Even before the election of Donald Trump, and more so afterwards, the dysfunction of the GOP has been glaringly obvious. Yet, despite the miserable favorability ratings for both Trump and the Republicans, those of the Democrats, notes Gallup, also have been dropping, and are nearly identical to that of the Republicans.

What gives? Simply put, the Democrats seem to know only what they are against — Trump — but have provided no clear sense of where they want to take the country. The party, and much of the nation, despises Trump, but there does not seem to be any huge pent-up national demand for the Democrats to take over — at least, not yet.

Part of the problem is major chasms underneath the absurd faux solidarity of the “resistance” movement on the left. These have been largely hidden in the increasingly uniformly pro-Democratic media. These differences extend beyond personal fiefdoms or stylistic differences. They reflect deep divides in terms of class and geography, and will not be easy for the party leadership to reconcile.

The gentry vs. populists

The two most remarkable campaigns of 2016 — those of Trump and Bernie Sanders — were driven by different faces of populist resentment. Yet, increasingly, the Democrats’ populist pretensions conflict with their alliance with ascendant “sovereigns of cyberspace,” whose power and wealth have waxed to almost absurd heights. Other parts of their upscale coalition include the media, academia and the upper bureaucracy.

This affluent base can embrace the progressives’ social agenda — meeting the demands of feminists, gays and minority activists. But they are less enthusiastic about the social democratic income redistribution proposed by Bernie Sanders, who is now, by some measurements, the nation’s most popular political figure. This new putative ruling class, notes author Michael Lind, sees its rise, and the decline of the rest, not as a reflection of social inequity, but rather their meritocratic virtue. Only racism, homophobia or misogyny — in other words, the sins of the “deplorables” — matter.

The Washington Post, owned by Jeff Bezos, the world’s third-richest man, reflects this socially liberal, but oligopolistic, worldview. Last spring, Bezos worked assiduously to undermine Sanders’ campaign, then promoted Clinton, and now has become a leading voice in the anti-Trump “resistance.” The gentry wing of the party, which dominates fundraising and media, as the opposition to Sanders reveals, likes its money. The tech community is famously adept at avoiding taxes.

How long can this odd pairing of socialism and oligopoly persist? There are growing sentiments on the left to begin confiscating some of the massive wealth of the tech firms. Bank of America’s Michael Harnett recently warned that continued growth of stock market wealth in a handful of tech stocks “could ultimately lead to populist calls for redistribution of the increasingly concentrated wealth of Silicon Valley.”

Geographical challenges

It’s widely noted by sentient Democrats that the party’s base is too concentrated in the big coastal cities, college towns and minority enclaves. So far, even Trumpophobia is not strong enough to shift elections in places like Montana or Nebraska. It may work in the congressional special election in Georgia, although the Democrats have done themselves no favors by nominating a nonresident and untested filmmaker.

To win in “flyover country,” the Democrats should follow the socially and environmentally moderate, economically populist course that was once the emblem of centrists and pragmatists like West Virginia’s Joe Manchin or North Dakota’s Heidi Heitkamp. Yet, such customized progressives run against the Stalinist notion of “intersectionality” that demands party members embrace every fashionable left-wing notion, from the “evils” of homeownership to police brutality, climate change and transgender bathrooms.

This creates a dilemma for many potentially anti-Trump voters. Running against energy industry growth in the Great Plains, Ohio and Texas assaults the bases of those economies. Just try telling people that they should give up their homes and cars for apartments and the bus, and then try to sell that in suburbia.

Surprisingly, Bernie Sanders, whose priorities tilt to economic concerns, may be closer to coming up with a strategy that could break the Heartland red wall than the gentry left. But his program will be expensive, and in an increasingly unequal society, free college, single-payer health care and “clean” energy all will require massive subsidies, which at some point the gentry will be forced to pay.

An American or transnational party?

Perhaps the biggest problem facing a Democratic ascendancy centers around national identity. Increasingly, the gentry and cultural wings of the party are “transnationalists” who find Trumpian grumbles about trade and immigration crudely archaic.

Yet, globalization, so particularly obvious in the coastal cities, has not served the interests of those voters that the Democrats need in the Midwest and elsewhere. Open borders and free trade work out well in the world of Davos and other meetings of the mighty, but they don’t translate well to those parts of the country where trade has devastated economies, or among those whose wages are threatened by mass, unregulated immigration.

Trump, by his incoherence and incompetence, has opened the door to the Democrats. But the passage to redemption may prove more difficult if the party fails, as Hillary Clinton and the Democratic congressional delegation showed last year, to relate to the broad ranks of the citizenry.

Joel Kotkin is the R.C. Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University in Orange and executive director of the Houston-based Center for Opportunity Urbanism (www.opportunityurbanism.org).