When I moved to North Charleston’s Park Circle as a child, it was a rundown industrial economically and racially mixed neighborhood in the shadow of the massive and odious pulp mill. My family’s modest 100-year-old house generated many memories of playing in the backyard tree house and climbing on the roof of my parents’ 1963 VW parked in the small wooden garage.
Inside that house, my first memory — the Challenger disaster of 1986 — played in front of me. I remember watching TV, knowing the man on the screen was the president, and he was telling us why these people died, and why everything would still be all right tomorrow.
Today Park Circle is very different — more desirable, gentrified and home to a butterfly garden — as South Carolina decides who that next president should be.
Tom, the retired gentleman who lives at my family’s old address, is planning to vote for Pete Buttigieg, because at age 73 he believes Joe Biden is too old. He forgets things, and he thinks Joe will, too, as president. He worries about Bernie Sanders, too, who is a bit too “crazy” for his tastes.
“Crazy” is the word that a lot of South Carolinians use about Bernie — perhaps absorbed by osmosis from the president’s Twitter feed. Outside Biden’s rally at Coastal Carolina University, an older voter named Linda tells me that “we already have a guy in the White House who says too many nice things about dictators like Putin; we don’t want to replace him with a guy who says nice things about Castro.”
Yet the attitude of the Democrats at assemblies for Biden, Buttigieg and Tom Steyer toward Bernie is one of creeping fear that he does actually represent the future of the party.
“These kids,” Wayne, from Charleston, tells me, “They don’t think about socialism the way we do. They think roads and libraries are socialism. It’s just plain nuts.”
South Carolina has played an important role in past contests. But occasionally the result here is one of a last yawp of resistance to the inevitable. Biden’s supporters carry a torch for him, but it seems more out of grudging respect for the man than hope about what he’ll do in office.
Of the 650 supporters who showed up to his event, several say they came just to see the candidate in person and that he’s not their first choice. “He did good with Obama Care. It lowered my drug costs, and he’s from the whole civil-rights era,” says Justin, a young African American supporter. “I just don’t know if he can go all the way.”
While Biden still leads in the polls running up to Saturday’s vote, his lead has shrunk dramatically. The swag sellers don’t even bother with his events — they say they are doing much better outside Buttigieg and Sanders rallies, hawking shirts and pins with references to the candidates combined with images of Princess Leia and a smiling Baby Yoda.
Joe is the past South Carolina may want to hold onto, instead of the future democratic socialism represents.
And what a bold future it is. As Henry Timrod wrote of this city, “Dark Sumter, like a battlemented cloud, Looms o’er the solemn deep,” here Sanders looms like an audacious representation of dramatic change.
Every voter speaks of him even at events where he remains unmentioned, either in fear or awe. They respect his authenticity, even if they do not respect his ideology. But a Buttigieg voter says Sanders’ appeals on racial matters come at the eleventh hour and recalls his rejection of Black Lives Matter appeals in 2016.
Even Steyer, an afterthought elsewhere, has made significant inroads hiring activists within black neighborhoods.
The question I asked everyone regardless of their chosen candidate was the same: Should South Carolina’s result be read not just as the result from one state but as a message to the national party? And if the state rejects the democratic socialist from Vermont, should it be interpreted as a warning of the dangers to the country should he be the nominee?
Consistently, the answer was the same: Yes to all of the above.
The question is whether the national Democrats will heed that message — or choose to go boldly where they have never gone before.
Ben Domenech is co-founder and publisher of The Federalist.