Who can blame them? Democratic voters are just doing what they’ve been trained to do – they’re thinking of themselves as members of factions. Over and over the Democratic Party has rewritten its internal rules to assuage the anger of unsuccessful political factions. This pattern started after the rioting at the 1968 convention with the McGovern-Fraser commission. Delegate quotas were established based on age, race and gender. Party caucuses were structured in ways that favored organized activist groups.

The rhetoric followed the rules. Jesse Jackson articulated the new arrangement perfectly in the Democratic convention of 1988 when he likened his party to a quilt made from individual patches of cloth, stitched together by his grandmother. On their own, they could not expect to rule, ‘your patch is too small…’ he told them each in turn. But sewn together women, blacks, latinos, and unions could take the nation.

Al Gore articulated it inadvertently when he bungled the motto from the Great Seal: E Pluribus Unum, which he translated as “from one, many”. It is, in fact, the opposite “from many, one”. His Latin was pretty weak, but his ability to translate the mood of his party was spot on.

What, if not factionalism, lies at the heart of Hillary’s ‘its tough for a woman out there’? What, if not factionalism, lies at the heart of Obama’s church with it’s the-government-intentionally-created-Aids-to-kill-black-people paranoia and its Afro-centricity?

Step by step, the warnings of Federalist 10 have been trodden underfoot, until finally age, race and gender have moved from the edges of the party to its very center. Delegate quotas, activists-dominated caucuses, the replacement of winner-take-all with proportional delegate systems…even proposed fixes such as super delegates and front-loaded primaries, are all fruit which comes from the same poisoned tree – the rejection of the founder’s vision of a nation protected from factionalism.

G.K. Chesterton once said that if you find a boundary stone in the middle of a field, and you don’t know why it’s there - don’t move it. For the past four decades the party of Jefferson has been moving the ancient boundary stones. This year’s Democratic primary chaos stands as a monument both to the arrogance of the generation of 1968 and the wisdom of the generation of 1788.