Bills Come Due

     If you’ve been paying attention to the caperings of the Usurper Administration, you’re already aware of some of the Usurper-in-Chief’s lunacies: e.g., letting China back into our national power grid; sending a large force of troops and armor into Syria; legitimizing “transwomen” in women’s and girls’ sports; yanking the Keystone XL pipeline’s construction permit; suspending all deportations of illegal aliens; and so on. The irrationality of these “policy decisions” is self-evident. You hardly need to think about them to realize it. Yet they’re a critical component of the Left’s initiative to cement itself into federal power.

     They’re payoffs, you see. The successful practice of coalition politics requires payoffs to the various components of the coalition. A component group that deems itself inadequately rewarded for its contributions will withdraw its support and look for a better deal elsewhere. And in this dynamic lies the greatest vulnerability of power-for-power’s-sake coalition building. For as soon as the coalition reaches a size that allows it to contend for majority status, the members of the coalition will all experience a strong incentive to increase their demands.

     The above makes a political coalition uniquely fragile—certainly more so than a politics of conviction. Even so, successful coalitions have been constructed, and have succeeded in wielding power for some time. But the natural fractiousness of a majority or near-majority coalition can be amplified greatly by another condition. I wrote about it here: the interests of the various components to the coalition must not be mutually antagonistic.

     At the time, I was concerned with the self-defeating behavior of Republican power brokers. Their behavior these past four years suggests that they thought the “If you don’t vote for us, you’ll get them” gambit would assure the continued support of sincere conservatives, constitutionalists, Trumpists, and America-Firsters. They were wrong, as they’re learning today.

     The Democrats are about to learn an even harsher lesson.

     The Usurper Administration has put itself in a bind. Several of the more important components to its coalition are mutually antagonistic to others. That makes payoffs to some component groups inimical to the interests of others—and that puts a strain on the coalition that such assemblages have seldom withstood. If you think the recent actions of AntiFa against Democrat offices are a harbinger of danger for the Usurpers, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

     Consider as an example the Usurpers’ action against the Keystone XL pipeline and their open hostility to hydrofracturing, a.k.a. fracking. This is a payoff to the militant environmentalist groups. But there are an awful lot of jobs and an ocean of money involved in both the pipeline and fracking. Big Labor especially loves fracking, as it produces copious amounts of both oil and natural gas. The Usurpers’ strokes against those enterprises will cost the Democrats a significant fraction of their traditional support: the American blue-collar worker.

     There are other, similar clashes between other components of the Democrat coalition. The feminist Left will not sit still as transwomen and transgirls flood into women’s sports. That’s to say nothing of their contention with actual women for elevation in corporate America. Big trouble brewing there.

     The most interesting area is in the enforcement of the immigration laws and border control. Low-wage jobs have been going preponderantly to illegal aliens for quite some time. President Trump’s policy of intensified enforcement of the border damped that trend for the first time in decades. Real progress was being made at not merely apprehending illegals and deporting them but at discouraging them from entering the country in the first place. Low-skill Americans were finding that those jobs were open to them once again, while the employers of low-skill workers were finding that one of their illicit controls over their workforce was slipping from their grasp. The Usurpers intend to reverse that course...but you can’t incentivize illegals, thus implicitly penalizing American workers, and expect both groups to support you.

     Oh, the fun we’re going to have as the cracks in the Usurper coalition widen and spread!

     Yes, it will take time to produce perceptible results. But those results are on their way. No one can long maintain a coalition of groups whose interests are mutually antagonistic. Some component groups will decide that they’re being shafted by the payoffs being delivered to others. They’ll cajole. They’ll threaten. Some will depart the Democrat flock. And the Usurpers, caught between many competing fires, won’t know what to do.

     Stay tuned.