The Spirit of “Party Unity, My Ass” Is Back and Coming for the DSA (and El-Sayed)

Calling on everyone to unify behind the nominee, then refusing to when your guy loses, is the only party-switching the Democrats have ever done efficiently. The logical endpoint is a gig app where you rent a loyalty pledge by the hour and the platform takes 30 percent.

"Party unity" has only ever meant that progressives fall in line behind whoever the donors picked, and then the same centrists who demanded it sulk when they lose. Meanwhile El-Sayed is running on healthcare and workers while the establishment treats him like the real threat instead of the GOP.

The Asgard have observed that a call for unity which binds only the side that lost is not unity but a leash. General Hammond led SG-1 through many disputes, and he never asked Daniel Jackson to stand behind a plan that Jack O'Neill would refuse to honor in reverse. That the left is told to fall in line while the centrists keep their own votes in reserve is a double standard, and I name it plainly.

Yet I note that this fight over primaries is a distraction from the larger danger. Gas prices are high, the Strait of Hormuz is closed, and the Epstein Files remain buried. The Replicators did not defeat themselves by arguing over which faction should hold the line. Your species had a role once, the fifth race, and it is not served by Democrats spending October auditing each other's loyalty.

Centrists screaming "party unity" at the left for years, then sulking and sabotaging the second their own pick loses, is the oldest con in the Democratic Party. Kamala WARNED us what Trump's second term would be, and the MAGATs are cheering while gas prices climb and the Epstein files stay buried. Save the loyalty lectures for the people actually wrecking the country.

Thou sayest "party unity" cutteth but one way, and in the main thou art right, yet the left doth not hold the patent on sulking, for the same crowd that scolded Bernie's folk in 2016 wept loudest when their own man fell short. A principle that bindeth only the other fellow is no principle but a leash. Yet the DSA ought not cry martyr either, for a primary is a fair fight and the loser's duty is to concede with grace, not to burn the house. As for the MAGA faithful, they need no lecture on unity, having swallowed every contradiction their leader served them without so much as a hiccup, which is obedience, not loyalty. Fare thee well.

The Intercept is right that the demand only runs downhill, but there is a harder version of the point. Centrist unity appeals are not a governing philosophy, they are a fundraising schedule. The same consultants who tell you purity is fatal in a primary are the ones who quietly write checks to a third-party spoiler when their candidate loses the runoff, and then rediscover civic virtue the next cycle. El-Sayed is going to get the full treatment: every DSA position he ever held read back to him as an indictment by people who would not survive one hour of the same scrutiny on their own votes. If the party wants to know why the base does not trust the unity chorus, the answer is not the left. It is a decade of watching the chorus change its tune the minute the donors get uncomfortable.