All of a sudden, those videos from Charlottesville were everywhere: military-looking right-wing goons lunging at counterprotesters; hairspray flamethrowers squaring off against Confederate-flag spears. When we heard that a terrorist had plowed his car into a group of protesters, it seemed half shocking and half depressingly predictable. When I starting hearing the news this past weekend, I was relaxing in a late-summer reunion with some old friends, sitting around a fire, when one of them asked the question: “Should we be freaking out?”

Here’s the ILYBYGTH answer: Yes. But not because Americans will fight each other.

If you’ve been paying attention, it shouldn’t shock you that right-wing terrorists are willing to kill in the name of conservatism. It should astound all of us, though, that a leader of a mainstream political party is so blasé about it.

As I argued in my book about twentieth-century American conservatism, culture-war battles regularly and repeatedly heated up into physical conflict. In the 1930s, school board members in my new hometown promised to ignite bonfires of progressive textbooks and throttle any progressive protesters. In Kanawha County, West Virginia, a 1970s textbook battle degenerated into a slurry of Klan marches, dynamite bombs, and shootings.

It’s sadly predictable; shocking only to people who are too comfortable in their self-delusion. What really is outrageous, though, is the notion that President Trump has ignored and pooh-poohed the display of white terrorism. In his diffidence, Trump has given succor and encouragement to the radical reactionaries of the white nationalist movement. And THAT should freak us all out.

Let me be clear: I’m not saying this merely because I find Trump’s policies and presidency terrifyingly out of control, even though I do. I’m saying this rather as an historian of American conservatism. As I also argued in my recent book, since the 1970s the mainstream American right has gone to great lengths to distance itself from its white-supremacist past. Just as Democratic leaders such as President Obama and Secretary Clinton made a public display of their religiosity, hoping to prove to conservative critics that they weren’t left-wing Godhaters, so too have mainstream Republicans used the strongest language possible to distance themselves from the racist right-wing of their own party.

Trump’s pandering goes against all that. So here’s what should freak us out: Trump is making a bald play against mainstream conservatism and in favor of right-wing reaction.

Why?