I somehow ended up reading a blog post from a “New Right” “intellectual” blog about the difference between Patronage vs. Constituent Parties, and why the Republican Party is more prone and capable to punish those supporters who do not sufficiently support the party (or specifically the party leader). I will purposefully not link to it, but I found the argument interesting.

In the American political system, the only party structure best suited to sufficiently punish campaign workers and consultants who are blamed for losing an election by casting them into the outer darkness of unemployment is one which swears loyalty to the party leader, not one which embraces its constituent groups and allows for their challenging of party leadership.

The Democrats, in their decades-long post-New Deal incarnation as a coalition of constituencies, do not get to punish or exile their lesser-performing or confrontational apparatchiks, no matter how tiresome they may be. The Republicans, as a vanguard of the old stock Americans and those who seek alliance with such, do.

The desire of Berniecrats to punish Manchin, Sinema and their enablers in the last Dem trifecta reflected a preference for a party structure which doesn’t exist, and is not allowed to exist, in the Democratic coalition.

Not even the DSA, with its own coalition of constituencies which sought to capture the left of the Democratic coalition, could pull off a party machine which punishes those who fail the platform and campaign.

For the left-of-center to discipline or punish its own would require a significant abandonment of diversity, coalition-building and consensus, in favor of patronage, hierarchy and corporate leadership, in which open dissent or failure results in loss of access to party leadership.

tl;dr: Pick your poison. Internal democracy does not make for a strong party machine.