On Jan. 6, the world saw the threat posed by a slice of White America to freedom and democracy. Three months on, most people still do not understand the movement’s depth and endurance — or its history. While the nation has never had a stronger, common commitment to equity for all people, these darker, authoritarian forces are determined to use every resource they can to ensure that injustice prevails.

Most scholars who study the second half of the 20th century in the United States would recognize the term “massive resistance.” The call from Sen. Harry F. Byrd (D-Va.) in 1956 sparked 50 years of ongoing defiance of racial inclusion. The past 30 years of white nationalism in federal politics helped seed the rise of mass incarceration between 1994 and 2012, and the crippling of the Voting Rights Act in 2013. The historic election of President Barack Obama in 2008 only intensified this movement. This resistance movement helped Republicans win 12 governor’s offices and 958 legislative seats between 2010 and 2016. Now those state legislatures are moving almost in lockstep to restrict access to the ballot for people of color.

The United States is a decade or two away from being majority non-White. The Republican Party has been quietly trying for years to delay that moment; now it isn’t even trying to hide its efforts.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) proudly celebrated his leadership in this effort when he declared his determination to limit Obama to one term in early 2009. He considers the denial of a Supreme Court nomination in 2016 one of his greatest political achievements; he also knows the court is key to furthering the delay. He followed that effort by working overtime to confirm the appointment of more than 270 other federal judges between 2017 and 2021, while Donald Trump was president.

The events of Jan. 6 were predictable and foretold. The Unite the Right rally in August 2017, less than a year after Trump’s election, brought the movement into the open again — and revealed its core assumptions about citizenship and belonging in the United States.