Democratic Division
Written by Ruwan Jinadasa
Democratic Division
With the fortunate success for the Democratic party in the US election (thank god), it now brings light to the divisions within the democrats. The democratic right party, is a centre, to centre-conservative party, leaving many voters not agreeing with Biden’s centralised policies, yet still voting to get Trump out. Simply, the party is a big tent, filled with different ideologies, with the main focus to get Trump out of office (thankfully it worked).
“In any other country, Joe Biden and I would not be in the same party, but in America, we are.”
With such different policies, how are Rep. Ocasio-Cortez and elected-president, Biden, both part of the democratic party?
Overtime, the US democratic party has become more and more divided, with the peak of division happening right now.
The Democratic party can be divided into two main wings, being the progressive democrats, and the more central-conservative Democrats.
The social progressive democrats, are a group notably consisting of Ocasio-Cortez, Sen. Sandars, Sen. Warren. They believe in affordable healthcare, climate policies such as The Green New Deal and affordable education for all.
On the other hand, the more central democrats, notably Biden and house-speaker Nancy Pelosi, believe in keeping private health insurance, and if you saw from the debate, different views on climate change.
The democratic national committee, which represents the democratic party establishment, rejected medicare for all from the party’s list for all, from the party’s list of priorities. Another issue causing tension within the party is police reform. Progressives want to defund the police, while senior members such as Nancy Pelosi, only proposed a bill to restrict excessive police force and increase transparency. While this is a step in the right direction, it’s not direct enough, as well as a lot of senior members ignoring other issues such as climate change.
Nancy Pelosi attempted to keep the party unified, but as more members drifted towards the left, the republican party often saw this as a time to attack the democratic party.
“It all has to do with 2020 and the election, But I really don’t like their policy of taking away your car, of taking away your airplane flights, of ‘Let’s hop a train to California’”
The Future of the Democratic Party
In theory the party should split up. Having so many different and contradictory ideologies in a single party obviously causes a lot of infighting and leaves a lot of people disappointed and feel like they're being ignored. In practice, splitting up either party would be detrimental due to the way the US election system works. It's pretty much mathematically impossible for the system to sustain more than two parties, and splitting up one side or the other would just split their base and hand every election to the other side. If both parties split there would be a bunch of parties for a couple of elections but eventually be forced to join back down to 2 to have any shot at winning anything.
Partially because of this, and partially because the DNC and RNC are massive institutions, there is virtually 0 chance that either party splits up unless there is great reform in the election process. This reform is definitely needed in the long run, however it’s not going to be very popular amongst the major wings of either party, since it would be jeopardizing a lot of their influence, similar to the argument to keep the electoral college.
The future of the democratic party and US democracy is at stake with Biden’s future presidency, and hopefully it will lead to a future, more united, America.