Historically, both main capitalist parties have governed based on relative stability. But consider the perspectives for the next president:

President Trump?

The fact that Trump has gotten this far has shocked the Republican Party tops and those CEO’s who stand behind them. It shows how much they’ve lost control over their favored party. Their weakened control means that even if he doesn’t win an outright majority, Trump could peel off enough delegates at a brokered Republican convention to win the nomination. And given how vulnerable Hillary Clinton is, it’s possible that Trump could actually win the presidency.

What would four years of a Trump presidency look like?

Regardless of whether he moderates his rhetoric, what Trump’s stirred up already would lead to turmoil in the streets. The Democrats and their mouthpieces  would try to keep it down, but they’d be seriously discredited. Those who’d be discredited would tend to include all those who supported Hillary Clinton, including the Black Congressional Caucus, a lot of establishment preachers and the “respected community leaders”. “You mean they couldn’t even keep this bozo from becoming president?” would be the sentiment.

A Ted (Christian bigot) Cruz or John (Lehman Brothers) Kasich presidency wouldn’t be all that different.

President Hillary Clinton?

It’s highly, highly unlikely that Hillary Clinton won’t win the Democratic nomination. And already she’s intensely disliked and distrusted by millions, including millions of Democrats. If she gets elected, she won’t even have the “honeymoon period” that the US electorate almost always gives to a president. That means she won’t be able to dry up the sources of protest in the way that Obama has.

Corporate America installed Obama partly because they were turning away from the simple-minded, militaristic approach to foreign policy. That is the approach of the neoconservatives, who hold that since the US government cannot be out-gunned, they can invade anywhere, with or without allies, and nobody can do anything about it. This approach was a disaster in Afghanistan and Iraq. (A disaster for them, that is; they don’t care about the effects on the people.) Now, they are seeing that Obama’s “diplomacy” approach isn’t working either, and they’re turning back towards a renewed increase in military intervention. Hillary Clinton is just the candidate for that.

But new military interventions, carried out by this already unpopular president, would meet with protests right from the start.

Racism

Then there is the issue of racism. No matter what happens with Donald Trump, he’s helped build something that won’t go away. Right now, there must be hundreds, thousands maybe, of little Donald Trumps watching what he’s built and thinking of running for local and regional offices on the same model. In some cases, they will run campaigns that are even less restrained than Trump’s.

As the Trump protest in Chicago and the anti-Klan mobilization in Anaheim showed, this won’t be taken lying down. There will be a counter action, regardless of who is president. And as Hillary’s reaction to the protest in Chicago showed, no matter if she or a Republican is president, they will try to physically repress such counter action. Even if there’s a Republican president, the Democrats will support such repression. This will only further discredit them.

Top: protesters confront Trump supporters at the Trump rally in Chicago.
Bottom: KKK opponents stop KKK from marching in Anaheim, CA.
No matter who gets elected, we can expect a lot more of this sort of thing. And a lot more intense.

And all of this doesn’t even take into account the fact that it will most likely be happening during a serious economic recession.

In other words, the instability that we’ve seen so far in these elections is only a very small sign of things to come. It won’t be pretty, but the next four years seem likely to overshadow the 1960s as a period of instability and turmoil in the streets of the United States. And this will likely happen with a severely discredited Democratic Party, regardless of who is president, for the reasons explained above.