We've been consumed with the tasteless spectacle of Donald Trump's cynical appeal to the irresponsibly angry and disaffected fifth of the Republican Party.
Meantime the biggest crowds of the early campaign season have been won by someone far different.
It turns out there also is an angry and disaffected left, which is a tad irresponsible itself, throwing in with a self-described socialist democrat.
People calling themselves any version of socialist are unelectable for the foreseeable future in a general election in the United States.
But there simply is a lot of anger and disaffection and irresponsibility from all directions in the United States right now. People are seriously peeved, for entirely different reasons, indeed conflicting or competing ones.
U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, the previously referenced socialist democrat, has been drawing enthusiastic crowds of 10,000 and 15,000 in places like Madison, Wis., and Seattle. His campaign claims 28,000 came out to see him in Portland over the weekend.
These audiences cheer his message of Medicare for all, expanded Social Security benefits, free college tuition, a higher minimum wage, and a tax and regulatory structure that stops favoring the richest, punishing the poorest and eroding the middle class.
His campaign also has managed unwittingly to expose the rawness of something that was always there, but is more pronounced now. It is the demographic and geographic divide in American Democratic liberalism. It's the racial divide, of course.
White liberals in white areas--Portland is a perfect example, being 76 percent white and 6 percent black and famously progressive--tend to be upscale and well-educated. They concern themselves with the poor getting poorer and the rich richer and with sustainable living and with gays getting treated fairly.
Liberalism in diverse black-white areas such as urban centers and states like Arkansas--or at least the Democratic Party in those areas--has historically encompassed a targeted appeal to blacks based on an emphasis on civil rights, race relations, racial progress and racial justice.
Bill Clinton and Barack Obama are the two most accomplished Democrats of the modern era. That's because they, though from quite different paths, combine deftly these influences of black-white culture and white establishment liberalism. They played in Portland and Ferguson.
In their campaigns, Clinton and Obama blended. They synthesized. They related. They bridged the gap. They preached in the black church. If they pandered, at least they sensed the need, understood the benefit and knew how. Their college friends forming their brain trusts were from Georgetown, Yale, Harvard, Columbia and Oxford.
Sanders hails from the rural liberal enclave of tiny Vermont, which is 95 percent white. He is the former mayor of Burlington, which is 89 percent white. He does not have the cultural experience of a Clinton or an Obama that lends itself to an ability to effect such a blend. That doesn't make him a bad person.
Sanders speaks almost exclusively about "economic justice" generally. He considers it obvious that of course he is talking about fairness for everybody.
But twice now he has been heckled or interrupted by members of the Black Lives Matter movement, which sprang in 2013 from outrage over the deaths of African Americans at the hands of police.
Black Lives Matter says Sanders offers nothing, or too little, for the distinct and deeper despair facing African Americans.
Hillary Clinton learned a little about African American relations at Bill's side in Arkansas. She enjoys the benefits of marital association with his popularity in the black community.
But she's not in Bill's or Barack's league. And this new divide has vexed her as well.
Her campaign invited a Black Lives Matter leader to her announcement of her candidacy, and he went to social media afterward to say he'd heard nothing of direct interest to the movement.
Later Hillary gave a speech in a black church in Missouri that was well-received except for her saying she had been taught that "all lives matter." Members of the congregation told the media afterward that they didn't like that. They said they wanted to hear that black lives specifically matter.
Sanders, driven from a stage Saturday in Seattle by two Black Lives Matter women decrying "liberal white supremacists," actually may be doing Clinton an unintended favor by fading some of the heat for her.
Right now Hillary has more problems than that.
The opening and overplayed events in the Democratic nominating process will be caucuses in Iowa, where the Democrats are predominantly white liberals, and the primary in New Hampshire, which is the same story.
That's a demographic heavy with disaffection over general economic conditions, but not prioritizing the specific black condition. Those are Sanders voters, in other words. Sanders could run close or even beat Clinton in either or both.
He can't possibly win the nomination. But he can have the effect of revealing Hillary's eventual victory as far more divisive than she, and he, ever intended or understood.
John Brummett's column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at [email protected]. Read his blog at brummett.arkansasonline.com, or his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Editorial on 08/11/2015