means to protect themselves from exorbitantly high interest rates that put their farms at financial risk. The bank offered farmers more equitable access to capital, and despite initial fears that it represented a Bolshevik takeover of the state, the bank eventually gained bipartisan support.

Today, the bank is a healthy: Its 2017 annual report says its income has risen steadily since 2013, and the state’s return on its investment is 17 percent. Khalatbari, the Denver mayoral candidate, said North Dakota’s bank helped the state survive the recession “better than any state in the United States.” That’s probably a stretch. The oil boom has a lot do with North Dakota’s fiscal health, and even the bank’s president has cast doubt on the idea that the institution was largely responsible for the state’s relative fiscal health during the recession.

But as The American Prospect reported in 2013, North Dakota was the only state in the country not facing a revenue shortfall in 2009. In fact, the state possessed a surplus, thanks in part to the bank: The Associated Press reported that the bank had “funneled almost $300 million in profits to North Dakota’s treasury” since 2000. It seems fair to say that the public bank did help somewhat—not just through its contributions to the state’s general funds, but through its partnerships with private community banks and its willingness to invest in community development projects.

As David Dayen noted for In These Times in 2017, the Bank of North Dakota offers fairer loans than the state government might find elsewhere. “BND’s Infrastructure Loan Fund, for example, finances projects at just two percent interest; municipal bonds can have rates roughly four times as high,” he wrote. For this reason, activists with Public Bank L.A. argue that a city bank could loan the city money, below market rates, to build more public housing and support the development of a greener energy infrastructure. 

Of course, it’s not cheap to start a bank of any kind. A feasibility study conducted by the state of Massachusetts estimated that a state-owned bank would require $3.6 billion in start-up capital. Further complicating matters, a spokesman for Los Angeles’ legislative analyst’s office told the city council in March that while state bonds initially helped fund the Bank of North Dakota, Los Angeles’ city bonds could only be used for infrastructure projects, not start-up capital. “That leaves using general fund money or finding philanthropists willing to bankroll, literally, a municipal bank,” the spokesman said.

Dean Baker, a senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy research, says that public banks certainly have their benefits. They “can offer competition with the existing banking system, and could be a way to help expose abuses.” But they’re not likely to be a transformative economic force. “Some of its proponents really think this is the key to prosperity,” he said. “And I just can’t see that. I think it could bring fees down. I think, again, it could help to expose abuses in different areas because clearly the banks do a lot of gouging. I think that those are very, very good things. But I really can’t see a story where a public bank qualitatively changes the state of the economy in a city or state that institutes it.”

Even if voters in L.A. approve the referendum, significant hurdles remain. The city would have to determine if changes need to be made to state law—and, if so, work with state legislators to make those changes. The city has to find enough funds for the bank’s start-up capital, and it must contend with the fact that a new public bank wouldn’t be immediately profitable. It also must contend with private banks, which generally oppose public banks. “The banking community would say that they already take care of all the lending needs for roads and bridges and infrastructure and housing and green energy and child care facilities,” Figart said. “But if you look at any report about our failing infrastructure and the needs in our urban areas and in our rural areas, you will see that the money is not necessarily being lent out at reasonable interest rates to fulfill these local and state and other municipal needs.” 

Public banks won’t fix the banking industry, and they won’t cure governments’ fiscal woes. But surely North Dakotans shouldn’t be the only ones who get to benefit from one.

When Louisa May Alcott was a child, her father Bronson asked her to define what a philosopher was. She replied, tongue in cheek: “a man up in a balloon with his family at the strings tugging to pull him down.” Later, as a grown woman, Alcott would write a short story loosely based on day-to-day life at Fruitlands, the short-lived utopian community her father founded in the 1840s. Titled “Transcendental Wild Oats,” the story satirized men like her father and his circle (Emerson, Hawthorne, Thoreau, and others), noting how “some call of the Oversoul wafted all the men away” when it came time to harvest the crops. Throughout her life, Alcott knew how to puncture the buoyant intellectual men floating above the people stuck down in the muck of cooking and sweeping and dying in childbirth.

This sharp perspective is easy to miss in the work for which Alcott is best known, her beloved 1868 novel Little Women. The earliest reviewers described the story of the four March sisters and their mother Marmee as “fresh,” “healthy,” “natural,” and “sincere.” In the 1920s, Ernest Hemingway characterized Little Women as full of “sweetness and light.” Critics since then have largely followed suit, continuing to describe the novel as amiable and charming, though often disagreeing as to whether that was a good or bad thing. In the 1960s the British critic Brigid Brophy asserted that the novel’s sentimentality was a form of “technical skill” on Alcott’s part, whereas Mary Gaitskill, writing in 1995, criticized the story as treacly: an “impossibly sweet view of life.”

Yet Little Women is also an angry book (“I am angry every day of my life,” Marmee declares), and in a specifically feminist way. Alcott uses the structures that hem women in—marriage, home, religion—both to attract and repel her readers. The homes she depicts are both cozy and claustrophobic, the marriages companionate and perverse, and the March girls’ dreams both fulfilled and depressingly renounced. It’s certainly possible to read Little Women as an untroubled sentimental text about family bonds and individual development, but then, well, you’d miss out on the fun and insight of the novel’s deeply weird and frustrated relationship to femininity.

Writing Little Women, Anne Boyd Rioux proposes in Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy: The Story of Little Women and Why It Still Matters, was a way for Alcott to explore these frustrations while also repurposing her own life story. Born in 1832, Louisa May Alcott was one of four sisters, raised in and around Boston and Concord, Massachusetts. Her education was valued and supported by her reformist and idealist parents, her writing encouraged—her father bringing her apples while she wrote up in the garret—during a time when women’s writing often was not. The Alcott family culture was whimsical and wholesome; the children spent time outdoors, full of mischief and fun. The idiosyncratic sisters had rich and contentious relationships. By early adulthood, Alcott (who never married) had achieved great professional success, earning enough money to support herself and her family through her writing. That’s the cozy story, and the one that the plot of Little Women mostly follows. In some ways, it’s true enough.

But Louisa May Alcott’s life was also full of darkness and anger. The family was itinerant, and nearly always in poverty. Bronson Alcott’s strict adherence to his “ideals”—vegetarianism, selflessness, and political commitments to use no cotton, wool, sugar, molasses, or rice—meant that his children were often improperly clothed and malnourished. He once left his wife Abigail alone with two small children so that he could focus on his studies for a year, during which Abigail weathered the first of many miscarriages on her own. Lizzie Alcott (the inspiration for the saintly Beth March) appears to have starved herself to death; her mother and sisters attended her during a protracted, painful, and utterly irredeemable death. Alcott was always keenly aware of how much she had to temper and redirect her own ambitions simply because she was a woman.

Alcott began writing the first part of the novel, which she initially titled “The Pathetic Family,” in response to a prompt from the publisher Thomas Niles. She was skeptical of the prompt—“never liked girls or knew many, except my sisters”—and enjoyed prodding readers’ expectations of “a girls’ story”—most famously and perversely declaring that “I won’t marry Jo to Laurie to please anyone.” Under pressure from her publisher, Alcott did ultimately marry everyone off (including her own avatar, Jo), but felt that such an ending was done “in a very stupid style.”

Despite Alcott’s own misgivings as to whether the book was good, bad, or stupid, readers and reviewers immediately responded to Little Women. The first part of the novel was published in 1868 and sold two thousand copies in just two weeks. Niles ordered a sequel, and Alcott obliged, churning out a chapter a day. Just two years after beginning to write the novel, Alcott had finished part two, and by spring 1869 tens of thousands of copies of Little Women were ordered and shipped across the country.

Little Women was immediately a critical and popular success. Nineteenth-century readers found it fresh and realistic, often focusing on the “naturalness” of the informal language the March girls use. The book’s fortunes shifted a bit in the early-twentieth century; with the rise of academic literary study, the canon was masculinized, and Alcott dropped from its legitimating view. Yet Little Women continued to exert a nearly immeasurable influence on those who read it. Rioux catalogs in almost overwhelming detail how nearly every major modern woman writer has some kind of relationship to the novel. Ursula K. Le Guin found in Jo March the original image of a woman writer; Erica Jong has said the book “told me women could be writers, intellects;” Elizabeth Alexander declares it “formative;” bell hooks found “remnants of myself in Jo.”

The centennial celebration of the novel in 1968 initiated the explicitly feminist conversation about Little Women that continues still today. Critics and feminists from Judith Fetterly to Gloria Steinem debated the gendered ideologies of the novel’s sweetness and do-gooder-ism, its emphasis on marriage, childbearing, and the home. By giving an overarching account of these conversations, Rioux’s book doesn’t so much as weigh in as it reveals how Little Women has served as a Rosetta stone for women to consult as they attempt to translate and understand their own confounding experiences of gender. The lingering feminist question for us all, it seems, is the one that Rioux poses in the introduction to her book: “What does it mean that this venerated story of girlhood centers on a girl who doesn’t want to be one at all?”

Rioux suggests that the novel’s appeal and influence over so many readers and writers has everything to do with this kind of unexpected complexity. Little Women is, in fact, propelled less by its sweetness and light than it is by its internal frisson: between Marmee’s placidity and her declaration of anger, between the family’s love of their father and his infuriating uselessness, between the novel’s embrace of the values of sentimental womanhood and their clear association with death and abjection. Rioux’s book is exceptionally good at establishing how these tensions drive not only the novel’s narrative interest but also millions of readers’ deep and lasting affection for the novel. The novel models what it means for women to have a creative relationship to the dull and limited facts of life under patriarchy, to take life’s disappointing material and make art out of it.

Rioux concludes that Little Women has endured because of the power of its “lessons” about balancing family and career, individualism and selflessness, and the value of (truly) companionate marriage. I’m not sure I share her faith in the usefulness of lessons drawn from fiction. I love, and have always loved, Little Women because of its perversity, because of the way its characters often work against their own best interests (Meg marries the worst man of all time basically to stick it to old Aunt March), and because of its anger and eroticism (consider the sausage pillow!). These aren’t lessons, but they are life.

Likewise, the affections Little Women inspires aren’t necessarily “good” lessons, even as they accurately reflect our culture’s distorted views of womanhood. “Am I a Jo or an Amy?” is as pleasurable a question to consider, as it is revealing of the tight strictures that govern our understanding of womanly selfhood. Some of the best television shows about women have been founded on Little Women’s presentation of women as types (Golden Girls, The Facts of Life, Sex and the City, Girls); so are many of our literary stories about womanly life (“Am I a Lila or a Lenu?”). Our most popular and lucrative stories about women are still based on this premise, which can begin to feel narrow and limiting: Am I the type of woman who marries or the type who writes? The type who’s a prude or the type who’s experienced? The heroine or the bitch?

Still, Little Women is, ultimately, a generous book. Alcott wrote it, first and foremost, to be generous to herself: It allowed her to rewrite and re-envision painful aspects of her life, both current and past, and to make bank while doing so. But it’s also generous to the reader. The first time I reread it after having children, I was gobsmacked to find a chapter on sleep-training a baby! Horrible handbooks that simplistically teach sleep-training abound, but a literary representation of this complicated, terrible aspect of new motherhood? I hadn’t even realized I’d been starving for it, and there was Alcott waiting for me at the table.

Readers’ relationships with Little Women, Rioux shows, are always also about rewriting ourselves, our histories, and our frustrations with the misogyny of our world. It’s easy enough to love heroines who don’t want to be girls, or to fantasize about floating off and away from patriarchy’s harrowing entanglements. But it’s less easy to know what to do with the fact that so many of us end up back down on the ground—married, dead, making jam. Little Women still matters because in it, Alcott insists that the ground is where the work, the harvest, and the nourishment is.

On Wednesday evening, Laura Ingraham opened her Fox News show with a critique of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the 28-year-old democratic socialist who ousted a top House Democrat in a June primary and is virtually guaranteed to become a member of Congress this fall. Conservatives, naturally, aren’t thrilled to see any kind of socialist win a U.S. election, even in a New York City district where Republicans can’t compete. But Ingraham’s opening monologue also carried a more insidious message.

She played a clip in which Ocasio-Cortez noted that the older generation of Democratic leaders came to power in the 1990s, under economic circumstances that are much different than today’s. “That’s not America anymore,” Ocasio-Cortez said.

“She’s kind of right in the general sense, because in some parts of the country it does seem like the America that we know and love doesn’t exist anymore,” Ingraham said. “Massive demographic changes have been foisted upon the American people, and they are changes that none of us ever voted for and most of us don’t like.” She then pivoted to a litany of murders and other crimes committed by undocumented immigrants.

Her central point, however, was that the country was taken away from its citizens by foreign hordes. “Everyone is gaming the system,” she said, referring to Democrats. “Now, this is a sure way over time to remake and reshape America. This is exactly what socialists like Ocasio-Cortez want. Eventually diluting and overwhelming your vote with the votes of others who aren’t, let’s face it, too big on Adam Smith and the Federalist Papers.”

Ingraham’s monologue mirrored the rhetoric that white nationalists use to articulate their worldview, except that it was delivered in a nationally televised broadcast by a major media outlet: She cast the nation’s immigrant population as participants in a plot by unnamed forces to “reshape and remake America” by “foisting changes” upon the native population that would “dilute and overwhelm” them. To further diminish their humanity, Ingraham singled out a handful of child rapists and murderers, as if to suggest an inherent degree of criminality in the nation’s foreign-born residents.

These remarks came a few days before the one-year anniversary of the deadly Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Organizers had intended for the rally to be a Woodstock of sorts for white nationalism. Instead, it appears to have been the alt-right’s Altamont. The movement has yet to recover from the fallout from Charlottesville. But Ingraham’s comments—not to mention this weekend’s Unite the Right 2 rally in the nation’s capital, and the political endurance of figures like Corey Stewart—show that their ideas still enjoy far too much currency in American civic life.

“Publicity is justly commended as a remedy for social and industrial diseases,” Louis Brandeis once wrote. “Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants.” Brandeis ranks among the finest legal minds ever produced by the United States, excelling at both the trench warfare of litigation and the high-minded brawls of constitutional law. He also happened to be the first Jewish justice on the Supreme Court, so racists might not put too much stock in his words. But the turmoil that’s engulfed the movement since Charlottesville has proved him right.

Leading figures from the alt-right and other white-nationalist groups didn’t think it would be this way. Last year’s rally on the University of Virginia campus was meant to be a moment of unity and solidarity for the disparate movement. There had been some missteps—Richard Spencer, for example, had been filmed giving a Nazi salute the previous November—but the energy seemed to be on their side. After all, Donald Trump had been sworn in as president only eight months earlier, after centering his campaign on hostility toward Hispanics, Muslims, and immigrants in general.

The first day began with a torchlit march near a contentious statue of Robert E. Lee, the Confederate general. The demonstrators chanted “Jews will not replace us,” an anti-Semitic slogan that casts immigration as a Jewish plot to destroy America’s white ethnic majority. The following day, protests turned violent as white nationalists clashed with counter-protesters. It turned deadly when a driver with neo-Nazi sympathies rammed his car into a crowd, injuring dozens and killing Heather Heyer, a 32-year-old paralegal with a passion for social justice.

In the wake of the violence, Trump publicly defended the alt-right, whose leaders saw the rally as a success and a path to legitimacy. “It was a huge moral victory in terms of the show of force,” Spencer told The New York Times at the time. But the ensuing year took a toll. The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this week that far-right leaders have seen a sharp decline in momentum and morale, partly because of infighting and partly because of mass resistance to their activities. “It’s been a total fracturing of the right,” Jason Kessler, a white nationalist and organizer of the Unite the Right rallies, told the Journal. When members gather in D.C. on Sunday for an anniversary march—Charlottesville officials denied them a permit—their numbers will likely be even smaller than they were last year, and those opposing them will be far more numerous.

What made Charlottesville so damaging to the white-nationalist cause is that it erased the veener of legitimacy that its new leaders had tried to build. Before the protests, the movement’s leading figures were covered copiously by the mainstream media, which often marveled at how normal they seemed. Mother Jones described Spencer as “dapper,” while The Los Angeles Times reported that a D.C. gathering of white nationalists after Trump’s election “more resembled Washington lobbyists than the robed Ku Klux Klansmen.” This was a propaganda coup. White nationalism had long been typified by its violent, aggressive adherents: neo-Nazis, Ku Klux Klansmen, skinheads, and other groups too brutish for mainstream American discourse.

Whatever hopes the alt-right had of changing that perception died in Charlottesville. In a way, this may have been inevitable. Political ideologies are defined by the worlds they want to build. Democratic socialists, for example, aim to rein in capitalism’s excesses in the short term and eventually replace it altogether with social ownership. Libertarians seek to roll back the state’s powers and functions to varying degrees. Adherents of those ideologies can operate within a democratic framework to achieve their goals. White nationalism cannot. Its end game, no matter how benign its adherents’ phrasing or attire, will always be ethnic cleansing.

While the alt-right is in decline, those who share its beliefs remain in power. Nowhere do they sit higher than President Donald Trump, whose administration has pursued even more aggressive policies towards immigrants. Foremost among them is the family-separation policy that traumatized hundreds of children earlier this year before the courts stepped in. The White House is currently mulling a plan to block immigrants who received government benefits from obtaining citizenship, as well as large reductions in the numbers of refugees admitted into the country.

With a president who vocally defends white nationalists and executes policies that match their worldview, more of its adherents have sought public office. In March, perennial candidate Arthur Jones captured the Republican nomination for Illinois’ 3rd congressional district. Jones is unlikely to win the seat in November, partly because the district tilts strongly Democratic and partly because he is an unrepentant Holocaust denier. The Illinois Republican Party called Jones a Nazi and denounced his candidacy, while out-of-state figures like Texas Senator Ted Cruz urged Illinois voters to “write in another candidate, or vote for the Democrat.”

Jones is hardly an isolated figure. The California Republican Party initially endorsed John Fitzgerald for the state’s 11th congressional district, only to rescind its support in March when officials discovered his anti-Semitic views. Party officials also expelled Patrick Little, a candidate for the California Senate, from the state convention in May after learning about his neo-Nazi affiliations. Both lost their bids for office. In Wisconsin, white nationalist Paul Nehlen is among the Republican candidates vying in next week’s primary for the seat vacated by House Speaker Paul Ryan.

One Republican state party is notably bucking the trend when it comes to rebuking white-nationalist candidates. In June, Corey Stewart won the Republican primary for Senate in Virginia, setting up a challenge of Democratic Senator Tim Kaine in November. Stewart enjoys the full backing of the Virginia Republican Party, which has declined to condemn him and his white-nationalist views, and Trump has been a reliable supporter.

Stewart rose to prominence on a platform of hardline immigration enforcement and enthusiastic defenses of Confederate statues and monuments. So it’s no surprise that, as The New York Times reported last week, “Some white nationalists volunteer for Mr. Stewart’s campaign, and several of his aides and advisers have used racist or anti-Muslim language, or maintained links to outspoken racists like Jason Kessler.” Stewart also called Nehlen, the anti-Semitic congressional candidate Wisconsin, “one of my personal heroes.”

Earlier this week, CNN surfaced remarks he made at an event in 2017 where he praises southern efforts to secede from the Union during the Civil War. “Because, at the base of it, Virginians, we think for ourselves,” he told a crowd of supporters. “And if the established order is wrong, we rebel. We did that in the Revolution, we did it in the Civil War, and we’re doing it today. We’re doing it today because they’re trying to rob us of everything that we hold dear: our history, our heritage, our culture.”

Stewart isn’t even a Southerner. He was born and raised in Duluth, Minnesota, a state that fought for the Union, and he only moved to Virginia after graduating from law school. Stewart’s zeal for the Confederacy, and sympathy for its aims, can’t be ascribed to some familial kinship with those who fought for it. The Lost Cause can only truly be part of his heritage and his culture if he sees it as a struggle on behalf of white Americans to retain a certain racial hierarchy.

It’s surreal to see a candidate for political office defend the Confederacy at all, especially 153 years after its defeat. This was a violent, militant rebellion that killed hundreds of thousands of Americans in an effort to preserve a white aristocracy that enslaved millions of people. A healthy political culture would readily expel supporters of that cause from its ranks. Virginians seem ready to do just that: A Virginia Commonwealth University poll released Thursday found that Kaine enjoys a 26-point lead over Stewart. May sunlight continue to disinfect such diseases.