the housing and credit markets began to collapse. Banks failed.

Mortgage foreclosures and evictions

spiked. Inequality and personal debt deepened as social services stretched thin. And still, no matter how
many patrollers the government put at the border, no matter how many deportations Bush carried out,
Mexicans and Central Americans kept arriving. As the historian Gordon Wood said of the Jacksonian
period, everything seemed to be coming apart, unravelling. The main difference, though, was that the
Jacksonians looked beyond the settlement line and saw nothing but possibility; the promise of free land,
and all that went with it, allowed the nation to stitch itself back up. Now the US looked out and saw
nothing but peril.

And then the country elected a black man to the presidency.

A number of historians have noted that the same people who hated Barack Obama loved Andrew
Jackson, described by more than one scholar as the first “Tea Party president”. That makes sense, for
the intensity of the emotions stems from the same source: the frontier. Both presidents came up on the
outer edge of the wave, the hither side of the nation’s outermost jurisdiction. The difference, though, is
that Jackson, as a cultural symbol, represented the settlers who drove the frontier forward, who won a
larger liberty by dispossessing and enslaving people of colour, a liberty that was then defined in
opposition to the people they dispossessed and enslaved. Obama, the country’s first African American
president, invoked their victims, and so his opponents seized on the idea that he was an alien, raised, if
not born, beyond the boundary.

Obama’s election “packed an emotional wallop”, as the historian Daniel Rodgers put it. But his
administration produced “only a policy whimper”, seeking to address the multiple calamities inherited
from his predecessor not with radical solutions but on familiar terms. In the meantime, the nativist right
continued to coalesce. Under Bush, the diverse border vigilante groups expanded nationally and helped
set federal policy. Under Obama, they merged with other rightwing organisations into what became
known as the Tea Party. Cross-fertilisation occurred at every level, as anti-migrant Republicans
rebranded themselves libertarians and anti-Latino organisations mobilised around fiscal “responsibility”.
In places like Cochise county, Arizona, long a preserve of rightwing rancher vigilantism, the Minutemen
and the Tea Party merged.

“Build a wall and start shooting,” said one featured speaker at a 2010 Phoenix rally. “Line ’em up. I’ll
torture them myself,” he said. Cruelty, by this point, was a way of establishing symbolic dominance over
foreigners. But it was also a badge of contempt for the political establishment and all its leaders and
institutions.

The wars went on, and the military, with its outsized budget, still served as the country’s most effective
instrument of social mobility and provider of healthcare and education. But whereas Bush had framed
militarism as an ideological struggle, Obama presented it as a matter of utility and competence. As he
did so, the country lost its ability to channel extremism outward, and the kind of chaos the US had
released in the Persian Gulf was increasingly mirrored at home, in an escalating spiral of jihadist
massacres, mass school shootings and white-supremacist and masculinist rampages.

By 2010, the US had lost something more than the ability to vent extremism. For over a century, foreign
relations had served as the arena where normative ideas a