Some of that hostility is already playing out as Clinton backers express their anger at progressives who balk at lining up for Clinton's long-delayed coronation parade. The stubborn support for Sen. Bernie Sanders, even after Clinton has seemingly locked up the Democratic nomination, is a forewarning of the nasty fight ahead.
The prospects are that the animosities will get worse if Clinton loses in November -- with many anti-war Democrats defecting or staying home, thus infuriating the Hillary Democrats -- or if Clinton were to win and begin implementing her neocon foreign policy agenda which will involve further demonizing "enemies" to justify "regime changes."
If anti-war Democrats begin to resist, they can expect the Clinton-45 administration to stigmatize them as (fill-in-the-blank) "apologists" and "stooges" of "enemy" powers, much as happened to protesters against the Vietnam War and, more recently, to Americans who objected to such U.S. interventions as the Iraq War in 2003 and the Ukraine coup in 2014.
Yet, few Democratic strategists seem to be aware of this looming chasm between anti-war and pro-war Democrats. Many of these insiders seem to believe that the anti-war Democrats will simply fall in line behind Hillary Clinton out of fear and loathing for Donald Trump. That may be the case for many, but my conversations with anti-war activists suggest that a significant number will vote for a third party or might even go for Trump.
Meanwhile, most mainstream media commentators are focused on the divisions between the pro-Trump and anti-Trump Republicans, giving extensive TV coverage to various stop-Trump scenarios, even as many establishment Republicans begin to accommodate to Trump's populist conquest of the party.
But it's clear that some prominent Republicans, especially from the neocon camp, are unalterably opposed to Trump's election in November, fearing that he will turn the GOP away from them and toward an "America First" perspective that would repudiate "regime change" interventions favored by Israel.
Thus, for many neocon Republicans, a Trump defeat is preferable to a Trump victory because his defeat would let them reclaim command of the party's foreign policy infrastructure. They also could encourage President Clinton to pursue their neocon agenda -- and watch as pro- and anti-war stresses rip apart the Democratic Party.
So, the establishment Democrats -- with their grim determination to resuscitate Hillary Clinton's nearly lifeless campaign -- may be engaging in the political equivalent of whistling past the graveyard, as the ghosts of the party's Vietnam War crackup hover over Election 2016.
[For more on this topic, see Consortiumnews.com's "Neocons and Neolibs: How 'Dead' Ideas Kill"; "Yes, Hillary Clinton Is a Neocon"; and "Would a Clinton Win Mean More Wars?"]
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