GREENVILLE, SOUTH CAROLINA—The Republicans had moved their circus on, and now it was the turn of the two Democratic candidates to woo the voters here in the home office of American sedition. Bernie Sanders was the first on the ground, fresh off a narrow loss in the chaotic Nevada caucuses, a state he nonetheless had to win, and didn't, at least according to last week's conventional wisdom, anyway. The crowd was enthusiastic, as they generally are. It also was overwhelmingly white, as white an audience as any Democratic candidate for president has seen down here since Strom Thurmond kicked the bucket. It responded warmly as Ben Jealous, the former national president of the NAACP, and actor Danny Glover revved it up. But there was a curious dissonance between their rhetoric and the crowd to which it was directed.

"They turn on the TV," Jealous said, "and they see too many of their brothers shot down by police every day. And then a man comes along…" The rest of the sentence is drowned out by the audience's roar.

This is a dodgy piece to write because it is a piece that, by all rights, nobody ever should have to write. In truth, Bernie Sanders' record on civil rights is unimpeachable. It spans seven decades. It began with open housing protests in Chicago, the nut even Dr. King couldn't crack. It is a straight line from those protests to his support of marriage equality today. It is consistent and it is admirable. And it somehow hasn't been enough. The campaign of Hillary Rodham Clinton has been shrewd in turning it around, making Sanders' record on these issues an odd kind of liability. It has been the heart of HRC's pitch that Sanders is a "one-issue" candidate, a campaign tactic that has worked fairly well, at least so far. It has opened up an improbable gap between Sanders and minority voters that first appeared when he responded badly to the appearance of activists from the Black Lives Matter movement at campaign events before his campaign took off. His message of economic inequality has simply proven unable to get across to a general audience because it has been characterized—and caricatured—as an expression not of populist outrage, but of an odd kind of white privilege.

(At the same time, it has failed the most superficial test of American "populism"—its targets are "Wall Street" and "billionaires," vague categories of people with whom most Americans have little or no contact. This is opposed to He, Trump, who tells his audience that the problem is "Mexicans" and "Muslims." People may not know who's on the board of Citigroup, but they know they have to hit "1" for English. They may not know a billionaire, but they see women in hijabs at the mall. The Sanders campaign gives them targets for their anger. The Trump campaign gives them enemies, and that makes all the difference.)

This has put the Sanders campaign in what may be an inescapable box, especially in the Southern Democratic primaries. HRC's sudden emergence as Soul Sister No. 1—especially in her radio ads, which have been running on local radio down here for weeks—has cemented her appeal to African-American and other minority voters. It has been a gentle, but effective, wedge that the Sanders campaign so far has been unable to dislodge, and now the campaign moves into states where that wedge can be most effective. The downside of the Clinton strategy, of course, is that, in combination with what Trump is doing, it once again helps to shove authentic American populism down into a familiar historical ravine. Especially, but not exclusively, in the South, racial issues splintered the original populist movement and turned it into a vehicle of racial terror and white supremacy. In Georgia, for example, at the turn of the last century, Tom Watson began his political career in the 1880s as a champion of the poor and the downtrodden of both races, particularly those farmers whose lives were ground up in the sharecropper system. By 1906, he was campaigning so vigorously for black disenfranchisement that his rhetoric helped touch off a race riot in Atlanta. Two years later, he ran for president on a purely white-supremacist ticket. In 2013, community pressure forced the removal of a statue of Tom Watson from the grounds of the Georgia state capitol.

Sanders' remarks in Greenville had a kind of valedictory quality to them. He began with a long section about how far the campaign has come since it was in single digits. "On Saturday, South Carolina has a chance to make American history and I hope you will," he said. "You know, we go around once so we might as well make history as we go around. We may as well do something that people will remember decades from today." It is becoming increasingly apparent that he is discovering what dozens of well-intentioned American populist politicians before him discovered—that when economic populism collides with the anesthetic elixir of American exceptionalism, it transforms from Dr. Jekyll to Mr. Hyde.

As we may have mentioned here before, it's important to remember that the late Adam Clayton Powell warned us against "Greeks bearing gifts and white men who understand the Negro." But the composition of the audience at the Sanders event is Greenville was so strikingly uniform that it fairly screamed out a message—that populism in America remains vulnerable to coded appeals to racial division and that, in Donald Trump, it has found that its vulnerability to authoritarianism is paradoxically part of its electoral strength. Gently, as in the Clinton campaign, and brutally, as in the Trump campaign, populism in America once again has demonstrated that it is too easily turned into a vehicle of division because the American Dream too often is a gated community of the furious and the deluded.

Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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