US parties threatened by grave internal divisions: Commentator

Popular demonstrations against US President-elect Donald Trump have continued for four days. Some analysts see the protests as an attempt for a color revolution by the likes of George Soros, who is accused of being behind many of the world's color revolutions. But others argue that the protests have been triggered by Trump's incendiary rhetoric against many groups, from women and Muslims to the disabled and Hispanics. Whatever the reason might be, the result is the same. The US is badly divided. In this episode of The Debate, we have asked our guests to tell us how things are going to play out in the US and whether there is any hope for the current tense situation to be defused.

Ajamu Baraka, the Green Party's former vice presidential candidate, maintained that the current chaos in the society is the result of grave internal struggles between the political elites, both Republicans and Democrats.

The ongoing disarray within the Democratic Party, Baraka analyzed, "is the consequence of the surrendering of the Democratic forces grouped behind Senator Bernie Sanders to the decisions made by the coalition which was formed between the right-wing elites and the liberals around Hillary Clinton."

“With this defeat by Hillary Clinton, now all bets are off. You have disarray now among the elite. You have within the Democratic Party itself a disarray at the progressives who were prepared to surrender the power to Hillary Clinton and thwarting Sanders' campaign and the consequence was still defeat. So, there's going to be, I think, internal struggle within the party in the next few months,” he added.

Baraka further noted that the situation inside the Republican Party is not much better than that of the Democratic Party due to the fact that the majority of the Republicans do not support Donald Trump and refuse to accept him as a real Republican.

“So, he has to cobble together some support from conservatives in order to be able to govern and it is not clear just how successful he is going to be especially when it appears he's already beginning to backtrack on some of his campaign positions.”

Meanwhile, the other panelist, Jim Walsh, with the Security Studies Program at MIT, claimed that despite Clinton's surprising defeat, the future belongs to the Democrats who mostly enjoy the support of educated voters.

“There are deep divisions in both parties. We have a president who is not really a Republican. He has never held office. He has never worked in government. He took positions that were an asthma to many in the Republican Party but because of his personality and the particular moment in time, he has triumphed despite what the Republican Party wanted,” Walsh said.

“On the other side, I think you have deep divisions in the Democratic Party between the centrist, more business-oriented wing and I would say sometimes more hawkish wing and a more progressive group,” he added.

But losses always cause parties to try to fix the problems internally, Walsh said, adding that the long-term prospects for the Democrats are pretty good because they would have a greater share of Hispanic and college-educated voters in the future.

“I think long-term trends are pointing in the direction but the near term is very unclear. Once you have divisions regardless of which party it is, the Republican or Democratic Party, if there are really deep divisions that lead to a reshuffling of the two-party system, then all bets are off. It becomes very hard to predict it to that point. So, I think we're in a period of very high uncertainty. Uncertainty about what Mr. Trump is going to do because he' taking positions all over the map and he is not a traditional Republican and uncertainty about the future of the parties,” he concluded.

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