Shoulder to Shoulder In Dunleavy’s Pub
Dunleavy's Pub on Sullivan's Island has been family-owned and operated for thirty-four years, started to fulfill a family dream. There's an ATM humming in the corner that has probably witnessed more first dates, last calls, and 21st birthdays than the rest of us combined. The walls are shingled in license plates and framed photographs and pennants from colleges nobody in the building attended. It is a small place, a small green building on a small barrier island, and on Monday afternoon in August it held a large number of people and some big ideas.
That is the story. Not the speeches, though there were speeches, and they were good ones. Four people who want to be trusted with public office stood up in front of a wall of ballcaps and asked a crowded pub to believe South Carolina could be governed differently, and the crowd believed them loudly. But candidates asking for votes is not news. What is news, what I keep turning over in my head, is that all those people came.
On a Monday. In the late afternoon. In August.
You should understand that August in South Carolina is not a month so much as a physical condition. The air outside has a weight to it. Inside, as more people pressed in through the door, the room did what rooms full of warm bodies do, until the windows went soft at the edges and everyone's hair and brow where showing it. Nobody left. That's the part that was impressive. It got hot and loud and impossible, and nobody left.
The staff of that pub deserve a shout-out of their own, and honestly a monument. They threaded through a crowd that had no threads left in it, carrying drinks above their heads, finding gaps that did not exist a half-second earlier, remembering orders shouted over three other conversations. They were quick and kind and never once looked discouraged, a masterclass in doing hard work gracefully in a room full of people thrilled to be exactly where they were.
As the pub filled up, it got loud. Not loud like a band or loud like the weather. It was loud like a stadium that believes it can beat the odds. Conversations stacked on one another, about change and excitement and what the future holds. I could not make out a word from the person standing two feet away. The cacophony mattered more than anything said into the microphone, because the noise was not a side effect of the afternoon. It was the afternoon. That is what a room sounds like when nobody in it has given up.
Here is what was not in that room: rage, anger, contempt. There was no appetite for revenge, no interest in humiliating anybody, none of the sour, clenched energy that has become the default assumption about American politics. People are exhausted by what is happening in Washington and what it is doing to this state; that was plain in every conversation that I could make out. But exhaustion was not the fuel. The fuel was that for the first time in three decades there is a full slate on the ballot here, top to bottom, and the people packed into Dunleavy's have decided this is a thing worth sweating for.
That is the whole difference, I think. Anger shows up once and goes home. Hope shows up on a Monday afternoon at a little Irish pub on a barrier island and stays until even the sidewalk outside is full.
These are people with jobs. People with kids and aging parents and Tuesday mornings coming. They gave up an afternoon to stand shoulder to shoulder in the heat, not because any one candidate promised them a better South Carolina, but because everyone in that room has decided to go build one for themselves, and more than that, for the people they love.
It seems right that it happened here. Thirty-four years ago, in this exact building, a family bet on something nobody could promise them would work, and it worked. Everybody crowded into it on Monday is running that same math.
I have covered a lot of rooms. I have rarely heard one that loud. I have never heard one that hopeful.