Breaking up is hard to do… How many more times do we have to hear “it’s total doom for the GOP” or “the DEM is done” months after a lost election? Think about it, wasn’t the GOP to have split and find a new path after campaign 2016’s dissension in the ranks after not wanting to follow POTUS Donnie? Wasn’t the DEM to have died 50x times over since 2000? Yet they still come back, because the constituents love “their” guy come election day – PB/TK
The Splitting Up of the Democratic Party: Why It’s Probably Coming Sooner Than You Think – March 15 2017
Before the election, some pundits were predicting that a Trump defeat would cause the Republican Party to split into at least two discrete new parties — one representing the old GOP’s business establishment, the other for the populist firebrands of the Tea Party. As the fight over gutting Obamacare reveals, those factions are in an uncomfortable marriage. But a full-fledged rupture doesn’t appear imminent.
A bigger story, one the corporate political writers aren’t focused on, is on the left. I wouldn’t be surprised to see the Democratic Party split in two.
In my imagined scenario, the liberal Democratic base currently represented by Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren file for divorce from the party’s center-right corporatist leadership caste. What next? Led by Sanders/Warren or not (probably not), prepare to see a major new “third” party close to or equal in size to a rump Democratic one.
I even have a name for this new 99%er-focused entity: the New Progressive Party, or simply the Progressive Party. Since this is ahistorical America, no one remembers the Bull Moosers.
Today’s Democratic Party is evenly divided between the Bernie Sanders progressives who focus on class issues and the Hillary Clinton urban liberals who care more about identity politics (gender, race, sexual orientation and so on).
In the short run, a Democratic-Progressive schism would benefit the GOP. In a three-way national contest I guesstimate that Republicans could count on the roughly 45% of the electorate who still approve of Trump after two months of hard-right rule. That leaves the new Progressives and the old Democrats with roughly 27.5% each — hardly a positive outlook for the left in the first few post-schism elections.
But as the cereal box warning goes, some settling may — in this case will — occur…and sooner than you’d think.
Continue to counterpunch.org article: http://www.counterpunch.org/2017/03/15/the-splitting-up-of-the-democratic-party-why-its-probably-coming-sooner-than-you-think/
