The mainstream media are having a field day, and rightfully so, chronicling the meltdown of the once-formidable Republican Party. Less focus has been placed on what may be equally, or greater, divisions emerging among Democrats, both in California and around the country.

The largest gap within the party was revealed recently in Orange County, where Bernie Sanders denounced the Walt Disney Co. for paying “starvation wages” to most of its workers while rewarding the CEO with $46 million this year. To Sanders supporters, Disney is a clear “class enemy,” but to Hillary Clinton, the Disney brass represent a source of campaign cash, part of the fairly uniform support for her among establishment Democrats across the board.

Increasingly, the Democratic Party is divided between two elements of its coalition – an oligarchy that supports Clinton and a base of workers, many of them younger, who favor Sanders. To the Clintonites, her positions on gay rights, the environment and feminism make her an acceptable progressive. However, to those who back Bernie, her embrace of, and by, the oligarchs, amid rising economic inequality, represents a glaring contradiction with someone supposedly leading “the party of the people.”

Corporate Liberalism vs. Social Democracy

Clinton’s ascendency reflects the gentrification of the Democratic Party. Since the 1990s, argues historian Michael Lind, the Democrats have evolved from the party of the people to become, increasingly, an instrument of those in media, technology, entertainment and finance who dominate our post-industrial economy. In contrast, Republicans, increasingly isolated from these rising corporate powers, are being forced, often unwillingly, to become the party of populist American nationalism.

Certainly, Clinton, more than any other candidate in modern times, symbolizes the convergence of economic and political power. She enjoys across-the-board support from Hollywood, Silicon Valley, Washington’s K Street lobbyists and Wall Street. Clinton also personally collected a cool $21 million in speaking fees from a host of powerful Wall Street financial and other big corporate interests during 2013-15. She certainly appears like a future president bought and paid for.

Many grass-roots workers in technology, entertainment or media may prefer Bernie, but the big money and the big bosses are, almost without exception, for the former secretary of state.

Clinton’s lockstep support from these critical industries has less to do with charisma – which helped her husband, as well as Barack Obama, excite these donors – than fear of both Sanders and Donald Trump. The powerful detest uncertainty, which we would likely see in a Sanders or Trump presidency. Instead, the oligarchs want a continuation of the cozy relationship that has developed between themselves and the White House under President Obama.

The oligarchs have reason to want continuity. Obama has presided over a massive tech and media boom, and a surge in the stock market that has done much for the ultrarich but little to improve the welfare of lower- and middle-income Americans. Wall Street has also benefited by Obama’s generous handing to those most responsible for the recession an essentially “get out of jail free card.”

If Clinton is the oligarchic dream candidate, Sanders and, to some extent, Trump are likely to be far less accommodating. After all, both populist candidates have expressed skepticism to such tech-blessed schemes as expanding H-1B visas, which allow tech firms and corporate IT functions to replace American workers with cheaper labor – virtually indentured servants – primarily from the Indian subcontinent. Both Trump and Sanders correctly have attacked the H-1B program, and Sanders specifically lambasted Disney for replacing some of its American IT workers with much-lower-paid staff from abroad.

Clinton, not surprisingly, has had little to nothing to say on these outrages. Her favorite oligarchs want to continue, and expand, their H-1B workforce. Tesla founder Elon Musk, arguably the nation’s champion of crony capitalists and a big-time Clinton supporter, also hired cheap foreign labor for his Milpitas car plant. He also has avoided, unlike most U.S. auto manufacturers, signing an agreement with the United Auto Workers union.

Maintaining and expanding the ranks of lower-wage foreign workers represent priorities for the Silicon Valley crowd as well as large corporations like Disney. No surprise, then, as tech chronicler Greg Ferenstein has pointed out, that techie overlords dismiss Sanders as incompatible with their interests, however much they may agree with him on social or environmental issues.

A similar split also appears to be growing over the oligarchy’s beloved “sharing economy.” Sanders has directly taken on the likes of Uber. The notion of turning ever more millions of Americans – notably millennials – into permanent “contractors” with little in the way of benefits may appeal to the oligarchs, but may seem oppressive to those stuck in a permanent employment limbo. No surprise, then, that millennials, facing an uncertain future in the oligarchs’ world, have been opting for the socialist Sanders.

Finally, there is the issue of taxation. Oligarchs in general don’t worry much about regular income taxes since they are expert in avoiding them. The real target, if you want to attack inequality and increase fairness, is the capital gains tax rate, now well below that for regular income, and various dodges, such as “carried interest,” that allow Wall Street and Silicon Valley billionaires to avoid billions in taxes. Clinton has spoken about reforming the tax system, but few can take her seriously given her massive backing from Wall Street and Silicon Valley. The ones really talking about getting under the kimonos of the billionaires, thereby scaring the daylights out of them, are Sanders and Trump.

California skirmish

The ferocity of the Democratic infighting can be seen in the harsh treatment of Sanders by the Democratic National Committee and the close-to-violent clashes between the two candidates’ camps, most recently in Nevada. These are more than mere fissures developed between competing candidates; they represent a profound schism between competing classes that are not going to be easily healed, even in the face of so heinous an opponent as Donald Trump.

Here in California, we may be getting an early look at the ruptured reality of the Democratic Party. This fall, Democratic candidates, under the state’s recently enacted “top-two” primary system, will face off against each other in many races. The California divisions, however, are somewhat different than the national ones. Here the pushback is largely against draconian environmental policies that are acceptable to the oligarchs but not so useful to the party’s middle- and working-class constituents.

Unlike Sanders, from ultra-green and ultra-white Vermont, the insurgent Democrats in California tend to be less extreme in both social and environmental policy than the party’s ruling circles. Democrats representing inland working-class voters – such as San Bernardino’s Cheryl Brown – face determined and well-funded opposition from hard-green elements funded by hedge-fund billionaire Tom Steyer and other oligarchs.

The most prominent example of the Golden State’s Democratic divide may emerge in the U.S. Senate match-up. State Attorney General Kamala Harris leads in the polls and is the favorite of the Northern California oligarchs, party bigwigs elsewhere and their public-sector union allies. Orange County Rep. Loretta Sanchez, likely to finish second, is a self-described centrist. Whereas Harris comes from progressive, affluent San Francisco, Sanchez represents a largely middle- and working-class, heavily Latino constituency.

Although no conservative, Sanchez’s success depends on building an alliance of working- and middle-class Democrats, including many Latinos, as well as politically homeless Republicans. Sanchez may also unite the majority in more working-class Southern California and the Central Valley, where many voters may be out of sync with the self-righteous gentry politics of the Bay Area.

In one-party states like California, this internecine conflict is all but certain to grow, particularly as the gentry agenda grinds against the economic interests, and often the social mores, of traditional Democrats. Bernie Sanders’ insurgency may be long dead by November, but the social and economic divisions he has exposed may haunt the Democratic Party for years to come.

Joel Kotkin is a R.C. Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and executive director of the Center for Opportunity Urbanism in Houston. His newest book is “The Human City: Urbanism for the Rest of Us.”