There were two deeply troubling events in Washington last week, and they are closely connected. One was the selection of Stephen Bannon as the chief strategist for Donald Trump. The second was a gathering of white supremacists, just blocks from the White House, that featured Nazi salutes.

Bannon is the driving force behind Breitbart News, a pretend-news site known for its racial, ethnic and religious hatred that serves as the propaganda arm of the so-called “alt-right.” Breitbart has replaced Fox News as the unifying instrument for a boiling stew of angry hate groups ranging from armed militias to the KKK to neo-Nazis.

In a building named for Ronald Reagan, hundreds of these extremists came out of the underground to hear speakers and explain themselves to the mainstream media. Most looked remarkably like pampered frat boys, sporting the aptly-named “fashy,” the haircut that Adolf Hitler made famous: buzz cut on the sides, longer hair on the top swept to the side.

Richard Spencer, president of the National Policy Institute, spoke at the end of the day on the need to recreate America as a white nation. America, he said, belongs to white people, who are “the children of the sun.” Also: “Every tree, every rooftop, every picket fence in the south should be festooned with the Confederate battle flag.” And “to be white is to be a creator, an explorer and a conquerer.”

Spencer called Trump’s victory a “victory of will,” echoing the title of a famous Nazi propaganda film, and attacked the mainstream press with the Nazi’s favorite “Lugenpresse,” or “lying press.”

As he wrapped up his speech, Spencer called out to the crowd to “Hail Trump” and “Hail Victory,” the English translation of “Sieg Heil!” Members of the audience responded with Nazi salutes.

Trump’s triumph has given these and other American extremists new hope. The far right is on the march in America, and every one of us, whether a conservative or a liberal, is its target.

There are still some people among us who were part of the “Greatest Generation,” which worked to defeat the Nazis in World War II. They fought a war unleashed by a violent Nazi ideology that divided the world into just two camps: true believers and lesser humans meant for subjugation or elimination. It is a war that killed millions, including more than 400,000 Americans.

When Japan attacked Pearl Harbor and hundreds of our ships were being sunk in the Atlantic by German submarines, the walls that had divided Americans by party, ethnicity and region melted away to reveal a country with one purpose. America became one, and together Americans sacrificed and shared, worked and fought, to build the arsenal of democracy that would defeat totalitarianism and establish a new world someday, in the hope that all of the world’s dictatorships might be eliminated.

I’m old enough to have grown up surrounded by a generation of these World War II veterans, who were the heart of every family and every town. Their war ended in 1945, but the struggle for democracy and freedom did not. Hitler died, but totalitarianism and fascism did not. They simply go out of sight, deep into the darkest parts of human societies, a latent disease awaiting the next time a society is weakened by hardship, fear, anger and division.

As soon as the horrors of the war had begun to fade, American fascism began to reorganize itself, slowly and quietly, waiting for the right time. And enlisting the most troubled and angry men in our country, as it always has done.

The rise of extremism among us won’t look like German fascism. It will look uniquely American. We have a far deeper tradition of democratic freedom than the Germans did in the 1930s. We have nowhere near the hardship that Germans experienced after the armistice of World War I, when wheelbarrows of money, sometimes reflecting a life’s savings, were needed to buy a loaf of bread. We know nothing of the sense of shame and loss that they felt.

American fascism won’t announce itself with a brown-shirted army of the disaffected and a stirring, charismatic leader. And that will make the work of exposing it, and defeating it, all the more difficult.

The rise of extremism in America represents a new challenge to all of us: to put aside party, ideology, region and background, and to put at the center of our concerns the future of the country. All of us, despite our differences, love this country. Perhaps this is a good time to relearn the lessons of the Greatest Generation.

Alan Caron is the owner of Caron Communications and the author of “Maine’s Next Economy” and “Reinventing Maine Government.” He can be contacted at:

alancaroninmaine@gmail.com