Divided, They’ll Fall…The Democrats could be coming apart.

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Fred Siegel:

After nearly seven years in power under the leadership of President Barack Obama, legatee of both the old and new Left, the Democratic Party has managed to hold on to its base. Despite Democrats’ loss of both houses of Congress, Obama has been successful in using executive, judicial, and regulatory power to deliver subsidies and administrative rewards to liberal interest groups including trial lawyers, feminists, and the Hispanic lobby. Unlike George W. Bush, under whom the first inklings of a Tea Party rebellion first formed, Obama has kept core Democratic voters inside the tent—if not always happily so.

The Democrats have ongoing strengths. The party has shown considerable unity even in the face of landslide losses in the 2014 midterms. On a wide variety of issues, however, the Democratic base finds itself at odds with the country’s so-called “swing” voters. This poses a problem for Democrats in 2016. On issues as varied as crime, environmentalism, late-term abortion, illegal immigration, free trade, and the Iran nuclear deal, serious splits exist among self-identified Democrats. The base’s leftward shift on these issues has party moderates shaking their heads.

The Democrats are deeply dependent on black votes. “African-American voters,” explains The Cook Political Report, “accounted for Obama’s entire margin of victory in seven states: Florida, Maryland, Michigan, Nevada, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Virginia. Without these states’ 112 electoral votes, Obama would have lost decisively.” With Obama on the ballot, black voter participation exceeded white voter participation in 2012. The great fear among Democratic Party operatives in 2016 is that African-Americans will stay home. The Democratic National Committee, looking to pump up black turnout, issued a resolution in August joining “with Americans across the country in affirming [that] ‘Black lives matter’ and . . . condemn[ing] extrajudicial killings of unarmed African American men, women and children.”

The Black Lives Matter movement, financed, in part, by billionaire George Soros, rebuffed the Democratic Party’s attempts to win its formal favor—even though the resolution put the Democrats on record as supporting “the hands up, don’t shoot” mythology that emerged from the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. On the anniversary of Brown’s death, the Washington Post published a long article finding that the “vast majority” of the 585 people killed by the police during the first seven months of 2015 were armed with deadly weapons. Moreover, most were white or Hispanic. Just 24 were unarmed black men. Nonetheless, a virulent anti-police campaign ensued after Ferguson, leading police in cities such as Milwaukee, St. Louis, and Cincinnati to back off from enforcement. St. Louis police chief Sam Dotson calls this “The Ferguson Effect.”

The anti-cop rhetoric of the Black Lives Matter movement can be overlooked by the DNC and its upper-middle class, liberal supporters—for now. Their neighborhoods remain largely secure and will be the last to feel the consequences of a dogma that vilifies police. But for the vast majority of Americans, including blacks who value the extraordinary drop in crime over the past 20 years, safety isn’t something to be blithely trashed. As crime rises in big cities, the Democrats will find that they have painted themselves into a corner on law and order—and this isn’t the only issue on which they are doing so.

Environmentalism was once a bipartisan cause, but that changed once hard-charging green crusaders and big-money beneficiaries of renewable-energy subsidies—they’re often the same people—started using questionable computer-generated models of climate change to sell civilizational apocalypse. Obama’s kibosh on the Keystone XL pipeline has angered not only a strong ally—Canada—but also organized labor. Hillary Clinton spent the better part of Obama’s presidency temporizing on the issue, but once she started running for president, she came out four-square against Keystone—despite the State Department’s assurance, on her watch, that Keystone would replace the dangerous and dirty transportation of oil by rail car.

The anti-Keystone campaign was led by billionaire environmentalist Tom Steyer, who made his money in coal and hopes one day to be the Democratic governor of California. Steyer’s efforts have alienated blue-collar voters who’ve watched the environmental movement kill jobs withman-made water shortages in California and attacks against the coal industry in Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Ohio, Kentucky, and Michigan. The result? A top-down version of class warfare, in which bicoastal elites attempt to quash the incomes of middle-American workers. In the California state assembly, the water woes produced a revolt among legislators from heavily Hispanic agricultural districts. Nationally, Democrats have the support of barely one-third of white-male workers.

Obama’s extra-constitutional efforts to bestow amnesty on illegal immigrants also threaten the wages of working-class Americans, black and white. As Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama explained:

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Well, when you promise everything to everyone, somebody’s bound to get the short end of the stick. Blaming Republicans doesn’t seem to completely work anymore, either.