Getting past the darkness.

• Author: Conniff, Ruth
• Position: EDITOR'S NOTE

One of our readers wrote in recently about a robocall she received from the American National Super PAC.

"I urge you to vote for Donald Trump," says the recorded voice of white supremacist leader Jared Taylor, "because he is the one candidate who points out that we should accept immigrants who are good for America. We don't need Muslims. We need smart, well-educated white people who will assimilate to our culture. Vote Trump."

There is nothing new about the wave of paranoid rightwing populism washing over the nation, Sam Tanenhaus explains in his essay, "Donald Trump and the Hidden History of the GOP," in this issue. Though conservative intellectuals don't like to admit it, "the gale forces driving Trump's candidacy are the same ones that have driven the Republican Party for most of its modern history," Tanenhaus writes.

This magazine covered Joe McCarthy, Barry Goldwater, and the John Birch Society during previous outbreaks of intolerance and anti-immigrant fever in the not-so-distant past.

Tanenhaus draws from the great political reporter Theodore White, who described the rise of rightwing populism in the McCarthy era in a way that is utterly applicable in 2016: "Many tenets of this radicalism are familiar today: fear of 'enemies within,' hatred of foreign nations and their governments, the belief that the American military can dominate singly with its missiles and bombers. Through it all ran the feeling of betrayal."

That misplaced feeling of betrayal and the fear of "enemies within" has fallen particularly hard lately on immigrants and, especially, the American Muslim community.

In On the Line, Jim West shares his photographs of Muslim American citizens in his home state of Michigan, where people who trace their roots back to several Middle Eastern countries are deeply enmeshed in the cities, towns...