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I almost wonder if those infiltrators - I have no better word for them - are in the pay of a liberal group. I can think of no other reason why a bunch of white nationalists would come out of the woodwork NOW.

I think of them more as misguided Jeffersonians who can't quite get it, but are all tied up (still) in the ethnic and social divisions that The Man in the big white house at the good end of town has used since the days when "the Old Southwest" meant Alabama, Mississippi, and Arkansas.

Boss-men in white suits have played these guys for 180 years and they still don't get it, but regard the slaves as the problem, when it was their rich neighbors who created the problem by importing masses of slaves who, in 18th- and 19th-century terms, were unassimilable because still regarded as members of a separate, African society (n/w/s that many of the alienating African social markers had been assiduously stripped away and discouraged by slaveholders).

The historian of Texas, T.R. Fehrenbach, commented that it was "planter liberalism" and its use, and the use of slaves, to belittle yeoman whites that were the genesis of racist odium against the slaves, who were complete pawns in the social-distancing game being played by the planter class and their professional- and business-class supporters. (Example of "planter liberalism": treatment of e.g. black ministers and professionals as near-equals, allowing them to come to the front door of a plantation house, when freehold farmers would require them to come to the side door of their small, rough-cut houses.)

There has been little progress overall in ending the animus (other than official stompings, and occasional prosecutions, meted out to dissenters from egalitarianism and affirmative action), mainly because there are too few stakeholders in reconciliation and too many who benefit from continued social tension and hostility, including elite, brahmin "deciders" in Beacon Hill mansions and Newport cottages.

lentulusgracchus: "The historian of Texas, T.R. Fehrenbach, commented that it was "planter liberalism" and its use, and the use of slaves, to belittle yeoman whites that were the genesis of racist odium against the slaves, who were complete pawns in the social-distancing game being played by the planter class and their professional- and business-class supporters."

I'm not sure where this leads, but I do agree with your point here.

lentulusgracchus: "There has been little progress overall in ending the animus... mainly because there are too few stakeholders in reconciliation..."

We should be the "stakeholders in reconciliation," because it is both morally and politically (for us, if not Dems) the right thing to do.