Disorganized? Of course. We’re Democrats.

Will Rogers, a bel oved American humorist a couple of generations ago, had a favourite line that has acquired a bright new life this week. “I am not a member of an organized political party,” Rogers famously declared. “I am a Democrat.”

The latest Democrats to prove the enduring truth of his remark were revealed at the worst possible time, just before their convention started in Philadelphia this week.

It began under the shadow of an embarrassing resignation. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, chair of the Democratic National Committee, was ruled off the course for favouring Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders in the struggle for their party’s presidential nomination.

The proof was in a few emails to Schultz’s office that popped up last weekend, courtesy of WikiLeaks (which acquired them from Russian hackers, if U. S. intelligence has it right). They made it clear that Schultz’s advisers were passing around clever strategies to malign Sanders and brush him out of Clinton’s way. Since the Democratic National Committee is supposed to be neutral as to candidates, Schultz had to go.

Sanders said he wasn’t surprised. He had sensed that something like that was going on. Others not surprised were all the people who have studied the history of the Democrats over a few decades. When mistakes are there to be made, Democrats will make them. Democratic bungling is the key to Republican success.

Why were the politically shrewd people at the Democratic National Committee unaware that an email is a weapon? All practised conspirators know you should never say anything in an email that could get you in trouble. That was true even in the days before WikiLeaks. Emails, which can be copied without effort, often lead to self-inflicted wounds.

But if the anti- Sanders people blundered, the proSanders delegates at the convention were exhibiting an even more familiar pattern of Democrat behaviour. Being idealists, they believe they are entitled to insist on their cherished, self- right- eous opinions even at the cost of harming their party and their country.

At the convention Sanders finally accepted that he wasn’t to be the candidate. He had pushed a few favourite proposals into the party platform and he hoped that Clinton, as president, would carry them through. Democrats should unite behind her, he said.

But his followers, more royalist than the king, did everything they could to frustrate that wish. “I try to be gracious about everything,” one of them said. “But there’s so much wrong, and it’s so unsavoury, we just need to make ourselves heard saying so — that we don’t like it and we want to speak up about it.”

Journalists tried to find out what the Sanders followers were planning, but ( as The Daily Beast reported) a question and answer routine with these people turned into a farce. “In fact, it would appear that they are entirely disorganized.” Will Rogers, you should be with us in this hour.

They booed Clinton’s name when Sanders endorsed her, they had placards saying “Bernie or Bust,” they chanted “Bernie, Bernie” at every opportunity, and they told every reporter in sight that they were frustrated. They shed well- photographed tears as they embraced each other in their sorrow.

They pushed their demonstrations into corners of opinion unrelated to the convention. As the New Republic reported: “They yelled out ‘ Black Lives Matter’ when Cory Booker (one of two sitting black senators) gave his fired-up speech. They yelled ‘We Trusted You’ when Elizabeth Warren spoke, implying she betrayed her values by backing Clinton.”

An odd twist of history has given Hillary Clinton a duty she could not have imagined even a year ago. She’s now all that’s standing in the way of Donald Trump, whose weirdly exaggerated ego, combined with his deep ocean of ignorance, makes him the most dangerous candidate for president in American history. This week’s polls show Clinton and Trump dead even.

This situation recalls 1968. The idealistic left wing of the Democrats believed their candidate, vice-president Hubert Humphrey, was not sufficiently opposed to the Vietnam war. So they sat out the election and Richard Nixon became president.

If the diehard Sanders people follow that sour precedent, despite all the concessions Clinton made in her acceptance speech, they will have only one excuse: because they’re true Democrats.