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After attending the unusually raucous and divided Republican National Convention in Cleveland last week, I expected a reasonably sedate coronation of Hillary Clinton at the Democratic National Convention that kicked off Monday in Philadelphia. Maybe I should have known better.

But who would have expected a cascade of internal Democratic National Committee emails to be released Friday by WikiLeaks.

Thousands of emails between party officials appeared to show a coordinated effort to help Clinton and confirmed what Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and his advisers had long claimed: that the DNC was biased toward Clinton in the party’s primaries and caucuses.

To be clear, Clinton did not win her nomination because of dirty tricks at DNC headquarters. She won because she got more votes. Sanders was perfectly free to win primaries and caucuses and persuade the party’s superdelegates, who are not bound by primaries or caucuses, to vote for him — the same way a young senator named Barack Obama did in 2008.

Delegates and attendees hold signs in support of Sen. Bernie Sanders on the first day of the Democratic National Convention at the Wells Fargo Center, July 25, 2016, in Philadelphia.
Delegates and attendees hold signs in support of Sen. Bernie Sanders on the first day of the Democratic National Convention at the Wells Fargo Center, July 25, 2016, in Philadelphia.

Superdelegates have been around since the 1980s as a reform move to prevent the sort of insurgency that has enabled Donald Trump to split the Grand Old Party. Yet Sanders and his supporters insisted the system was “rigged,” as if the rules had been written in the past year or so with Sanders in mind.

Sanders demanded that party chair, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida, step down after the embarrassing emails were released, and she did on Sunday. Even though the preferences of Schultz and other party bigwigs for Clinton was one of Washington’s worst-kept secrets, the cat was out of the bag on her biases in a job in which she is supposed to remain fair and neutral.

But the #BernieOrBust movement was not appeased. When Schultz showed up to address a pre-convention breakfast meeting of Florida delegates Monday, she was heckled booed and otherwise treated like Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas at a Trump rally.

During the DNC’s opening session, almost every mention of Clinton’s name sparked a chorus of boos mixed with applause from the convention floor. Even Sanders was booed earlier in the day when he begged his supporters to support Clinton.

Matters improved, but barely, Monday evening when Sanders and Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts gave full-throated endorsements of Clinton from the podium. Warren was heckled with cries of “We trusted you.”

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It was comedian Sarah Silverman who got fed up with constant boos and “Bernie! Bernie! Bernie!” chants and told the truth: “To the Bernie-or-bust crowd,” she said, visibly miffed, “you’re being ridiculous.”

To that remark, the crowd erupted in cheers and applause. I wanted to join them, but remembering the old journalists’ ethic of “no cheering in the press gallery,” I restrained myself.

The #BernieOrBust bros didn’t win any new fans on my Twitter feed. More often they were compared to a bad day at Chuck E. Cheese’s. Sounds about right.

But the ill-mannered activists inspired some nostalgia on my part. I was reminded of how long it has been since I have seen the sort of passion that brings a political convention to a halt.

“I am not a member of any organized political party,” Will Rogers reportedly said in the 1930s. “I’m a Democrat.”

I have not heard that line much since 1992. That was when Bill Clinton’s campaign pulled the famously fractious party’s many factions together long enough to present a seamlessly organized convention to television viewers from New York’s Madison Square Garden and win the White House.

Now it is the Republicans who have become the fractious party, divided into populists versus establishment just like the Dems.

It says something about our times that both parties are so loudly divided by insurgent candidates over some of the same issues — job loss, income inequality, comprehensive immigration reform — although offering very different solutions.

But it’s important for the dissidents on both sides to pay attention to the lessons of history, particularly this one: The party that has the least unity usually loses — and probably deserves to.

Clarence Page, a member of the Tribune Editorial Board, blogs at www.chicagotribune.com/pagespage.

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