Looking for America:

A  Journey into the Country’s Divided Heart

by David Maraniss and Robert Samuels

Copyright © 2016 by The Washington Post

Part 1: The Great Unsettling

Ahead of the Iowa caucuses, as many expressions of hope as of fear could be found.

Donald Trump supporters leave a campaign rally at the Dubuque Regional Airport in Dubuque, Iowa, on Jan. 30. Trump came in second in the Iowa caucuses on Feb. 1. (Linda Davidson/The Washington Post)

So much anger out there in America.

Anger at Wall Street. Anger at Muslims. Anger at trade deals. Anger at Washington. Anger at police shootings of young black men. Anger at President Obama. Anger at Republican obstructionists. Anger about political correctness. Anger about the role of big money in campaigns. Anger about the poisoned water of Flint, Mich. Anger about deportations. Anger about undocumented immigrants. Anger about a career that didn’t go as expected. Anger about a lost way of life. Mob anger at groups of protesters in their midst. Specific anger and undefined anger and even anger about anger.

Each presidential campaign has its own rhythm and meaning, but this one unfolded with dizzying intensity, an exaggeration of everything that came before. It felt like the culmination of so many long-emerging trends in American life. The decomposition of traditional institutions. The descent of politics into reality-TV entertainment. Demographic and economic shifts quickening the impulses of inclusion and exclusion and us vs. them. All of it leading to this moment of great unsettling, with the Republican Party unraveling, the Democrats barely keeping it together, and both moving farther away from each other by the week, reflecting the splintering not only of the body politic but of the national ideal. The newest voters of 2016 were in elementary school when Barack Obama was first elected. Many of their parents were toddlers when Richard Nixon flew off on a helicopter, or when young antiwar legions went “clean for Gene” and helped Eugene McCarthy uproot the presidency of Lyndon Johnson. The two generations were joined in this violent election year, in Chicago, where antiwar protesters clashed with the police in ’68, and where a multiethnic assembly of demonstrators collided with a Donald Trump rally in ’16.

The sensibility of this year shares something with those days when everything seemed up in the air, unresolved, and when the rhetoric was juiced with words like establishment and anti-establishment and revolution and rebellion and silent majority, and people were challenging a rigged system or trying to take the country back.

What were the causes and connections of the anger? Was it all real, or another inflated concept in this year of uncommon hype? Would the center hold, as it usually does? Was this “revolution” more like the original one, leading to a new era of liberty for we the people, as patriots from both left and right proclaim — or the French Revolution, with partisans effectively killing their own in the name of purity? Did all the noise of the campaign match the reality of how people were living their daily lives?

In search of answers, we traveled the country, attending rallies in airport hangars and high school gymnasiums, followed canvassers rounding up votes, observed Rotary Club breakfasts and fraternity-house debate-watch parties and morning coffee klatches and church sermons and sidewalk picket lines. All along the way, we listened to people talk in divergent ways about idealism and pragmatism and their concepts of America and what it means to be an American.

We heard the various expressions of anger, a cacophony of primal screams that spoke of both individual and group frustrations. But to define things only in those terms would be an oversimplification, reducing to easy stereotypes the contradictions and competing forces at play this political year.

For every disgruntled person out there who felt undone by the system and threatened by the way the country was changing, caught in the bind of stagnant wages or longing for an America of the past, we found someone who had endured decades of discrimination and hardship and yet still felt optimistic about the future and had no desire to go back. In this season of discontent, there were still as many expressions of hope as of fear. On a larger level, there were as many communities enjoying a sense of revival as there were fighting against deterioration and despair.

A large photo of Trump faces the street from George Davey’s back yard in West Des Moines, Iowa, on Jan. 31. (Charles Ommanney/The Washington Post)

At the center of it all, amid the kaleidoscope of candidates and issues, stood Donald Trump, the New York provocateur who had seized the Republican Party from its bewildered establishment. What raging current in the American public could explain the rise of this say-anything man of wealth who was breaking every rule of modern politics? The answer was in the question, to a certain extent. Many people were done with convention, sick of political correctness and tired of waiting for the GOP to keep its unmet promises. Fear of the other was also a motivating factor, evident in individual discussions and the behavior of crowds at Trump rallies. But we also found an aspirational strain among his supporters. The evangelism of wealth — a respect for his authoritative vocabulary and monetary success, and a desire to follow him into a future of riches.

Despite the expressions of anger, this campaign was no dreary enterprise even among the self-identified discontented. Trump and Bernie Sanders channeled the most anger from opposite ends of the political spectrum, yet many of their supporters acknowledged the pleasurable dopamine effect of rallying around their man and listening to him speak.

Here came Daphne Papp, a mother whose kids were now grown and gone, scurrying down the icy parking lot outside the Executive Court Banquet Facility near the Manchester airport. In late January, she had driven north from Massachusetts with the idea of spending two days in New Hampshire. She ended up staying two weeks, loving every minute of her work as a Trump volunteer. It was two hours before the doors would open for Trump’s primary victory party, but Papp was eager to be in line early, no matter the subfreezing temperatures. This was the first time she had been involved in politics. She could not wipe the smile off her face. Listening to Trump made her feel ecstatic. Fabulous, she said. Fantastic.

And there went Zacharie Boisvert, with stringy black hair and beard, darting tirelessly around the crowd of Sanders supporters on a fenced-in demonstration lawn at the University of New Hampshire, down the street from the debate site where his candidate would take on Hillary Clinton. Boisvert’s voice was unflagging, his relentless chants piercing the early-evening air. Hey, hey, ho, ho, corporate greed has got to go! Seventy-year-old Ree Katrak stood nearby, waving a sign and, between chants, telling students around her about the days when she and her generational cohorts helped end a war. Her smile was as broad as Papp’s had been when thinking about Trump. Grass what? Grass roots! Who’s got the power? We’ve got the power! Who feels the Bern? We feel the Bern!

Political campaign as tribal communion, with the thrill of live and unpredictable action. When the National Football League’s Super Bowl coincided with the final weekend before the New Hampshire primary, the Manchester Radisson had the same heady buzz you would experience in the team hotels of a Super Bowl host city. The packed lobby hallways throbbed with political tourists who had driven or flown in simply to gawk at the passing scene. Shrieks and shouts of delight resounded at the first distant glimpse of Trump’s trademark hair and orange face in the rear of JD’s Tavern when he emerged to be interviewed by Chris Matthews. The magic and mystery of American democracy.

The Cathedral of St. Raphael stands above historic downtown Dubuque with the Mississippi River in the background. (Linda Davidson/The Washington Post)

Early on the afternoon of Saturday, Jan. 30, television screens showed a jet descending out of the gray-and-white winter sky. It was a Boeing 757-200, the personal plane of Donald Trump, arriving at Dubuque Regional Airport as the first stop on his last swing through Iowa before the MondayFeb. 1-night caucuses. The local TV station kept its cameras zoomed in on Trump Force One, with its 24-karat-gold bathroom fixtures, as it made a flyby, circled around for a landing and taxied close to the crowd that had been waiting in the chilled hangar for two hours. In the modern American world of reality TV, no show now matches this year’s season of politics, it seems.

In that crowd was Monty Alexander, a 38-year-old software salesman and protege of Cheryl Kramer, who was helping coordinate the county’s caucuses. As they waited, Kramer stepped up to the stage. She was 70, her thin brown hair teased upraised in a bouffant. The elder stateswoman of the Republican Party in Dubuque had been given a small job.

“Since we don’t have a flag with us, we are going to pretend like we have one,” Kramer told the crowd. She pointed to her right at the flat grounds of the airport tarmac.

“I pledge allegiance . . . ”

“Isn’t she awesome?” Alexander said. “She’s a legend.”

One chapter of the local Republican Party was closing, another opening. Over the next two days, Kramer planned to teach Alexander how to run a caucus. It would be her 11th, and his first. He was the new guard of the party in Dubuque — and the two poles had converged on one common thought: The principles that made them American were becoming as elusive as the imaginary flag they were saluting. They hoped a new president might restore them.

“Lately in this country,” Kramer had said earlier that morning, “there hasn’t been a lot to cheer for.”

Cheryl Kramer, 70, the elder stateswoman of the Republican Party in Dubuque and a Donald Trump volunteer, is participating in her last campaign. (Linda Davidson/The Washington Post)

She trusted George W. Bush’s decision to invade Iraq but felt wronged when she learned that thousands of troops had lost their lives fighting under false pretenses. On Obama she didn’t know where to start: his inability to lead, his liberal streak and those executive orders. She believed he steered the country into a moral and economic tailspin.

“People are surprised when I tell people I’m for Mr. Trump,” she said earlier that day. “We just have to admit that our government let us down. We’ve tried it the Washington way all this time, so maybe we need another way.”

Alexander dreamed of another Ronald Reagan, the president of his childhood who seemed to stand up for America. An ideal man. Not like the father who left his mother and him when he was a kid. Marco Rubio seemed too soft on immigration and too inexperienced. Jeb Bush represented the part of Washington that Alexander hated — old, moneyed and distant. He had narrowed his choice to Trump and Ted Cruz. He liked Trump’s brashness and capitalism, but was not sure that the real estate mogul really wanted the job. Cruz seemed to want it too much. Maybe seeing Trump in person would help Alexander decide.

There were swells of buttons on the coats of people all around him: “Bomb the S--- Out of Isis,” “Hot Chicks for Trump,” “Hillary for Prison in 2016.” Alexander’s political interests came to him late. His mother told him that all politicians were liars. He had voted once before, for Obama in 2008, but quickly grew to regret it, thinking that Obama had gone too far in seeking gun control. Opposing gun control became Alexander’s first cause. He bought two handguns and an AR-15. He became so obsessed with Second Amendment rights that at one point he drew up a banner and stood on a Highway 20 overpass with it: IMPEACH OBAMA. Then he started listening to his boss and mentor, Rep. Rod Blum, a local congressman, who told him he had to become more reasoned in his political actions.

Monty Alexander, 38, is pictured in Dubuque on Jan. 31 with a shotgun he uses to hunt deer. He believes in gun rights and says the issue was a turning point for him to become active in the Republican Party. (Linda Davidson/The Washington Post)

Alexander shared messages with Charlie Troy, his 63-year-old father-in-law, a Navy vet who had accompanied him to the airport to see Trump. They both were feeling isolated from their vision of America. Troy recalled an American Dream that seemed attainable and real. “They used to have these things called ranch homes. You could buy one for $6,000. You didn’t need to be rich, you didn’t need a lot, but you could watch the value grow and appreciate.”

“People worked for those houses, they worked,” Alexander responded. “Now people just keep on getting all this free stuff. And Obama, he doesn’t seem to care. He just thinks the rich have too much.”

“He has created a real divide in this country,” Troy said. “He is always calling out the rich so the poor people can get mad and vote for other people. The whole model is to divide and conquer us so he can get his way.”

The conversation veered toward race. Obama seemed too quick to judge white people, Troy said, and too quick to empathize with black residents in Ferguson, Mo., who complained of racial profiling, as opposed to supporting Darren Wilson, the police officer who was scrutinized for shooting down 18-year-old Michael Brown. “He didn’t have any of the facts, and he basically blamed us for everything,” Troy said. “And racism — it’s gone.”

“Now, I think racism still exists,” Alexander cautioned. “It’s just not as bad as it was 50 years ago. But it’s like anyone who doesn’t agree with him, he just makes it seem like we’re just . . . ”

They said together at the same time: “extremists.”

“I have no problem with black people — I have black friends,” Alexander said. “I don’t want to discriminate against gay people — I know people who are gay-married. But America, that was what it used to be about. How great America was. But now I hear all these terms. Racism.”

“Islamophobia.”

“Income inequality,” Alexander said. “That was a term I didn’t hear until eight years ago.”

Trump supporters stand on folding chairs to try to get a glimpse of their candidate at a rally in Dubuque on Jan. 30. (Linda Davidson/The Washington Post)

Soon, the theme song from the Harrison Ford movie “Air Force One” was playing on the loudspeakers, and the jet emblazoned with “TRUMP” approached the hangar. With a theatrical sense of triumph, the candidate strode down the stairs, the emcee sounding like a Vegas showman introducing a heavyweight champ into the boxing ring. “Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome the next president of the United States, Donald J. Trump.”

The candidate approached the microphone and began talking — about money.

“Three billion,” he told the crowd. That was the amount the federal government was set to pay to buy the president a new plane.

“Do you think I could have made a better deal?” he nodded with assurance.

All deals, all the time. Obama should have walked away from the deal with Iran to gain a stronger negotiating position — much as he did in the debate before the caucuses.

A group of protesters began to chant “Love trumps hate,” and Alexander joined the crowd in shouting them down. “U-S-A! U-S-A-! U-S-A!”

“Get them out of here,” Trump said to applause. That was strength, Alexander thought. Something the country had lost.

“Do we ever win?” Trump asked the crowd. “We’re like the big bully that keeps getting beat up all the time.”

“I hear you,” Alexander said from the crowd.

“We’re going to make the country great again . . . and strong again,” Trump said. Then he warned that some may not like his next line but that he would say it anyway. “And so rich. . . . We can’t be great unless we are rich.”

In the front row, Cheryl Kramer clapped. After his speech, Trump went around signing autographs with a black marker. He recognized Kramer and asked her, “So, what have you been doing?”

“Well, Mr. Trump, I’ve sent about 1,200 emails and made about 300 phone calls.”

“Good job,” he said. He grabbed the back of her hand and drew a check mark on it. The mark of Trump.

Monty Alexander made his way back to his baby-blue 2009 Chevrolet Silverado. “That plane, wow!” he said. “That’s a big plane for around here. If I was any happier, you’d have to drug-test me.”

That night, Rep. Rod Blum invited Alexander to drives at in the Riverboat Lounge in the swanky Hotel Julien, dark with plush seats that evoked an old speakeasy. Blum had the house wine; so Alexander had the house wine.

Blum wasn’t caucusing this year; he had to be in Washington to vote. He told stories about unnamed friends who came in during the wave of the Tea Party, pledging to dismantle the Washington machine, but soon becoming enamored with wheeling and dealing with lobbyists.

“And now, we see the decline of the American dream,” Blum said. The American Dream was the story he lived. He grew up in a farm community with parents who had no college education, then went to start a small business selling software to hospitals.

“What happened to us being a shining city on a hill?” he asked. “What happened to we can do it because we’re America?”

Then, the son of a president walked into the bar. Jeb Bush, a small backpack slung across his shoulder, sat down at a small table and chatted.

Alexander wanted to meet him, but his boss suggested he leave the candidate alone. Alexander could only heed the advice for a few minutes.

Bush stood up at a table, and Alexander rushed to see him. Their interaction lasted a few seconds.

“Well, that was harsh,” Alexander said as he plopped back into the booth.

Alexander said he extended his hand and introduced himself as the co-chairman of the county GOP. Bush stared in his eyes and said, “Good for you. I’ve got to go.”

“He made me feel like I was an a-----,” Alexander said. “I’m the county chair of the local party!”

“Well, that’s why he is where he is today,” Blum said, alluding to Bush’s low poll numbers.

“Definitely,” Alexander said. “That guy is the establishment.”

Members of the Marshalltown Canvass in Marshalltown, Iowa, catch a glimpse of Bernie Sanders as he prepares to walk in to talk with them. (Lucian Perkins/The Washington Post)

At Sanders headquarters on Main Street, Justin Tauke watched the Trump rally on his computer. Not that he liked Trump — just the opposite, although he nonetheless empathized with some of the complaints he heard from Trump supporters he knew in town.

Tauke was 30, with his own little house and car and an IT job at a credit union, and the night before he had gone to the Grand River Center along the Mississippi to feel the Bern in the flesh. The arena was part of Dubuque’s thriving new riverfront, evidence of one of the contradictions in America today — that despite all the rhetoric about a nation in decline, Dubuque and scores of other cities were in the midst of a revival. Tauke stood near the rear wall, holding back tears, when Sanders, his hands conducting a symphony of anti-establishment argumentation, wound his way through the movements of a stump speech denouncing Wall Street and the corruption of politics by big money. The chords felt so right and true, the candidate’s words articulating so precisely what the young listener was thinking.

His father, Bob Tauke, had spent nearly a quarter-century at the packing house in town, hauling 70-pound slabs of pork loin off the conveyor belt and onto pallets. The business eventually was gobbled up by a larger company and then vanished, leaving employees like him scrambling through the maze of job retraining until he landed with a company installing water pumps in wells. This was a small business, and Bob began to think like a small-business man. He now worried about regulations and deficits and started voting Republican.

If the father did not see a larger picture of how and why Dubuque’s working class suffered, the son thought he did. It was partly through watching what was going on around him, but more than that it was through music. Justin Tauke saw a direct line from the Dead Kennedys and Dillinger Four and Against Me! and Fugazi and Smoke or Fire to the politics of Bernie Sanders.

“It seemed to express an urgency I felt,” Tauke said. “You have to do something now.

And a lot of the music was kind of angry, too.”

We’re sorry

But you’re no longer needed

Or wanted

The Dead Kennedys sang.

Or even cared about here

Machines can do a better job than you

This is what you get for asking questions

Justin Tauke, 30, volunteers at Bernie Sanders’s campaign headquarters in Dubuque on Jan. 30. He says punk music helped shape his political views early on. (Linda Davidson/The Washington Post)

When the meatpacking plant was sold and then closed, Justin Tauke saw it as a manifestation of corporate indifference toward everything but profit. “My father would not see the correlation between that and his own life. He would be more likely to blame it on immigrants. That blame is more readily available to him.” One small indication of their differing perceptions: Justin came home one day and told his dad that a worker at the Mexican restaurant he frequented had told him that he was going back to Mexico. Bob immediately assumed that the worker was illegal; Justin had only lamented that he was leaving.

Everything was connected, Tauke now believed, and that realization strengthened his sense of responsibility. Whatever decisions were to be made in Dubuque, he wanted to be part of the action. He started voting even in city council and school board elections, and would now attend his first presidential caucus — and stand for Bernie.

Who would stand for Hillary? The next morning, at the epicenter of the canvassing effort for Clinton at the Hockenberry home up the bluff near the University of Dubuque, Nicholas Hockenberry and Allison Simpson, his girlfriend, were running the show. To spend time with these two was to see the promise and peril of the Clinton campaign. Hockenberry and Simpson, both in their late 20s, were bright and engaging. Their operation was precise and well organized. Yet there was a sense of something missing.

Heart is what led Hockenberry and Simpson to work so hard for Obama eight years ago. It was largely in the belief that Clinton would best sustain the Obama legacy that they decided to work for her this year. Hockenberry called it “more like a placeholder type of thing.” Simpson said that she “felt ashamed to say I was for Hillary for a while,” and that she had to work up the courage to post her support on Facebook. “I understand the Bern phenomenon,” she said. “I know how it feels to get swept up. I still love Obama and have those strong feelings.”

In the end, Clinton aligned with the issues that meant the most to her, especially women’s rights and reproductive rights. Her parents got married when they were teenagers and had six children, and although Simpson would not have had it any other way, she nonetheless wanted women like her young mother to have alternatives. Her mother felt that way, too, and became a women’s advocate in Dubuque, sometimes facing the hostility of abortion opponents. There was one incident Simpson could not forget. She was a young girl leaving church with her family when someone shouted at her mother. “My dad was 15 and my mom was 16 when they were married, and someone is yelling ‘abortion lover’ at her. That stuck with me.”

Nicholas Hockenberry and his girlfriend, Allison Simpson, who are both in their late 20s, coordinate volunteers and campaign coverage for Hillary Clinton in Dubuque on Feb. 1. (Linda Davidson/The Washington Post)

So much of this campaign seemed to be about differing takes on what it meant to be an American. To Simpson, the defining characteristic was inclusion. “I think we have come so far and are so close to being able to bring people in no matter who they are to make them feel welcome here,” she said.

“But I still get so discouraged about the racism the Obamas have faced. On Facebook I saw a posting where they called Michelle a monkey. That appalled me. It had a personal meaning to me. I have a mixed-race cousin who was one of my best friends growing up. I remember one day I was in a Target with her and people called her nasty names. When she was 4 and I was 6.”

At midday on the eve of the caucuses, into the Hockenberry house walked two men who had driven to Dubuque from Milwaukee in a white Mercedes SUV. One of them was Ismail Fersat, who was from Turkey, and Muslim, and a successful entrepreneur who ran his own granite-countertop business. Once, back in Turkey, he was the national boxing champ. He came to America from Istanbul 16 years ago in hopes of becoming a professional boxer.

What did America mean to him? “For me, the key is democracy,” said Fersat, still two years away from citizenship. “I feel that if the people can tell honestly and confidently what they think without any fear, no matter what religion they belong to, what culture they belong to — that, to me, is democracy.” He had more than anything admired this about America — until he started to worry about it during this campaign.

For years in Wisconsin, he had thought that he should support the Republicans, because they would be best for business. Then along came Trump. “When Trump came out, I felt offended by the comment he made. The Muslim is blah, blah. That hurt me in a big way. I see democracy as something else. When Trump came out, boom, no more. I’m done with the Republicans. I said, ‘I’m on the wrong side!’”

The unintended consequences of the Trump phenomenon. It turned Fersat into an activist. Hockenberry gave Fersat and his friend Tamer Coruroglo instructions and a file of addresses that took them to a neighborhood of middle-class ranch houses like the ones Charlie Troy talked about. First stop, no one home. Second stop, no one home. Finally, Lorilee Hamel opened the door.

It was all perfunctory until Hamel heard that Fersat was from Turkey and was Muslim, and she lit up with interest and empathy. It turned out that she was the coordinator of English-as-a-second-language programs in the Dubuque schools. She told Fersat that she dealt with children and their parents from all over the world who were frightened and in need of help and understanding. That was what America was all about, she said. What did Hamel think of Trump? “Two things. One, he is embarrassing. Two, he is uncovering beliefs that are entrenched more than we want to believe. That is not good for the country, but it shows us we still have a lot of work to do.”

Ted Cruz leaves Casey’s General Store on his campaign bus for his next event on Jan. 8 in Manly, Iowa, as part of a six-day swing through the state. (Charles Ommanney/The Washington Post)

So much of what the Rev. Edward Mast’s church in Dubuque was about was encapsulated in its name: Old Paths Baptist. It was a church where parishioners knew Scripture verse after Scripture verse, where the rafters filled with full-throated voices singing “Wonderful Grace of Jesus” in four-part harmony. The old-time religion was the best practice of religion, Mast believed, and it once led the United States to a position of moral certitude and prosperity.

But those days were long over, the pastor thought. So on the Sunday morning before the Iowa caucuses, as the faithful and the fearful drove to his tiny church, he made sure a special message was placed on the church’s front sign: “Only God Can Make America Great Again.”

With an easy smile, full beard and wide eyes, Mast looked younger than his 45 years. But the battle for the country’s soul, he said, had begun before his birth. It started with Bibles being taken out of public schools and hippies instilling godless values in their children. That led to a country that had elitist judges who approved of abortion and sodomy and same-sex marriage and a leader who seemed to embrace those sins.

Last summer, as it became clear to evangelicals that they were losing the legal battle over same-sex marriage, their national organizations vowed to galvanize their congregations to vote in higher numbers than ever. Ted Cruz, a senator from Texas, recruited them vigorously, finding at least one pastor in each of Iowa’s 99 counties to endorse him. Mast was his guy in Dubuque.

Cruz talks with patrons during a campaign stop at Bogie’s Steak House in Albia, Iowa, on Jan. 26. (Charles Ommanney/The Washington Post)

America’s problem was not so much economic or racial as spiritual, Mast told his flock, and the spiritual thing to do was to caucus the next day. “Don’t let anything sidetrack you,” he said. “One of the reasons our country is in the shape it’s in is because Christians have not come out.” After all, Proverbs 29:2 saith, “When the righteous are in authority, the people rejoice: but when the wicked beareth rule, the people mourn.”

The next morning, caucus morning, Mast met with five members of his church at the Village Inn to drink coffee and talk about life and politics.

“It can’t be that we are alone,” said Victor Mowery, 43, a network engineer. Same-sex marriage, he said, was approved because of “a bunch of elitist judges.” He thought the news media was fluffing numbers showing that the majority of Americans supported it. There was no need to change America, he said, just a need to bring it back to what it once was.

“I think people want to cast us like we are wishing for a return to the ’50s,” Mast said. “We recognize those were simpler times, but what we’re asking for is a return to honoring of God and the Constitution.”

Look at what they’ve done to Thomas Jefferson, Mowery replied. Here was a man who wrote the Declaration of Independence and served as a great leader. “But instead, they teach the kids that he owned slaves. Yes, he did, but he was also a product of his time. And when he tried to abolish slavery, he didn’t have any support. How does teaching that he had slaves show a student to love their country?”

And evolution. “I’m not that old, but back when I was being taught, teachers told you evolution was a theory,” Mast said. “Our kids think that’s wrong” — that creationism has no place in the schools.

“They just think it’s because we’re old, but we’re just following the word,” Mast said. “Now I’m some kind of middle-aged, medieval tyrant. It’s just difficult to have everyone on a different page.”

The lunch table went silent.

“Sometimes I wonder if we are headed toward a cataclysm,” Mowery said. “I never said that out loud, but I’ve thought it.”

Monty Alexander and Cheryl Kramer chat as Wade Hallett makes his case for Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum to caucus-goers in the gymnasium at Roosevelt Middle School in Dubuque, Iowa, on Feb. 1. Kramer planned to teach Alexander how to run a caucus. It would be her 11th, and his first. (Linda Davidson/The Washington Post)

When the time for the Republican caucuses arrived that night, Monty Alexander still was not sure how he would vote. He had just seen a commercial suggesting that Trump wanted a health-care plan similar to Canada’s. What if Trump was just pretending to be a conservative?

At 6:30 p.m., dozens of white-haired men and women piled into the cafeteria to confirm their registrations. Then came groups of college students by the dozen with “Marco Rubio” and “Rand Paul” stickers on their pullovers. Then families with young children. Alexander beamed. Four years ago, the Republicans could fit into the school auditorium, with its 837 seats, but now a spillover crowd was filling the bleachers in the nearby gym. Whatever else this election season has unleashed, it has undeniably let loose an energy among conservative voters unlike any in recent campaigns.

When it was time for him to cast his own ballot, Alexander was huffing and tapping his pen as he thought things through one last time. His 15-year-old son sat at his side. Alexander was cautious about going along with the masses. But Ted Cruz? Could he even beat Hillary Clinton? In a campaign with incessant ads, with information streaming through his cellphone and Facebook feed, he still had no clarity. He turned to his son.

“Who do you think I should vote for?” he asked.

“Trump,” the boy responded.

Alexander covered his ballot so others could not see it. Then wrote: T R U M P.

There were Democratic caucuses scattered around Dubuque, but when the counting was done, everyone was invited to congregate at one site, a long, low-slung tavern on the edge of town that was home to Precinct 1.

Justin Tauke sat at the bar, nursing a beer and watching the networks as Sanders edged closer to Clinton but could not quite catch her. Nicholas Hockenberry and Allison Simpson came in from their caucus downtown, checking reports from the candidate’s professional staff on their cellphones, their anxiety turning to relief. This was only the start of a long and uncertain process, and the news media was once again denouncing the weirdness of the caucuses.

It was freezing and windy outside. A winter storm was blowing in. And yet in this election season of discontent, the name of the establishment still somehow seemed appropriate. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of. . . Happy’s Place.

Part 2: Longing for Something Lost

In New Hampshire, the feeling is widespread. But what it truly means varies across demographics.

When Mary Beth Walz picked up a shovel and started to clear the pathway in front of the home of 92-year-old Doris Eriksson — that was a moment when much of the campaign rhetoric this election year seemed hollow. This small gesture occurred in the town of Bow, south of Concord, a few days before the New Hampshire primary. Walz was canvassing for Hillary Clinton in a heavy snowstorm, the footing uncertain enough that later she would slip and lose her car keys in the snow, but it was obvious that there was zero correlation between the votes she was trying to get and the walk she would work to clear. It was just what she did.

Some of it may have had to do with the quaint values of a small New England town, but there was more to it than that. Walz and her husband, Harry Judd, both lawyers in their 60s, had been invested in the well-being of the people of Bow for more than a quarter-century. They were not angry. They were not trying to make America great again. They had strong convictions and were what you might call political animals, but they were not interested in living a life of us-vs.-them in a divided country. To classify them as establishment or anti-establishment was beside the point. They were doing what they could, pragmatically, dutifully, their quotidian efforts overshadowed but not overtaken by the grandiosity of the national political story.

Walz previously had served as a state representative, a job that paid a whopping hundred bucks a year and meant she was dealing with 399 other people holding the same title, the largest state legislative body in the country. Her husband spent a few nights each week on the Bow Planning Board and other volunteer town committees, and on Friday mornings he helped prepare food and coffee for the Rotary breakfast meetings at the Old Town Hall. They both worked as election officials whenever there was a vote to be held, and seemed to know everyone in town, from the young woman who serves as police chief to the big ol’ guy in the hunting outfit who was the leader of the local National Rifle Association chapter.

Former New Hampshire state representative Mary Beth Walz shovels snow for Doris Eriksson, 92, while canvassing for Hillary Clinton in Bow on Feb. 5. (Linda Davidson/The Washington Post)

When Walz left the state legislature a few years ago, she thought it was a different place than it once had been. She prided herself on working with Republicans to get things done. One of her favorite people at the statehouse had been the House clerk, Karen Wadsworth, an old-school New England Republican who before taking the clerk’s job had served as mayor of Lebanon and as a state representative for 10 years. That morning, Wadsworth was at the Rotary in Bow, sitting near Judd, Walz’s husband. She said she felt like an endangered species as a Republican Christian who was “neither extreme nor born again” and who believed in getting along with people regardless of political affiliation.

There had been much talk this year among Republicans about a longing for something that seemed to have been lost in American culture, but what did that mean? To some, like Donald Trump, it sounded as simple as winning vs. losing. Some would say it was a sense of American strength in the world. Or a dilution of national identity because of immigration or multiculturalism or political correctness. To Wadsworth, it was something else. “I keep coming back to the word ‘respect.’ Respect for others, for other ideas.”

She thought that social media, while allowing people to communicate more freely and widely, also had made the public conversation nastier. “You keep seeing things that are personal rather than discussing the issues,” she said. Were individual people angrier than they used to be, and more negative, or did technology and culture combine to make it easier for them to project the angriest and least tolerant sides of themselves? Wadsworth said that she did not have caller ID, so she always picked up her telephone when it rang and was distraught by the nature of the incessant campaign calls. “It’s all, which issue frightens you the most? Nobody says what’s going on that’s hopeful, but what do you fear? I usually say none of the above.”

A variation of that conversation was playing out at the University of New Hampshire over in Durham, where Joe Sweeney, a young Republican in the most literal sense, at age 22 a member of the state legislature, had gone to watch a Democratic debate. The scene was the Phi Mu Delta fraternity house, a dingy hangout, up a creaky set of stairs, with eight boxes of pizza, plastic boxes of chocolate-chip cookies, stools circled around a flat-screen TV that was balanced on two dinged pieces of furniture pushed together.

New Hampshire state Rep. Joe Sweeney and his friend Sarah Vallon watch a Democratic debate on television at his Phi Mu Delta fraternity house in Durham on Feb. 4. Sweeney, 22, a Republican, is studying political science at the University of New Hampshire. (Linda Davidson/The Washington Post)

The debate itself between Clinton and Bernie Sanders was being held minutes away on campus, and somehow the notion of watching politicians discuss debt and health care had transfigured itself into must-see entertainment. Rep. Sweeney, with his pinchable cheeks and plaid shirt, was already in his second term and thinking of running for a third. He had a sense of politics beyond his years, going back to the days when he was an adolescent and watched his mom speak out against floodlights being added to a baseball field. Even he longed for the good old days that he never really experienced, before congressional gridlock, before Republicans and Democrats at the statehouse seemed so determined not to associate with each other.

He found politics equally fascinating and frustrating, a sensibility he shared with his friend Sarra Vallon, who was there watching the debate with Sweeney and his fraternity brothers. The notion of people building taller silos, avoiding the other side, was something they could not and would not do at the university. They were Republicans on what they considered a lefty college campus and were used to no one agreeing with them. “Every day I try to have a conversation with someone I disagree with,” Sweeney said. “It’s made me a better person.” “9/11 happened when we were in second grade, and back then, it was all ‘God Bless America,’ ” Vallon said. “And then, at some point, people started getting angry.”

They took time from studying to meet candidates and tried to balance stories they found on Fox News Channel with similar stories from the BBC. They liked watching Democrats, even though they agreed with little they said. And they wondered what kind of world, what kind of voter would ever support a man like Donald Trump. “We were just talking about what we’d do if he won,” said Vallon, who considered maybe sitting out the general election. “I just don’t get it. It doesn’t make sense. I guess people are really angry and just uninformed.”

A lanky fraternity brother with shaggy hair and glasses walked into the living room.

“Is Bernie on yet?” he said.

This was Jon Brown, 19, a civil-engineering student who had started volunteering for Sanders. Before the campaign, he said, all he knew about the senator from Vermont was that “he was an independent socialist who used to come on ‘Stephen Colbert.’ ” But now, as Brown faced tens of thousands of dollars of debt while pursuing his degree, he had become an unabashed supporter. He said he understood why people were so angry about the government. He was among them.

“If you look at Republicans or Democrats, you are looking at 10 years of things people don’t trust,” Brown said. “Before, we could trust our government, but then we had the NSA wiretapping, and while the world is getting bigger, our politics are getting so much smaller and more corrupt.”

People wait in line to hear Bernie Sanders speak at the Politics and Eggs breakfast in Manchester, N.H., on Feb. 5, ahead of the state’s Feb. 9 presidential primary. (Charles Ommanney/The Washington Post)

The debate was about to begin. Cookies were being eaten. A Blue Moon was opened. The crowd was all white, but a mix of genders. The only thing everyone could agree on was that Clinton was untrustworthy and power-hungry. Aside from Sweeney and Vallon, most were supporting Sanders, except for one young man who said he was voting for Carly Fiorina, prompting a mocking retort from Sweeney.

“You say you are supporting Fiorina, but you are wearing Marco Rubio shoes!” he teased, noticing the prominent heels.

The debate started.

“Ooh, drama,” Vallon said.

“Did she just give Bernie Sanders some shade?” said another.

“I just think Hillary Clinton says everything Bernie says after he says it,” Brown said. “She just wants to win.”

“Wasn’t Hillary, like, a massive failure in the ’90s?” said one fraternity brother.

“Did Hillary just claim she’s not a part of the establishment?” Sweeney said. “How can that be? Her last name is Clinton!”

On a commercial break, Sweeney began to pry.

“I can understand not liking Hillary,” he said. “But why do you support Bernie? His plans are going to cost a lot of money.”

“The big issue for me is money in the political system,” Brown said.

“If you raise the corporate tax rate, all the companies will just go overseas and we can’t bring jobs back to America,” Sweeney said.

“I just can’t see Bernie Sanders talking to Vladimir Putin,” Vallon added.

They stopped as the debate continued. It became progressively less interesting.

“I need to study.”

“Thank God! It’s over.”

By the time the final question was asked, only Brown and Sweeney remained in the room. They could not tell who won, or even whether it mattered.

“Everyone’s giving up because people are unwilling to compromise, and you look at Congress and it sucks,” Brown said. “We get angry at politicians and we all feel like we have to choose sides.”

“But we can have these sorts of disagreements because we were brothers first and it became easier to respect conversations with each other,” Sweeney said. “I don’t think Americans know each other well. And that’s a part of the problem.”

In a sense, the thing about America, in Sweeney’s estimation, was that it was really one big fraternity.

“The coolest thing about being American is it’s not a nationality or a genetic thing, it’s more of an idea,” he said. “It’s a struggle of finding the balance between the collective and the individual, and that’s what makes it hard.”

“We’ll get it one day,” Brown said.

* * *

A protester is escorted out as Donald Trump speaks at a campaign rally at Plymouth State University in Holderness, N.H., on Feb. 7. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)

Another night, back in Bow. Counting the Danish visitors in Richard Swett’s living room. They’d all come to look for America.

Or at least the New Hampshire version of it, which was unrepresentative demographically, just as Iowa was before it, yet so condensed and local and hyperactive in its presidential primary that it served as a valuable small-d democratic laboratory. That is why the Danes had descended on the state in full force, a few dozen consultants and journalists and officials fascinated by the American idea. That and the fact that Swett, a former Democratic congressman, had been the U.S. ambassador in Copenhagen during the final two years of Bill Clinton’s administration.

How odd it was for them to discover that Denmark could play a role in the American conversation. A few days earlier, they had attended a rally for Jeb Bush, and were listening to the warm-up act from Sen. Lindsey O. Graham of South Carolina, when suddenly their little European nation was Target No. 1. The big-government plans of Democratic candidates, especially Sanders, Graham said with alarm, sounded like “Denmark on steroids.” And now the Danes had gathered at Swett’s house, where they sat on white folding chairs and commodious couches to watch a Republican debate on television, and right out of the box came a question quoting someone as saying that Donald Trump was so trigger-happy that the first thing he would do as president is “nuke Denmark.” Nervous laughter all around. But still.

The Danes came with questions that night. They wanted to know whether the excitement about Sanders could be transferred to Clinton if she finally won. They were puzzled by the mystique of Trump, and wondered whether it intersected with the Sanders movement in any strange way. There was another question: Could Europe’s debate about what it meant to be a European illuminate the struggle over competing ideas of what it meant to be an American?

Despite all the agitation in the United States about immigration, and the talk of a weak America that had lost its way, the consensus among the Danes was that the issues in this country seemed more rhetorical than real, especially compared with what they were facing across the Atlantic. They sounded more confident about America than many Americans. The United States, they said, could absorb everything, and that is what made it special. “The financial crisis, the refugee crisis, it is all much more dramatic in Europe,” said Lars L. Nielsen, the public affairs director for a communications company in Denmark. “There are some echoes in the U.S. debate, but they are contorted, distorted here.” The question in Denmark, he said, and in most countries in Europe, was not so much what it meant to be a European but what it meant to keep a national identity, “what it meant to be French, or German, or Hungarian, or Danish.”

The group vs. the individual, the whole vs. the parts. The balance of this tension had been at the core of the American idea from the beginning, eventually creating a mosaic of nationalities and races that had coexisted and melded into a vibrant nation. Europe was struggling with that concept now in a new way, but so, too, once more, was the United States — the divides seeming wider and the fractures more painful.

* * *

From left, Steven Siegel, 26, Paul Garver, 75, and Ben Kreider, 32, prepare to canvass for Bernie Sanders in Portsmouth, N.H., on Feb. 6. The trio drove up from Massachusetts to volunteer. (Linda Davidson/The Washington Post)

Paul Garver woke up that very morning thinking that maybe at last the revolution was upon us. He was 75, a retired union organizer with a white goatee and a cheery disposition. He had watched people from his generation grow disheartened by modern politics, and felt that way himself until Sanders came along. Now here he was, driving up from the Boston suburbs to volunteer in Portsmouth on the New Hampshire seacoast for his fellow democratic socialist, energized not only by conviction but by a sense of possibilities.

“He could be the next president,” Garver said. “I always felt that it would take a mix of old leftists and a new generation to bring about the change we always talked about. I’m just glad I can get to see it before I’m gone.”

On the way north, Garver picked up two graduate students at Brandeis. One was Ben Kreider, a 32-year-old with a dirty-blond goatee, who knew Garver from the labor movement. And Kreider brought along Steven Siegel, a bespectacled 26-year-old working on an MBA in nonprofit management. Over his red hair, Siegel wore a blue skullcap with a bow on it — a nod to the rest of the world that he existed outside the gender binary. Siegel, who has no preferred gender pronoun, had never canvassed for a presidential candidate before. In Sanders, he saw a bit of himself — a Jewish democratic socialist who wanted to go into politics.

For these leftists, the past eight years had fostered seasons of love and lament. They had become angry at Republicans who tried to block President Obama’s initiatives and mad at the president himself for disassembling his community organizing arm, “Obama for America,” even as so much of his agenda languished amid partisan gridlock. Obama was not the fundamental disruption they had wished for — and it left them wanting more.

“I knew when Obama appointed Rahm Emanuel as his chief of staff that he would not be the president we were hoping for,” Garver said. “He was an outsider and he chose a Washington insider to protect him. The problem with Obama was he did not have a fundamental critique of power. He played along with the system too much.”

Said Kreider: “Bernie’s ideologically pure. People know Republicans have been bought by special interests, and there’s a feeling that Hillary might be bought, too. But Bernie is definitely not bought.”

Voters cheer Sanders at the 2016 McIntyre-Shaheen 100 Club Celebration, a Democratic gathering in Manchester, N.H., on Feb. 5. (Melina Mara/The Washington Post)

As they drove up I-95, Siegel questioned what to do if Clinton — whom he thought of as careerist, super-PAC-loving Hillary — ended up defeating his candidate.

“Then you do what I’ve been doing for years,” Garver said. “You hold your nose and just vote for the best Democrat.”

“But to me,” Siegel said, “voting for someone as the lesser of two evils feels bad.”

The conversation took an awkward pause. A Clinton presidency was not an America he wanted to imagine.

The America that Garver’s passengers grew up believing in just wasn’t working for them. Kreider had degrees from Bowdoin and Georgetown but said he could find a job only at a think tank that paid $15 an hour in the months after he received his master’s degree. He now had $35,000 in student-loan debt. The dream of two kids and a picket fence seemed like either the implausible vestige of another time or the realities of those who found themselves in the wealthy 1 percent. Owning a home like the one he grew up in seemed out of the question. He wondered whether he would ever be able to afford to raise a family with the advantages he had enjoyed.

“I did everything right and I’ve still had to struggle, so I don’t think America is really working for me,” Kreider said. “And if it’s not working for me, then it’s got to be extremely hard for someone who did not have that privilege — that privilege of growing up white and male in a middle-class suburb.”

Siegel’s dream was to start a nonprofit organization that used video games to teach science and technology, as well as life skills, to underprivileged teenagers. He had no generational wealth to fall back on — his mother died when he was 13, and his father was in an assisted-living facility. He never wanted to make a lot of money.

“I’ve taken advantage of every opportunity that I could as being a perceived man and white, and still I feel straddled,” Siegel said.

“Your generation’s debt is our generation’s draft,” Garver told them. It spurred middle-class whites to reconsider their stations in life and ally themselves with those who had less, he said, when they realized the fundamentals of the country were misguided.

Sanders supporters leave a rally at the Exeter town hall, where their candidate spoke, on Feb. 5 in Exeter, N.H. (Charles Ommanney/The Washington Post)

Garver grew up Republican. A key moment in his political evolution came when, as a graduate student at Harvard, he was dispatched to teach classes at Southern University, a historically black college in Baton Rouge. He saw black students pushed through the education system so superficially that they came to college illiterate. They slept in roach-infested dorm rooms and ate spoiled food in dining halls. When they wanted to rebel, he taught them “The Autobiography of Malcolm X” and Paul Goodman’s “Growing Up Absurd” — a 1960 tome that discussed angry youth and the corporate system that held them back. His experience at Southern helped mold him as he joined the labor movement and began to push for progressive politicians to run for president: McCarthy, McGovern, Jackson.

All lost. And many of the lefties of his generation lost hope. There were times when Garver thought that maybe he should give up, too: During Ronald Reagan’s union-busting in the ’80s, which began to strip away the most powerful and accepted collective groups in the nation, and during George W. Bush’s push for the Iraq War.

The rise of Obama gave him hope that young people would be able to carry on the work. The young people are sometimes dismissive of him, he acknowledged, treating him as an out-of-touch, rambling old man. During the car ride, Kreider and Siegel humored his annoyance at the GPS — “I don’t like, what’s it called, Siki? She’s always yelling at me” — and his reluctance to make U-turns (“Just do it, Paul!” Kreider chided).

When they reached Portsmouth, they were assigned to knock on the doors of voters who were leaning toward Sanders.

They drove into a wealthy suburb with large garages and sprawling treehouses. Garver stayed with Siegel to watch him canvass for the first time.

First door. A woman answered. Siegel had said he wouldn’t need to follow the script, but now he froze.

“Don’t worry, I’m with you,” the woman said. “Hillary is untrustworthy. Bernie’s my guy.”

Then came a man who didn’t want to be bothered and said he hated both Democratic candidates. Then another who appeared at the side door to say that he wouldn’t be voting because the system was too corrupt.

“I wouldn’t be doing this if I didn’t believe in the candidate,” Siegel told him. “I would suggest you Google him.”

“How do I know how much of it is true and how much of it isn’t?” he said.

Siegel clomped through an ankle-high pool of snow on the front porch of the last house to get to the door. A lanky man with brown hair answered it. “Don’t worry about a thing,” the man said. “If there’s a blizzard, I’m going to walk over there. I never thought I’d live to see the day when a democratic socialist could win! Good job, comrade!”

* * *

John Kasich addresses potential voters at a town hall appearance in Nashua, N.H., on Feb. 7. (Linda Davidson/The Washington Post)

Among all the candidates, Ohio Gov. John Kasich stood out. His campaign was in effect a way of looking at things from the perspective of the people out there, not from above. It was a strategy, to be sure, the most effective way for Kasich to operate without the media attention of the others, but it was the reality nonetheless. He was not surrounded by a protective cordon of aides and security agents the way Sanders and Clinton were. He did not hold rallies in cavernous arenas and talk without listening, as Trump did. On this day, he was cracking the hundred mark in terms of town hall meetings in New Hampshire.

As the vote neared, these events seemed more like group therapy sessions — shelters from the storm. The stoop-shouldered, aw-shucks governor as the Oprah Winfrey of this disorienting political moment, trying to make people who were anxious, confused and even angry feel a bit better. “We have to slow down,” he said at a town hall meeting in Nashua. “We have to slow down our lives. There are people with no one to share their victories with; no one to share their tears. There are people who are lonely. Can we slow down and listen to our neighbors? Can we listen to our friends?”

The questions were not staged. The first one came from a liberal woman who asked him about reproductive rights and why he would not fund Planned Parenthood in Ohio. Kasich’s answer did not satisfy her, nor did it demonize her. “I have never been an enemy of people who don’t think like I do,” he said.

At every stop, someone thanked Kasich for running a positive campaign. Some people left dissatisfied, unmoved by his soothing approach. Jim Miller, a retired accountant, walked out of the Nashua session with a stern look. He didn’t like it when Kasich said he would not try to deport 12 million illegal immigrants. “The people who should be getting citizenship are the people who understand the traditions of America,” he said. In his retirement, he sometimes volunteers to help people with their taxes, and some of them don’t know how to speak English. “They want to have Mexico here.”

And at every stop, someone also proved Kasich’s point about loneliness and the desire to connect. These are competing human impulses — to disconnect and differentiate from the other, and to connect and feel the commonality of humans. They coexist in most people, and in the body politic this year more than ever. A week and a half later, a video of Kasich hugging a young man would go viral and be seen by millions. He did that every day in New Hampshire. On this day, he encountered Lydia Johnson, an 80-year-old woman who had Alzheimer’s and neurological problems and came hobbling up in her walker to meet him after all the questions were done. She said she once lived in western Pennsylvania, near where Kasich grew up. She thought she was more of a Sanders person, until she saw Kasich on television and decided she had to meet him. The governor leaned over and smothered her in a warm embrace for more than a minute.

There was a bit of deja vu to what Kasich was doing and saying. It was reminiscent of another governor, or in this case a former governor, who moved through New Hampshire trying to feel people’s pain. Bill Clinton in 1992. And now the former president was back, a silhouette of his former self, at the side of his wife. Here he was at a rally in Manchester the next day. The rally itself seemed like a therapy session at first, with the crowd chanting “I believe that we will win! I believe that she will win!” as though saying it enough times might make it so.

Bill Clinton was approaching 70 now, and was a vegan, and had endured heart surgery, and looked more brittle and slower than he used to, both in his mannerisms and in his analysis. He had lived the life of a survivor, his career alternately riding along waves of hope and against currents of dispute. So much of the chaos and anger and disruption of this year had been building for the quarter-century since he staked his ambitions in a New Hampshire comeback. And now, campaigning for his wife, he said one thing that lingered as he sought to explain some of the discontent washing over the country. It was a William Butler Yeats quote from “Easter 1916”: Too long a sacrifice can make a stone of the heart.

Part 3: Awaiting a Political Awakening

In Las Vegas and across the nation in South Carolina, people wonder whether the American Dream is still attainable.

Bill and Hillary Clinton appear on a TV screen reflected in a window overlooking the Las Vegas Strip on Feb. 21. (Ricky Carioti/The Washington Post)

Where else to pick up but in Las Vegas, our nation’s great national cliche, more excessive in its hyperbole than the boasts in a Donald Trump stump speech, at once the representation and perversion of the American Dream. It is by its very sustenance a city teeming with losers, yet the tallest residential structure in town has Trump’s name on it. People flock here in hopes of something gained, of some miraculous transfer of wealth, of beating or evening the odds rigged against them, of leaving inhibitions behind, in fear and loathing, in remembrance of things lost. All various ways of interpreting what the 2016 presidential campaign is about.

It was 45 years ago that gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson beat his way to Las Vegas, longing for something already gone, a time when “there was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning.” He was writing in 1971 about the heady counterculture days of the mid-’60s, although the words could be appropriated by various ideologies this election year. Feeling out of time, his senses altered by hallucinogenic drugs, Thompson rendered a novelistic evocation of Las Vegas as the wasteland of the righteous capitalist ideal.

One can only wonder what Thompson would have done with the materialization of candidate Trump. Watching the Republican Party leadership deal with Trump, one person said, was like witnessing a high-anxiety Vegas act — the illusionist David Blaine trying to escape from a water tank. Surely he will loosen his way out from the chains and handcuffs and rise to safety. Time passes, even in this city without clocks, and is it already too late? How much longer can he hold his breath? The establishment was in the water tank, running out of air.

The Trump International Hotel Las Vegas is understated compared with the man himself, and in contrast to the neon madness nearby. The owner might call it low-energy if it were Jeb Bush’s joint, not his. A block off the metastasizing gaudiness of the Strip, it has no casinos, no 24-hour slot machines dinging and clanging, no motley hordes marauding over the vast carpeted expanses in search of a magic show or a buffet line. Inside the gold-plated doors, in the clean, bright restaurant off the lobby, Mary Robinson sat enjoying breakfast.

It was only by chance that Robinson had spent the night at this hotel. She had arrived from Georgia earlier than her friends, and her travel agent booked her there for a night before moving her to the Encore casino hotel on the Strip. “You’re not really going to stay at Trump’s?” one friend chided her upon hearing the news.

Supporters of Hillary Clinton listen as their candidate speaks at an outdoor rally in Las Vegas on Feb. 19, the eve of the Nevada Democratic caucuses. The former secretary of state was accompanied by her husband, Bill Clinton, and daughter, Chelsea Clinton. (Melina Mara/The Washington Post)

As a 70-year-old African American, an IBM retiree and a staunch Democrat, Robinson expressed shock about Trump’s success and concern as to what it meant. She worried that the Trump movement was fueled at least in part by racism, an angry backlash to the presidency of Barack Obama and the changing demographics of the country. She confessed to having felt compelled to “defriend” some people on Facebook who were supporting Trump and defining what it means to be an American in ways that were disturbing to her.

“I posed this question to some of these Facebook friends: What would be one thing that would change if you ‘got your country back’?” Robinson said. “And by the way, who stole it? Would you take it back to the 1950s, when blacks faced segregation laws? When white men controlled everything? Is that the country you want back?”

Did she have any empathy for white men who felt betrayed or left behind by the powers that be? This was as foreign to her as that possible new planet past Pluto. “No,” Robinson said, and then she added, slowly enunciating every word to emphasize the point: “I don’t get that whole thing about them being screwed. When you are brought up black, in the South, that is a leap I just cannot make.”

One of the name-tag people who helped feed tourists such as Mary Robinson was 55-year-old Alma Zamarin, a petite, black-haired food service worker who grew up in the Philippines and “jumped ship” more than 20 years ago after marrying an American. She was now a citizen, and she also happened to be a committee leader in the employee group at the hotel that organized under the Culinary Workers Union Local 226 banner. She is no fan of Trump and his followers. The Trump management was challenging the union election, but the vote seemed likely to hold. For the man who promises that as president that he would win so much that the public would grow tired of it and beg him to lose just to break the monotony, here was one for the loss column.

Alma Zamarin, a Filipina food service worker at the Trump International Hotel Las Vegas, is pictured on Feb. 20. Zamarin is a member of the Culinary Workers Union trying to bargain with owner Donald Trump. (Linda Davidson/The Washington Post)

Zamarin is part of the other Las Vegas, the real city, largely working-class and with a predominance of Hispanics, along with blacks and Asians, and strongly pro-labor. In the power structure of Nevada, the culinary workers play a vital and uncommon role. They make this casino wonderland possible, serving the food, washing the dishes, cleaning the rooms, carrying the luggage, parking the cars. Their strength comes not through money but because of the necessity of the work and the magnitude of their numbers. And they know how to organize, both to win contracts and affect elections.

This side of Las Vegas was on display when Zamarin walked a picket line in the late-afternoon dusk on the sidewalk perimeter of Sunrise Hospital along with several hundred others. The mass demonstration involved a dispute with Sunrise’s parent company, the Hospital Corporation of America, a giant for-profit hospital conglomerate, over higher rates the hospital wanted to charge union members in its health network. This was not a campaign event, and yet it was, falling under the rubric of the little guys saying they were being squeezed by corporate greed. What does it mean to be a culinary worker in America?

The chants resounded up and down the line.

Who sucks?

Sunrise sucks!

The picketers were barely 20 minutes into their demonstration when a caravan of dark SUVs pulled to the curb. Out flew Secret Service agents and a covey of aides, all unavoidably inflated with the adrenaline-rush self-importance of big-time campaigning, and then from behind the tinted glass came Hillary Clinton. She was perfectly put together, ready for another go at a town hall showdown with Bernie Sanders, as she made her way along the curb and down the line.

Members of the Culinary Workers Union picket outside Sunrise Hospital in Las Vegas on Feb. 18 to protest what they say are stall tactics on negotiating contracts with the Hospital Corporation of America, its parent company. Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders stopped by the demonstration to talk to members two days ahead of the Nevada Democratic caucuses. (Linda Davidson/The Washington Post)

The chanting continued unabated.

Who sucks? Sunrise sucks!

The candidate was shaking hands and offering encouragement.

You’ve got a good protest going on here.

Keep the pressure on.

Good for you. All right! All right!

She stopped to pose for photos with workers.

And soon enough, she was gone.

Twenty minutes later, another caravan pulled to the curb, with another rush of agents and aides, and another candidate working the line.

“I’ve been Bernified!” one union steward yelped joyously after Sanders gave her an embrace.

If you are looking for the issues of modern America, they are all here in abundance, like everything in Las Vegas. During the last recession, this place became known as the foreclosure capital of the country. The jobless rate and homeless problem grew accordingly, and they are still evident. The schools are stressed. The population has swelled with Mexican and Central American immigrants, legal and not. Poor mental health is a problem, with a suicide rate well above the national norm. The desert environment is endangered. Water is always the question: how to get it, how to preserve it.

And if you are looking for quirky American stories, they are here in abundance, too. Consider first the case of Justin Lepper, an artist with his own studio, who studied political science at Indiana University and worked on election law for George W. Bush’s reelection campaign in 2004. On a day just before the caucuses, he was curating an exhibit of paintings of Sanders that would be auctioned off that night. Lepper had painted a few of them himself, including one of Sanders dressed as his hokey namesake, KFC’s Colonel Sanders, with double vision.

Artist Justin Lepper puts the finishing touches on a painting of Bernie Sanders at the Eden Art Studio and Gallery in Las Vegas on Feb. 18. Lepper was curating an exhibit of artwork of Sanders to be auctioned off at a fundraiser for the candidate ahead of the state’s Democratic caucuses. Although Lepper likes Sanders, he said he didn’t plan to vote. (Linda Davidson/The Washington Post)

From Bush to Bernie? Lepper called himself “the world’s most liberal conservative.” Pro-choice, supportive of gay rights, pro-gun (although he doesn’t own one), a “capitalist at heart” who had a marriage fall apart and a house out near Centennial Hills get foreclosed on. He thought he was living the American Dream, and now he had reinvented himself with a new one, like so many people out here.

He called the Sanders-as-the-colonel painting “I Love Chicken.” “Chicken is very American. Colonel Sanders is very American. Bernie Sanders is very American. Fighting for the American middle class.” Something else was very American, as it turned out. Although he considered Sanders “the best choice we have this year,” Lepper will not vote for him. He does not plan to vote at all. Just like 43 percent of the registered voters in 2012. It is always instructive to remember this aspect of American democracy: Voting is a right people died for; choosing not to vote is a freedom.

Melissa Petersen, a leading arts advocate in the city, was not only planning to vote, she was the Democratic Party’s site leader for the five neighborhood precincts that would caucus at the John C. Fremont Middle School. Petersen was a Las Vegas native who knew the neighborhoods block by block — where the Bernie signs were, where the “corn man” and the “tamale lady” might situate their carts, where the other colonel, Elvis’s Col. Parker, kept his ostentatious residence, where the voters who might need a Spanish-speaking interpreter lived. It was the diversity of the city, she said, that explained what it meant to be an American. She was a liberal, supportive of undocumented immigrants and gay rights, worried about climate change, but she said most of her relatives lived out in the gated communities and would vote for Trump.

* * *

A supporter waits for Donald Trump to arrive at a campaign event in Walterboro, S.C., on Feb. 17. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)

Across the nation, in Columbia, S.C., a member of Marco Rubio’s staff had just beckoned Steven Diaz, 31, a stocky former Marine with a “#marcomentum” button affixed to his pullover, to stand in front of a black curtain that protected a hotel bathroom and hallway that served as a makeshift green room for the candidate and his aides.

Diaz stood there, folding his arms across his broad chest.

“There’s another bathroom around the corner,” he told each person trying to get behind the curtain.

As one scooted away, Diaz smirked.

“I actually don’t know if there’s a bathroom that way,” he said. “People just follow me. They think I’m intimidating because I have no eye.”

His left eye resembled a marble. A scar on his right side stretched across his skull like the lines of a basketball. It had been more than 20 years since his family moved from Mexico, 13 years since he became a Marine and 10 years since he was hit by an IED in Iraq’s Anbar province. The shrapnel went through his left eye and into his right brain, affecting his short-term memory and causing doctors to replace a part of his skull with plastic.

It had been eight years since he had come home and faced depression, five years since his marriage and four years since he said he finally understood what love really meant. Four months since he began volunteering for Rubio. He was just proud to be serving again.

“When you come back, you realize that when you’re away the politicians have control over so much,” Diaz said. “A part of you knows you’re being used as a pawn. But you focus on protecting people and helping out kids or building roads, and that’s what we have to focus on. Because if you try to understand the politics, whew.”

The 2016 campaign offered opportunity and confusion for Diaz and many veterans like him. The military molded him not to question the commander in chief. But the country he fought for was waging a fierce internecine battle. In his conservative, evangelical circle, things had changed. No one there seemed to think President Obama was utilizing the talents of troops abroad or respecting veterans at home.

The questions unsettled the fundamental fabric of South Carolina, a state that prided itself as being the most patriotic in the country. Spending cuts were diminishing communities whose economic vitality relied on the military-industrial complex. They were polarized, angry and struggling. Was the American promise still real? Or had it become as seductive and improbable as a slot machine in Vegas?

Steven Diaz, 31, a medically retired Marine veteran who runs Hidden Wounds, a nonprofit organization in Columbia, S.C., that helps veterans deal with the emotional scars of war, is pictured on Feb. 24. Diaz was wounded by an improvised explosive device in Iraq, losing vision in his left eye. He suffered traumatic brain injury and post-traumatic stress disorder. Diaz said he would vote for Marco Rubio in the South Carolina primary. (Linda Davidson/The Washington Post)

And then there was Diaz, a patriot in a country that felt less patriotic. Diaz was critical of Obama but tried to find a balance between being open about his personal struggles and avoiding needless bickering. If South Carolina would do the same, he hoped the answer would lie with Rubio. He was drawn to the senator’s optimism and his multiethnic group of conservatives. Rubio’s father had moved the family to the United States when Marco was 4 to be the pastor of Iglesia Latina de Columbia, and now Diaz relished the idea of a Hispanic president.

It also meant something to Diaz that Rubio thanked veterans at each campaign stop. Old-timers wore baseball caps with their military branch embroidered on them, but his generation tended to wear subtle black wristbands, often with the names of a friend who lost his life during the war. The last time he was at a campaign rally, and Rubio asked vets to raise their hands to be acknowledged, Diaz made friends. One of them was Michael Banks, a 31-year-old Air Force vet who had started a martial arts studio in town.

“There’s a lot of piss and moan going on right now,” Banks said in a conversation with Diaz. “But there is still a lot of opportunity in this country.”

“Yeah, when you spend days sleeping in holes, and seeing people who want to destroy your freedoms, it changes things,” Diaz replied. “What I loved about the military was that there was no division. In the bigger perspective, we were all willing to kill for each other and die for each other. Now, in the civilian world, everyone wants you to pick a side.”

After he was injured, Diaz oscillated between anger and guilt. It anguished him when he heard about friends in the war zones getting hurt because he thought he should have been with them. It angered him whenever Obama withdrew troops from Iraq or Afghanistan before the countries were stable, thinking it risked everything for which they had fought. His return meant dealing with the VA bureaucracy while attempting to cope with post-traumatic stress disorder and seizures. He tried to stay positive while he watched friends sink into depression and alcoholism.

After a good friend committed suicide, Diaz co-founded Hidden Wounds, a nonprofit organization that connected veterans with therapists and private doctors as they waited for an appointment at the VA hospital — which he said could take up to six months. About 2,000 veterans, mostly from South Carolina, had taken advantage of the program, and the group footed the bill for 500 of them.

When Mario Rubio, Marco’s 65-year-old brother and a former Green Beret, came to town, a staffer asked Diaz to organize a dinner with him and other vets. Diaz put on a blazer and found an American flag to commemorate the event.

Diaz sat down at Lizard’s Thicket with his wife, Laura Diaz. She was the daughter of a stay-at-home mom and a truck driver who saw his wages stagnate, then decrease until he was eventually laid off. Her mother had to reenter the workforce in her 60s but found little luck applying for jobs against underemployed college graduates. “We plunged from middle-class to poor,” Laura Diaz said. “I’m not sure how we’re gonna get back.”

Joining them was Jesus Caldera, a soft-spoken 27-year-old with gelled hair and rimless glasses, who had to drop out of the University of South Carolina after administrators asked students for proof of citizenship. Caldera had none. His parents had immigrated illegally from Venezuela when he was an infant, and he grew up with Steven Diaz in the evangelical church.

Although he was as conservative as his friends, Caldera found a reason to thank Obama for giving him “the biggest break in my life” when the president issued an executive order allowing “dreamers” like him to get driver’s licenses and work permits. He now managed a 50-person call center at the United Way and was drawn to Rubio because of his work on immigration reform. “I know he has to distance himself from it now,” Caldera said, “but I remember what he did. I know he’ll look out for people like me when he’s in office.”

As they began to dig into dishes of fried catfish and green beans and okra, Laura Diaz confessed that she was afraid they would have offended somebody by simply bringing an American flag to the restaurant. This is the fear that political correctness had wrought after a tumultuous summer in South Carolina. They marveled at how quickly their state supported the families of the Emanuel Nine, the black churchgoers who were killed by a young white gunman, but found themselves exhausted at the subsequent controversy over the Confederate flag.

“It just seemed like it wasn’t causing any trouble being up there,” Laura Diaz said to the table. “But then, people just used the moment for their own agenda.”

“Does it ever feel to you like we are going back a generation?” Steven Diaz asked. “With Black Lives Matter and all this aggression, sometimes it feels like we have forgotten how far we’ve come.

“I mean, there was a time we could not eat with these people,” Diaz said to Caldera. He looked at his wife, a white woman from Mississippi.

Mario Rubio, whose struggles with the VA bureaucracy are invoked in his brother’s stump speech, approached Diaz’s table and patted the young veteran on his back.

“How’s the VA treating you?” he asked.

“Well, I’ve learned how to play the game,” Diaz said. “No, let me rephrase: I’ve learned how to work with the system.”

Rubio laughed and said, “Can you teach me?”

Walter Holm, 67, a Vietnam War veteran living at Transitions, a homeless recovery center in Columbia, S.C., is pictured on Feb. 22. He served in the Marines; has no drug, alcohol or mental problems; has had four years of college; and had been employed most of his life until medical problems caused him to lose almost everything. He spends his days at an unemployment center and a public library, where he applies for jobs online. (Linda Davidson/The Washington Post)

If Walter Holm, a 67-year-old Vietnam War vet, could teach young Americans a lesson about the country, he said it would be that the place was “hallowed ground, brimming with opportunity.” Yet he couldn’t find any. At the unemployment office near downtown Columbia on another day, Holm walked out of the place feeling frustrated, again.

Holm spent his childhood in rural Rhode Island, worked as a commercial diver in New York, designed cabinets in California and built houses in Alaska. He said he lost all his money paying for operations on his back and his digestive system and moved to Columbia to find building work after last fall’s floods. “I always thought by this age I would retire and feel good, but this is a little depressing,” he said. Then he paused, looked to the sun and added: “I’m homeless.”

He wore glasses and hid his thin white hair under a navy-blue veteran’s cap, trying not to worry. As the Republican primary approached, he focused instead on the condition of the nation, which he thought was in the midst of its own crisis. “We used to be a country that valued integrity, that meant what we said.”

He watched Obama with confusion after the president did not fully back Syrian rebels against a ruler who allegedly used chemical weapons. He wondered why Obama did not keep a larger sustained presence in Iraq, instead of “using the military like little specks at a time, instead of using our firepower.”

Holm was not registered to vote in South Carolina, but he said he would vote for Ted Cruz if he could. He liked that the senator from Texas was willing to shut down the government to voice his disdain for Obamacare and Planned Parenthood funding. Although he opted against Trump out of fear that he would be too eager to use his war powers “as a showmanship thing,” he appreciated that the New York billionaire pounded away against illegal immigration.

Every morning, Holm sees groups of brown-skinned men huddled on a street corner, waiting to get picked up for day-labor jobs. Holm acknowledged that he was old and could not move as fast as any of them, but he figured he could at least supervise. In the meantime, he would fill out 10 to 30 applications a day sitting in the local library or McDonald’s. The only job he was offered paid $8 an hour, which he thought was too little.

As Republicans voted in South Carolina, the hottest action on caucus day was down on the strip. No surprise there, usually, but for a caucus? It turned out that several of the big casinos gave their workers time to attend special caucuses held inside the facilities, and that the culinary workers even though they officially stayed neutral were now flexing their muscles for Hillary, and the numbers were going her way, and sometimes rather forcefully. Most of the media was there, entranced by the scene, while a passion play of a different sort was playing out at the John C. Fremont Middle School, where Melissa Petersen was overseeing the show.

Two precincts caucused in the gym, and two in the cafeteria, and one in a classroom. The crowds were a cross-section of America: Anglo seniors with canes, young Latinos in pony tails and black jackets, millennial couples with square glasses and rolled pants, an electric wheelchair-bound old Cuban gentleman wearing a Cincinnati Reds cap, a young mother with a baby in her papoose, a gay lawyer in salmon colored pants, people of all shapes and colors, some wearing Hillary tees, some sporting Bernie buttons. “This is such a great country,” exclaimed Sonia Schneider, who emigrated to the U.S. from Argentina and was helping as a Spanish speaking interpreter. “Anything can happen here. You can be anything you want.”

It took about an hour and a half for everyone to register and get instructed on where to sit or stand. There was some confusion and squabbling everywhere, but the most action was in the cafeteria, especially up in Precinct 5564 when Clinton supporters were invited to make their case. A debate over what it means to be liberal in America.

First a nervous young woman said that she was sorry that Hillary was so boring and so uncool, but it was important to get things done, and Hillary was good at that. The Sanders people started kibitzing and talking over her until an older man urged them to be polite.

Then a woman in her sixties stepped up on a table and acknowledged that she thought Bernie had good ideas, she loved his ideas, but her three kids told her she had to go for Hillary.

To which some Sanders supporters started to chant, “Just say no! Just say no!”

Then came Francine Bernard, a 67-yearold retired real estate broker who told the Sanders gaggle that she had been a revolutionary once, back in the sixties, and had been booted out of the University of Connecticut for her protests, but that she had watched the liberals lose time after time when they went too far left and she had matured and did not want to see that happen again.

“I don’t want to see our party led by a bunch of idealists who are out of synch with the voters and can’t win,” she said.

Eliciting this chorus:

“I do!”

“I do!”

It was a face-off now, and the two sides were like gangs, serious but not threatening. For some reason it was reminiscent of the rumble between the personnel of competing TV weather stations in the Will Farrell movie. Or a meeting of the SDS on a Big Ten campus circa 1968. Or a bit of both. But it was peaceful democracy in action, no hard feelings in the end.

* * *

Journalism major Nikeeya Ali, 19, walks to class at South Carolina State University in Orangeburg, S.C., on Feb. 25. (Linda Davidson/The Washington Post)

At South Carolina State University in Orangeburg, Nikeeya Ali’s goal for this election season was to stay “woke.” That meant being aware of the injustices of institutional racism and countering efforts to demean black culture. It was part of the political awakening among young black activists in America, and it was disrupting the otherwise cozy relationship the Clintons had with African Americans.

Ali was friendly and curious, a 19-year-old sophomore class president, and she had just learned about the 1994 crime bill’s disproportionate effects on black men. It was a measure that Hillary Clinton had supported as first lady.

The morning after learning about the crime bill, Ali was in the audience when actress Angela Bassett came to the historically black public college to stump for Clinton. Ali approached the microphone. “I just want to say your outfit is amazing,” she started. Then she said her professor had played a video in which Clinton talked about how black men could seem scary when they wore hoodies. “As a black woman with two sons, why do you really advocate on Ms. Clinton’s behalf?”

Bassett, who actually has only one son, stumbled briefly before saying Clinton was ready to have conversations and “put in place a concrete plan.” Ali couldn’t remember that part. She was too thrilled, too nervous. She wrote about the experience on a personal blog and watched with amazement as it received about 43,000 page views.

Intellectuals including Cornel West, Ta-Nehisi Coates and Michelle Alexander had abandoned the Clintons. And just as a segment of white America was defying conventional Republican dogma and going for Trump, Ali and her friends were debating whether they, too, had too much faith in a politician who seemed to pander. Given the string of unarmed black men being shot by police, and the battle over the Confederate flag, Ali and her friends could not help but be woke. Those incidents were discussed so much on campus that faculty put on a seminar called “How to Not Get Killed by the Police.”

“I have two brothers, and it bears on my soul every day,” Ali said. “It’s always in the back of my head that something might happen to them. He might not even have to open his mouth — just by the color of his skin. I want a politician who will address that and mean it.”

After writing her blog post, Ali took increasing pride in being part of the new black consciousness. There was a history of activism at the school. In 1968, students began protesting a segregated bowling alley in Orangeburg, and after an officer was hit with an object during a campus protest, police fired into the crowd. They wounded 27 and killed three. The Orangeburg Massacre predated similar incidents at Kent State and Jackson State, but it was underplayed by newspapers covering civil rights in the South.

Now the campus had a bowling alley of its own but struggled with declining enrollment and state funding. Broken windows. A vacant dorm. A shuttered Starbucks. But the roadshow of American media was about to clang into town. Clinton was coming to the school. Ali had concerns about inconsistencies in Clinton’s story. Not that she was certain about Sanders. Some of his ideas seemed impractical, and his notion of providing free tuition at public universities, she thought, might harm enrollment and funding at historically black colleges.

Two days before Clinton arrived, Ali and her friends spoke about how proud they were that Beyoncé took on a political cause with her video “Formation,” and rejoiced at how unapologetically black Kendrick Lamar’s performance was at the Grammys, where he came out in a prison uniform while his band played in jail cells before being released to joyfully step with dancers in African garb. The word they used was “authentic.” It was not a word they would use with Clinton.

Khadeja Ceasar, a 21-year-old majoring in political science who grew up in Sumter and dyed her afro puff in a color somewhere between brown and green, declared that Clinton could not construct an actual policy argument to help black people.

“I’m personally excited to see her,” said Nakea Pennant, 19, a biology major. “She’s the one who can get the job done. She has years of experience.”

The others at the table stared at her.

“What? You have an issue? Chime in.”

Ali jumped in. “I saw her on video singing ‘His Eye Is on the Sparrow,’ because she was speaking to some black people,” Ali said, referencing a familiar song in the black church. “Now, you know she doesn’t sing that song to herself. Who taught her that?”

“But that’s how politics are played,” Pennant said.

Their generation was promised a new type of politics that they believe never fully came. Most were tweens and teenagers when Obama won and remember their parents and teachers crying at that unlikely moment. As they grew older, they all knew Obama would not solve racism in America. He was one man. But they did not expect to come of age at a time when perceived injustice would lead to looting in Ferguson, Mo., and rioting in Baltimore, and a Republican front-runner singling out Mexican immigrants as “rapists.”

Jalen Griffin kills time before a game at South Carolina State University in Orangeburg, S.C., on Feb. 25. Griffin said he had no plans to vote in the presidential primary. (Linda Davidson/The Washington Post)

“If Trump wins, America is a country that is willing to accept racism,” Ali said. “And if Hillary wins, it makes us know we’re moving in a direction of diversity.”

“If he wins, now we know they hate us,” said Keith Gilliard, 27, a broadcast major who was invited by Sanders’s staff to perform his rap song “I Love My HBCU” on the candidate’s tour of historically black colleges and universities.

The conversation sped up. Although they appreciated Obama’s legacy, one student noted that few of the people who had most powerfully worked for change in the black community did so inside the electoral system. They were people such as Malcolm and Martin, who exacted pressure on a system that did not present solutions quickly enough.

“Things are going to get worse, but it’s getting better because we are getting people to listen,” Ali said. “You can’t ignore Beyoncé, you can’t ignore Kendrick Lamar, because black people are becoming more serious about our state in society. So many people are becoming, like, woke.”

“Now we have the power of the people,” said Raven Barker, a 23-year-old broadcasting major known to his friends as Jim West, his hip-hop name. “By the time we hit our 30s and 40s, we’re going to be the ones that are leading the line and we will have the power to control the conversation.”

“I think the old people have already accepted ‘This is my life,’” said Deja Wilson, 19, who was studying criminal justice and planned a career as a police officer and then a prosecutor. “They are like, ‘I raised you, I gave you the information [about racism], I bust my ass every day, I make sure that there was food on your table, why do I have to be rioting for you?’”

The students were asked whether they had any talks with white people about race relations. They were told stories from Iowa about how many people there thought Obama spoke too much about race, fostering even more division.

“Are they trolling?” one student asked. “I would assume they are looking for a laugh.”

“Do they not watch the news every day?” another asked. “I would have sympathy for them, but I would feel sorry about their mental state.”

With the election approaching, Ali was about to make up her mind. Her friends had shared a video of a protester who bought a ticket to a private Clinton fundraiser in Charleston. The woman hoisted what appeared to be a pillowcase that said “We have to bring them to heel.” It was a reference to a Clinton quote in which she discussed the importance of tougher prison sentences for “super-predators.” It seemed she was talking about young black men.

“Will you apologize to black people for mass incarceration?” the protester asked.

Clinton tried to answer, but the woman continued talking. As she was escorted out, Clinton told the audience, “Back to the issues.”

The video horrified Ali. Back to the issues? Clinton’s support of the crime bill was the issue. By the next afternoon, Ali was wearing a “Bernie Sanders” T-shirt as she looked out a window and saw a long line forming to see Clinton. The melody of “Lift Every Voice and Sing’’ could be heard ringing out from the campus bell tower.

* * *

When at last it was all over in South Carolina and Nevada, and Clinton had won each, Nevada narrowly and South Carolina overwhelmingly, and Trump had cleaned his opponents’ clocks in both states, Melissa Petersen would sit in the back yard of her home on Barbara Street in Las Vegas and listen to the shrieks coming from atop the Stratosphere, a giant observation tower that rises high above her Beverly Green neighborhood. She knew the screams by heart — three variations that differentiated the amusement rides that provoked them, from the mechanical claw to the bungee jump to the capsule shot up and down.

Las Vegas again capturing the American mood. There was the hysterical giggling scream. There was the scream of utter terror. And there was the undulating scream that started high-pitched and fell to a long and low moan.

Part 4: A Nation, Divided

In Michigan and Texas, voters choose between hope and fear.

Workers at Detroit Manufacturing Systems, an auto-parts company in Detroit, await a visit by Hillary Clinton on March 4. (Melina Mara/The Washington Post)

To reach the heart of the matter in Michigan on a late-winter evening, navigate out of downtown Detroit and drive 20 miles north on Interstate 94, hang a left at Highway 59, and continue for seven miles, the darkening way illumined by the flickering yellowish glow of American commerce, until you reach yet another strip mall at the corner of Schoenherr Road. There, in a storefront headquarters stuck between Buy Buy Baby and Long Tall Sally, members of the Macomb County Republican Party were coming out of the cold to watch their presidential candidates debate again on television.

Macomb County, in the vast suburban landscape above Detroit, is mostly white and middle-class, filled with people who fled the troubled city and shed their pasts as Democrats and union members. Many were from families that voted for FDR and roared with the multitudes in Cadillac Square when John F. Kennedy opened his fall campaign there on Labor Day in 1960. All of that is long gone. It was 36 years ago that Macomb County became synonymous with Reagan Democrats, but the rightward lean began there a decade earlier with the embrace of George Wallace, the Southern segregationist.

Now the territory was largely Republican, and another movement, the phenomenon of Donald Trump, had turned it once again into a case study of modern politics.

Among those in attendance at the debate watch were two people who might be considered bookends of the Trump movement. One was Jason Powrozek, an earnest 17-year-old senior at Anchor Bay High School, whom the state field director had praised as the most productive volunteer in Michigan. The other was longtime political aide Ken Matiyow, state Sen. Jack Brandenburg’s district chief of staff. Matiyow’s boss was the first Michigan senator to endorse Trump, an early rider among public officials across the country starting to scramble aboard the Trump train even while others were desperately trying to blow up the tracks.

If you wonder what the Trump phenomenon said about America, Matiyow advised that you spend time knocking on doors in Macomb County. The feedback at address after address was the same. All anti-immigration, all the time. “Man, does that strike a nerve. It gets an incredible response when you get to talking about illegal immigration. People don’t want them to ever be legal citizens.” There was one front-stoop conversation where they were denouncing the idea of a path to citizenship and saluting Trump’s plan to build a wall and make Mexico pay for it, and someone heard Matiyow talking and said, ‘Hey, let me have a sign, too.’” On immigration, Matiyow said, there was “a massive outpouring of disgust.”

After describing how Brandenburg had helped turn Macomb County red by pounding away on conservative issues and taking the territory back one house at a time, Matiyow concluded a riff on immigration by telling a personal story about where he lived. For the past several years, he had been renting a place at the Village Park apartments on Dequindre Road in Shelby Township, not far from the party headquarters. When he moved there, he said, “there was no one there from India. Now half the building is made up of people from India. These are young techies who have come to replace American workers. This is a real scandal.” The Indians, he said, all had proper documentation but were taking jobs away from Americans.

Matiyow sat in the front row as the televised debate beamed in from Houston. He was alternately animated and subdued as what he was watching descended into playground insults, just as the larger campaign itself had devolved, with Trump sandwiched between his twin tormenters and twin targets, Marco Rubio on one side, Ted Cruz on the other. He laughed when Trump said Mitt Romney had run a terrible campaign. He clapped when Trump said that he was the only one onstage who had hired people and that Rubio hadn’t hired anybody. He looked around to see who was laughing when Rubio said that while important events were unfolding, Trump was busy firing Dennis Rodman on “The Apprentice.” A perturbed look crossed his face when Cruz and Rubio started yapping at his man at the same time, rendering the conversation unintelligible.

And when it was over, Matiyow said he preferred town hall meetings over debates. The guy next to him said he thought that Trump was perhaps the new Andrew Jackson.

Jason, sitting 10 feet behind them, kept a calm demeanor throughout. He used to worry about what Trump would say during a debate and how other candidates went after him, but no more. “Mr. Trump says whatever he wants to and it doesn’t hurt him,” he said.

Jason Powrozek, 17, makes calls to potential voters at a Donald Trump phone bank in Rochester, Mich., on Feb. 27. He was praised as the most productive volunteer in Michigan, putting in hours after school and a full schedule on weekends. (Linda Davidson/The Washington Post)

Jason offered a different notion of how to look at Trump, a variation of the dream that anyone can become rich and powerful. When first encountered at the regional Trump headquarters a few days earlier, the teenager was soft-spoken and polite. It would be hard to imagine him shouting insults at a rival, or at a protester at a Trump rally. Jason lived in New Baltimore, on the edge of Lake St. Clair, and would not turn 18 until October, in time to vote in the general election. His mother worked at home, and his father was a sales rep for Cintas, a uniform company. Earlier that afternoon, he had made the 45-minute drive along 26 Mile Road from high school, wearing black dress shoes and a suit and tie, his brown hair gelled straight in front.

His support for Trump was rooted in personality more than the construction of a wall. He had never been much for cartoons or sports but was into prime-time television, and his favorite show was “The Apprentice,” which he began watching when he was 12. Trump had been an authority figure in his life ever since. “I have always looked up to Mr. Trump. I like how when he walks into a room, he commands the room. I enjoyed that show. He was almost like a role model for me. That show was able to convey his personality and charismatic appeal. I would like to become more like him. I am currently not that way, but in my own progression I would like to develop my personality more like Mr. Trump’s. I would like to become successful and help other people become successful.”

Since getting involved in January, Jason had placed more successful calls from the Trump phone bank than any other volunteer in the state. He said he kept finding people who called themselves Democrats and said they had never voted for a Republican. At Anchor Bay High, he said, he worried at first about how classmates and teachers would react to his support of Trump, then decided, “I’m going to express myself and my views.” He wore a Trump T-shirt to school and spoke up in government class, where he thought his teacher, James Swartz, admired him “even though I know Mr. Trump is not his first choice.”

Swartz later praised Jason’s involvement as an example of what it means to be an American. He had never had a student “take such an active role” in campaigning. “Neil Simon’s ‘Biloxi Blues’ comes to mind when thinking about Jason’s role in political activism. In the play, Epstein accuses Eugene of ‘always standing around watching what’s happening.’ He says, ‘You’re scribbling in your book what other people do. You have to get in the middle of it. You have to take sides. Make a contribution to the fight.’ Jason is simply doing what Epstein is asking Eugene to do. Instead of scribbling in a notebook, which I guess would be this generation’s version in the form of Facebook, Twitter or Internet blog, he is making his contributions through his actions.”

The fact that Jason was inspired by “The Apprentice” revealed something else about the Trump phenomenon. The New York real estate mogul’s appeal was many layered. In the entryway near where Jason worked the phones, two retired men wearing “Make America Great Again” caps sat at a card table, unofficial bouncers of a sort. Gary Hohf, 63, and Bill Manjar, 60, fit the Macomb County Reagan Democrat archetype — beefy guys who grew up as Democrats, once belonged to unions (United Auto Workers and Ironworkers) and felt “screwed,” as they said, by various free-trade agreements, left the Democratic Party and were now all in for Trump. His was the first campaign they had ever felt the desire to join.

But when Jason exited the headquarters to canvass that day in Shelby Township to promote Trump ahead of the Michigan primary, which was then two weeks away, his companion was another variation of Trump supporter, Rick Cruz, a 62-year-old self-employed entrepreneur who shared young Jason’s admiration for Trump’s commercial success. In listening to Cruz, one could see a connection between Trump’s evangelism about money and his unexpected popularity among religious evangelicals, between mega-churches brimming with believers who want to be saved and arenas filled with people who want to be taught how to become rich. Prophets and profits, in this sense speaking the same language.

Cruz said he had read many of Trump’s books, including “Midas Touch” and “Why We Want You to Be Rich,” and had taken courses Trump sponsored in real estate and wealth development. “I admire success,” he said. Trump was his favorite profit evangelist, but he also was keen on investor Warren Buffett (“If I could just sit down in that fast-food restaurant where he eats every day, I would love to do that!”) and motivational speaker Tony Robbins, and was just starting to get into the other businessman Trump is always trumpeting, Carl Icahn. Was he rich himself? Cruz had lost his share of homes and cars over the years, he said, and he had been “divorced twice, like Trump.” But “I’m comfortable enough with what I’ve earned. I haven’t had to draw unemployment this last year even though I haven’t worked.”

The wide, quiet streets of the Shelby Township subdivisions were mostly empty as Jason and Cruz weaved their way canvassing late in the afternoon. They finally found a guy hauling things out of his garage on Sandy Creek. His name was Mike Miroslaw, and he said he was not that into politics and thought it was “a really bad crop this year, a bad crop.” But if the choice was between Trump and Hillary Clinton, he was going with Trump. “I want this country to get back to where it should be,” he said. “It’s time to focus on the U.S., on this country again.”

* * *

Fatima Salman, pictured with two of her three sons on March 2, is a working mother living with her husband in Bloomfield Hills, Mich. Salman attended a West Bloomfield Township board meeting a month earlier in support of a resolution that had passed but was being challenged by a roomful of angry tea party conservatives. The resolution declared that West Bloomfield was a “welcoming” city for immigrants. (Linda Davidson/The Washington Post)

Focusing on the country was precisely what Fatima Salman was doing. She was an organizer with the Technical Assistance Center in Detroit, an outfit working to help the city’s neighborhoods emerge from decades of decay, and was among hundreds of businesspeople and community leaders attending the winter conference of the Detroit Regional Chamber at the MotorCity Casino Hotel. The conference was about reviving the city’s neighborhoods. That sort of work was what Salman thought being an American was all about. But there was more. She grew up in the suburbs, in Troy. Her mother taught Montessori. Her dad worked at Chrysler. “We always had a Chrysler in our driveway. We are very much a part of the Detroit car culture. We are so American!”

Now she was married to a doctor and lived in West Bloomfield with three children who attended public schools, and it was in that suburban setting, at a meeting of the West Bloomfield Township board a month earlier, that police escorted her to the safety of her car. She had attended the meeting in support of a resolution that the board had passed but was being challenged by a roomful of angry tea party conservatives. The resolution declared that West Bloomfield was a “welcoming” city for immigrants. Salman’s parents came from India 42 years ago. Her husband grew up in Syria. They were American citizens and Muslims who worshiped at the Muslim Unity Center in Bloomfield Hills. The Detroit area had the largest concentration of Muslims in a nation of immigrants. Salman had always been proud that Michigan “was so welcoming to Muslims” — until that night at the town hall meeting when she was surrounded by anger. Reporters were at the meeting, and the discussion was recorded.

One resident talked about the beheading of Christians. Another said Muslims wanted to change the U.S. Constitution. A third said new immigrants from Syria and other Muslim countries would “never be American” — that these immigrants were taking jobs and resources away from real Americans and that the United States was in danger of becoming a Third World country.

“I was shaking,” Salman said. “It shows we have a lot of work to do. We have to work overtime to overcome all the negatives. . . . Trump by himself has changed Muslim life so much. The fear of the other. Everything they were saying at that town hall was what he was saying.” The incident and others like it, as chilling as they may be, had one positive effect, she said. They forced the Muslims she knew to coalesce and get active and engage the world around them and not recede into their safe zones. The incident at the township meeting also challenged her view of America, she said, but did not change it. She had lived in Syria once, as an exchange student in the late 1990s, and her husband had grown up there, and they knew what it meant to live in a closed society with an oppressive government. The United States, she said, was “a country that celebrates the beauty of diversity, the prosperity of diversity. The whole world looks at America and says, ‘You guys have got it!’”

Nakeyja Cade bathes her three children in bottled water on March 1 in Flint, Mich. Her her 1-year-old daughter, Zariyah, at left in the bathtub, scored high on a blood test for lead. The working single mother said that Zariyah began having seizures shortly after she was born and that the lead in the water is responsible. Cade’s 3-year-old son’s levels were not as high. She has not yet tested her 5-year-old daughter and herself. (Linda Davidson/The Washington Post)

Perhaps, but they might look north to the city of Flint and say something else. Here was another Michigan story leading to citizen discontent. Flint, where the water was so full of lead that it was poisoning its residents, where the people were victims of government disregard, where Clinton and Bernie Sanders would come to campaign and return to debate and denounce a slow-to-react state government run by Republicans. Flint was where the Rev. Gerald Cardwell talked about how his church, Quinn Chapel AME, the oldest in the city’s African American community, had lost almost all of its younger members since General Motors left town. The average age was now 65. He worried about that, along with why his hands started cracking a few years ago because of the additives in the water, and then the poisoning came along and he stopped cooking and showering with tap water.

His was the city where Nakeyja Cade, a single mother who worked at the Forman Mills clothing warehouse, worried about what that tainted water did to her 1-year-old daughter, Zariyah, who keeps testing high for lead in her blood and started having seizures and passing out a few months after she was born. And it was where the Rev. Allen Overton, a Baptist minister who had lived there for half a century, first noticed the funny color of the water, then the irritation of his skin, then thought it was odd that there seemed to be more concern early on about the water corroding car parts than about it harming people. How did he define America during this election season? As a nation that was still divided by race and economics. “I don’t know what it means to take America back or make it great again,” he said. The words seemed like code to him, but entirely irrelevant to his city’s struggles.

* * *

A billboard put up by business owners welcomes visitors to Harrison, Ark., a town with “beautiful people, no wrong exits and no bad neighborhoods.” It hangs on State Road 412 above a sign that says “‘Diversity’ is a code word for #whitegenocide.” (Andrea Morales/The Washington Post)

On the Sunday morning when Trump, in a CNN television interview, did not disavow the endorsement of former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard David Duke, Jeff Crockett sat in his home and flinched. He lived on a farm in Harrison, a rustic Arkansas hamlet deep in the Ozarks. With a town square that looked like a western movie set, and more than 40 churches from First Baptist to Brand New Church, Harrison had tried to move beyond an unsettling distinction. It was the listed address of the KKK.

The Klan’s headquarters were nearly 20 miles out of the city limits, but the mailing address said Harrison, and that was enough to keep the city’s racist history fresh. During riots in 1905 and 1909, whites ran out practically all the African Americans living in the city. The reputation held that Harrison was a “sundown town,” a place unsafe for blacks at night. The current census said that about 0.3 percent of the city — 43 people — identified as African American.

“We never hear any complaints from them,” said Crockett, a former mayor who grew up in the Chicago suburbs. He was bald, with a hearty laugh and piercing blue eyes. As mayor, Crockett tried to reshape Harrison’s reputation. When the city tried to host a convention for nonviolence, parents of black students from Little Rock were so afraid of sending their kids to Harrison that they asked if they could be accompanied by a police escort. In 2014, Crockett held a ceremony with those students in which they symbolically put “hate” in a casket and declared it buried. Some residents complained, asking why they were bringing up the subject of race.

“There’s a percentage of racism here, but there’s racism everywhere,” Crockett said. “Diversity is harder to grasp because they’ve never been around it. They haven’t had to drive through the projects, they don’t know what Cabrini-Green is.”

After Barack Obama was elected, Crockett said open displays of racism were muted. “No one wanted to introduce racism,” he said. With Trump, he had concerns that his leadership might reintroduce that word he buried with the schoolchildren. “I worry a little that some people, very few people, might start beating the drum louder because of what Trump is doing.”

Their slice of the country, largely ignored in politics, had suddenly become thrust into the national conversation. Republicans were eager to pick votes from rural and working-class white voters, and the top three candidates had visited northwestern Arkansas in a 24-hour span. Their presence, and Trump’s comments, provided neither solace nor clarity.

Men chat while drinking coffee at the Townhouse Cafe in Harrison, Ark., on March 8. They are a part of a group of locals who gather at the diner for coffee every morning. (Andrea Morales/The Washington Post)

On the eve of Super Tuesday, Crockett headed to the Townhouse Cafe, a restaurant with exposed-brick walls and tablecloths that read “Société Générale.” The old-timers liked to come to this place each morning, visiting with one another from table to table. As Crockett munched on a breakfast sandwich and hash browns, Dave Fitton joined him briefly.

“So who are you voting for tomorrow?” Crockett said.

“If there was a libertarian candidate, I’d vote for them,” Fitton said. “But there’s not, so I’m not sure I’m going to vote.”

Fitton thought the government had sunk beyond reproach. “Even when you send people with good intentions, they get up in Washington, D.C., and they get a lot in the club,” he said. “Republican, Democrat, if you just look at what they’re saying, there’s not a lot of difference.”

“I’m just confused right now,” said Tim Lauer, 68. “I’m waiting for the shoe to drop to finally expose what these people are really thinking. I just don’t trust them.”

Lauer used to own the cafe with his partner, who died in 2012. They abandoned the partying lifestyle in New Orleans in the ’80s to avoid the scourge of AIDS, seeking refuge in a town that was dry until 2011. The town folk rarely acknowledged that the cafe was run by a gay couple, and Lauer worked to be accepted. He held his tongue when customers complained if Lauer did “woman’s work” of waiting on their tables. When he wanted to introduce the chicken fricassee as a dish, customers steered clear of it until they renamed it “stewed chicken over rice.”

These regulars were independent, and proud to call themselves mountain folk. They didn’t believe in rocking the boat. They said what they resented most about the country today was not the poverty or education level of their town, but that politicians didn’t fully understand their desire to run their own lives. They were interested in business, maybe, but not government programs. They were interested in the moral teachings of their pastor, but not this president. And they would not vote if they didn’t want to. Lauer understood that now, too. He said he was unsure whether he’d cast a ballot in the primary.

How did his patrons feel about Trump’s push to get more votes from people in rural areas who did not go to college? George Cady, 62, a former trucker, said he thought the country was in dire need of some more common sense. “Our president is a socialist, and we are in debt,” he said. “I personally think politicians could learn from us. I didn’t go to college, but I know I have to pay my credit card bills on time. So what does that tell you?”

At another table, Frank Hampson and his friend Joe Bilbee were leafing through copies of World War II magazines. “I know how to fix the illegals problem,” said Hampson, a justice of the peace. The government, he said, should find illegal immigrants and then force them to work in gardens and grow vegetables before deporting them. “Before you knew it, we would have all these fruits and vegetables from our gardens,” Hampson said. “And it would send a message that if you come to the United Sates, all you will do is garden.”

As Lauer walked out of the restaurant, he announced to Crockett that he was leaving town. He was moving to Eureka, Ill., a community that had a gay bar, and he was eager to hoist up a big rainbow flag without any worry.

* * *

Jorge Silva, left, the director of Hispanic media for Hillary Clinton’s campaign; Choco Meza, the top volunteer at Clinton headquarters in San Antonio; and campaign volunteer Ernesto Aguilar listen to their candidate speak on the television on March 1 at the campaign’s San Antonio headquarters after election results for the Texas primary were announced. (Spencer Selvidge/The Washington Post)

Texas and Michigan seem at the center of things this year in many ways. The vote may be more decisive elsewhere, but the threads of the story weave through these two states, the debate over different definitions of what it meant to be an American. Texas, like Michigan, was a great divide. Here was one Texas: the richest donor base of conservative money in the era of Citizens United. Texas, where Alex Jones, America’s airwave conspiratorialist, portrayed a world in which 9/11 was an inside job and the moon landings were faked. Texas, where public officials seriously questioned whether the Jade Helm military exercise was a prelude to a government takeover of the state. Texas, where officials urged gun manufacturers to move after the shootings at Sandy Hook. Texas, in the vanguard of voter-ID laws, abortion restrictions, guns in government buildings, and textbooks rewritten to eliminate history with a liberal slant. Texas, with the longest border and more than a thousand miles of Trump’s imagined great wall.

Then the other Texas, the land of Latinos who are rising faster than any group in the country and by large percentages want nothing to do with the wall or the idea of deporting 11 million or 12 million undocumented immigrants. San Antonio is the heart of this Tex-Mex Texas, the one that inspired the notion of demographics as destiny, an eventuality of a blue Lone Star that would change everything about American politics. The idea still seems a far distance away, if it would ever arrive.

Among the abuelas of this other Texas is Choco Meza, the top volunteer at Clinton headquarters in San Antonio. She was an immigrant herself, arriving in Texas in the early 1950s at age 3 with her parents and four siblings from Zaragoza in the Mexican province of Coahuila. Their first stop was Uvalde in the Rio Grande Valley, where her father, Alfonso R. Gonzalez, dug ditches for ranchers. Then they moved on to Eagle Pass, up along the border, where they lived in public housing, and where a second-grade teacher scolded Meza for bringing her Spanish-speaking mother to school. “If she doesn’t know English, why is she here?” the teacher asked. “Because she is with me,” Meza replied.

The family finally made it to San Antonio’s west side, with these results from three generations: All five children went to college and three, including Meza, to graduate school. Among 13 grandchildren, three are lawyers and the others work in homeland security, cybersecurity and various businesses. Meza’s son and daughter are lawyers. When she was asked what it meant to be an American, she said: “Just look at my family. That is an American success story.”

The anger and frustration that permeated this campaign left Meza disheartened. What a different world she lived in from that old gentleman in rural Arkansas who thought undocumented immigrants could be punished by having to grow gardens. So many obstacles that could have made Meza feel cynical about the democratic process, she said. As a woman, as an immigrant — “I can think of all these ways that I could have been held back, but I had to work through it, we have to work through it. Just because things don’t happen right away is not reason to be belligerent to our own country. We may not be a perfect country, but we certainly are a great country.”

One of Meza’s oldest friends in San Antonio was Rosie Castro, whose mother, Victoria, arrived in San Antonio as an orphan from Mexico at age 6, living with her guardians, the Garcias. Castro also grew up with the Garcias. Her young mother never married, never got past third grade, worked as a housekeeper, but could read in Spanish and English, and sent Rosie, her only child, to Little Flower Catholic School and then to Our Lady of the Lake University. Rosie never married, either, but had twin boys, and as she became more involved in politics in San Antonio, she took them with her to meetings and rallies all over town.

Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-Tex.) and his mother, Rosie Castro, have lunch at Mi Tierra in San Antonio on Super Tuesday. Rosie Castro was a single mother who raised twin sons, now 41, Joaquin and Julian, who, after being mayor of San Antonio, now works in President Obama’s Cabinet as secretary of housing and urban development and is on the shortlist of potential running mates for Hillary Clinton.(Spencer Selvidge/The Washington Post)

As Rosie Castro sat in Henry’s Puffy Tacos eating lunch a few days before the Texas primary, she pondered the same question asked of many dozens of people over the past month. What did it mean to her to be an American? She said that when she started as an activist four decades ago, it seemed to her that America had “a lot of prejudice and no remedy. . . . It didn’t matter what the issue was, it looked like we were screwed.” But she had always loved the country nonetheless. “Ever since I was a child, my thing was the American flag,” she said. “I sold little American flags then. Later I had an American flag in front of my home. I just so fundamentally believe in the ideals of America. I believe that fundamentally Americans are good people. Even though we face difficulties, in a democracy there is a way to change things. You have to be engaged. You have to understand that things don’t just happen. I think back to 30-some years ago when I ran for city council and didn’t stand a chance, to today, when my sons could be president someday.”

Her twin sons, now 41, are Joaquin and Julian Castro. They went to Stanford and Harvard and got law degrees and became politicians. One served in the Texas legislature and is now a congressman. The other, after being mayor of San Antonio, now works in President Obama’s Cabinet as secretary of housing and urban development and is on the shortlist of potential running mates for Hillary Clinton. Here is one of the central tensions of the political debate this year. Although some express dismay about a lost America and the dilution of the national ideal by an influx of immigrants, there are people like Choco Meza and Rosie Castro who believe that the American ideal is alive to them and their descendants as never before.

Joaquin Castro, the congressman, came home to San Antonio that weekend to campaign for a local legislative friend and for Clinton. “People are motivated by two things,” he said at one rally. “Hope or fear.” And fear had been let loose this year, he said, through the scapegoating of immigrants and talk of a wall across the Mexican border. “In the era of Donald Trump, you can’t stay quiet. They are talking about us. The people of this neighborhood. And a lot of that talk started in Texas. This was ground zero.”

Audrey Garcia was driving home from a cross-training class on Saturday morning when she saw Castro walking along Commerce Street, door-knocking in the Edgewood district on San Antonio’s west side. She pulled over and got out of her SUV, bringing along her teenage daughter to meet the lawmaker. She said she wanted her daughter to be proud of politics and proud of her country, not angry.

A protester is escorted out of a rally for Donald Trump on March 1 in Louisville. (John Bazemore/Associated Press)

The next day, in Louisville, a different side of America. Johanna Hribal had decided she needed to take a stand. Donald Trumpfull name okay was coming to town, and the diminutive 24-year-old middle-school foreign-language teacher with long black hair had decided to organize a protest. She was no lefty. She had never organized anything before. She did not even know who would get her vote. What she did know is that she disliked what she considered to be Trump’s bullying, wild boasting and arrogance, and feared it would ruin America. She had watched a John Oliver video detailing Trump’s faults and read that fact checkers deemed more than three-quarters of the Trump statements they examined as false or mostly false. Maybe she could help stem the momentum.

As Hribal put out her protest call on Facebook, strangers from around the country warned her to be careful. Trump rallies could get violent, they wrote. When a local television station asked to interview her about the cause, she called her mother in Virginia. Concern, but not complete support there. “You know I actually am going to vote for him,” her mother said of Trump. “I just don’t really like Hillary.”

The plan moved forward anyway. Hribal straightened her hair and wore a baseball cap to throw off any security guard who might have seen her on television. She wore a T-shirt with a bald eagle on it. At 1 that afternoon, she joined the line to enter Louisville’s convention center, in the heart of its industrial downtown. Once inside, she waited for more protesters to find her.

“There are no seats here,” Hribal said, although her protest was known as #emptytheseats. “We’ll just stand and walk out.”

Among those who joined her was Keith Rose, burly and bearded, who came with a handmade sign that said “Make America Great Again.” The motto nauseated him. The past eight years, he said, had been the happiest in his life. Rose grew up gay in a small town in the 1990s, fearing that bullies might kill him. Now he had married the love of his life and watched a president, after some hesitation, fully embrace gay people. “What we’re seeing is a lot of resistance to change in this country and it’s sad,” Rose said. “But we’ve come too far to let it get away.”

The hall began to fill. Soon they were surrounded by men with thick beards and women in jeans, dancing and singing along to “Uptown Girl.” Hribal got nervous. Then the rally started. A woman sang the national anthem. A Korean War vet saluted the flag. New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie told the crowd that Trump was the only person who could beat Clinton. And out came Trump to deafening applause.

Hribal was too short to see him through the tangle of arms and heads and cellphones. She was surrounded by women in American flag paraphernalia and men with caps proclaiming their veteran status. The crowd began shouting the candidate’s name.

Was it time for action?

A protester holds up a sign reading “Immigrants make America great” as he disrupts a rally for Donald Trump on March 1 in Louisville. (John Bazemore/Associated Press)

When Trump congratulated himself for introducing the debate about illegal immigration, a group of protesters on the other side of the room began to yell, although Hribal could not quite make out what they were saying. A teenager standing in front of her in a black Green Day sweatshirt turned red in the face and began to jump toward the protesters, both middle fingers in the air.

“Build that wall!” the crowd shouted. “Build that wall!” As the chant continued, a man in a purple sweater standing behind Hribal raised a hand in the air, clenching his fist. The crowd members were so riled up that they booed at Trump’s utterance of the word “Mexico.”

Hribal typed a message furiously into her cellphone. It was time. She hoisted a sign in the air and yelled, “EMPTY THE SEATS!”

The teenager in the black Green Day sweatshirt turned and sneered. He grabbed the sign and ripped it to shreds. Rose hoisted a new sign, with the name “Bernie” written in the colors of a rainbow. Another man tore it from his hands and stomped on it.

“Get them out of here!” Trump yelled from the stage. “Out!”

Men in the crowd lunged at Hribal, extending their arms, but Rose acted as a shield. Police officers were coming to escort the protesters out, but the path was blocked. The crowd seethed at them and called them losers. Hribal began to shake. As more officers approached to lead her and her friends out of the hall, a man in a green trucker hat leaned toward her. He whispered, “This old man will whip you.”

Outside, Hribal waited near the entrance to see if any more protesters would be kicked out. One was a young black woman who said she was called vile racist and sexist names and shoved by the crowd. Video of her harassment later went viral. Ronald Fernandez, 29, came to find Hribal and wrapped her in his arms. He was her boyfriend.

“I’m so glad you’re safe,” he said, kissing her on the cheek.

“I’m a little shaken up!” she said. “I’m a little invigorated. Look at these people who are coming out to speak against this guy. Maybe there is hope in America.”

* * *

Return to San Antonio for one final scene in the broad expanse in front of the Alamo. The afternoon was soft and warm, a becalmed sea compared with the raging whirlwind of Louisville. Smiling gaggles of 15-year-old girls posed in their flowing blue quinceañera dresses. Tourists stood erect on Segways and glided by single-file. African Americans and Anglos and Latinos came and went, men in cowboy hats, babies in strollers, people speaking Spanish and English and German. And sitting on the stone wall in the shade, a fellow named Maurice Jones. What was his definition of what it meant to be an American?

Turned out Jones was from Wales, the village of Tal-y-bont. He was 63, a retired sergeant major in the British army who had seen action in Northern Ireland and the Falklands. And he was more than game for the question. He loved America as much as any native-born son, and to him the Alamo was the symbol. For many years now, he had made an annual pilgrimage from Wales to San Antonio and booked a room at the Crockett Hotel and visited the Alamo from late February until March 6, the date the mission fell to the Mexican army 180 years ago. He had been obsessed with the place since he was a boy and saw John Wayne play Davy Crockett in the 1960 movie.

Jones thought he knew America, until this year. That morning he had been asking other guests at the hotel to explain the rise of Trump and the ruckus in the Republican Party. He knew about nationalism, and in fact said he would vote for Britain to leave the European Union. And like all Europeans, he certainly knew about the difficulties Western nations faced dealing with a flood of refugees and immigrants, although he thought the Britons were handling the problem more rationally than the Americans.

But “all the nastiness and name-calling on the telly from Mr. Trump” — that was beyond him. And so was the notion that America was not great. “This is still basically the land of opportunity, is it not? If you work at it, you can still get on with it, can you not? It is a beautiful country. If I had it to do over again, and I were a young lad, this is where I would want to live.”

THE END

david.maraniss@washpost.com

robert.samuels@washpost.com

More from The Washington Post

Ferguson: Three Minutes That Changed America

After the Storm: Katrina 10 Years Later

The Threatened Net: How the Web Became a Perilous Place

State of Terror: The War Against ISIS

Runaway Planet: How Global Warming is already changing the Earth

Justice for None

Lethal Force: The true toll of police shootings in America

The Resistance: Digital dissent in the age of machines

A Marine on Trial