As far as I was aware, I was trying to place value in genuine conversation.

Respectfully, it’s possible that your original conversation point was not entirely clear.

The OP was a response to the false assertion that I was excusing DNC practices, and that the DNC tendency to act strategically to manipulate things towards an agenda somehow made them different from the GOP, or any other major political party across the world. Careful curation and cunning guile towards the populace is intrinsic to the idea of political parties in a democratic or democratic-republican system.

Your argument, as far as I could ascertain, was that the “open civil war” amongst the GOP primary candidates was proof of a higher level of honesty or sincerity or authenticity or ethics — and thus, that I was incorrect in pointing to similarities between the parties, as evidenced by the contents of WikiLeaks emails.

I replied by citing the unfair point of comparison that the public has not had the privilege of seeing behind-the-curtain of the RNC, despite the fact that their servers, too, were hacked. Again, I did not deny any of your claims about the DNC. But I did allude — though perhaps not explicitly enough—towards the formal GOP’s tendency to stoke religious and racial tensions to serve their agenda. The “open civil war” that you referenced is proof of this, as most of the primary GOP candidates individually condemned Trump’s most abhorrent behaviors before falling right in step behind them once he was named as the party’s official nominee.

The buckling spines of Cruz and Rubio, among others, stood in stark contrast to the DNC, where supporters and candidates alike constantly criticized the central party, in hopes of encouraging them to improve their foolish ways. Whether or not this was successful — and whether or not it is better to fall in line behind the party, rather than attempt to force change—is a different conversation.

In that way: sure, the parties are different. Which is why, as I said, the GOP’s “manipulation of and disdain for their voter base was more transparent.” Because the other GOP primary candidates publicly changed their tunes to get behind Trump, contradicting their previous concerns about his tendency to lean into xenophobia, misogyny, and other similarly-immoral belief structures, all of which were still intended to manipulate voters in the same way that the DNC attempted to do.

For better or for worse, stoking those sentiments absolutely worked.

In this way, both the GOP and the DNC pandered to their audiences in similar ways: xenophobia-disguised-as-economic-strife on one end, and overly-simplistic back-patting expressions of “identity politics” on the other.

The DNC is far, far, faaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaar from perfect. Which is also why many liberals criticize them, in hopes that they’ll improve. The GOP is similarly far from perfect; however, the formal party as represented in DC has also lost sight of its formative economic and administrative values, which has lead them to base their platform on two major beliefs: anti-abortion (to appeal to the Christian crowd without actually having to provide any measurably productive policies to support this idea), and anti-whatever-we-perceive-to-be-Left-of-us-at-this-moment-in-time.

Granted, perhaps the DNC similarly panders to people of color, LGBTQ+ people, women, people with disabilities, and so on (AKA, the actual majority of the country). I don’t love the pandering here, and often disagree with the DNC’s methodology. However, the main difference that I do see here is that one group advocates for action and progress, regardless of its intent or execution; the other one only defines itself as it exists in relation to the other party, which is not at all a healthy way to do things.