Markos Moulitsas, the Duce of Daily Kos, shown above, has laid down the law for his troops, in a characteristically arrogant, managerial tone, with corporate cliches, sports metaphors and all:

If Sanders eats into Clinton’s big delegate lead by March 15, then we carry on. But if he doesn’t, then on March 15 this site officially transitions to General Election footing…. If you want the most liberal government possible, we aren’t going to get that this cycle in the White House, but we can keep building the bench down the ballot so that come 2024, we have lots of great liberals to choose from….

Even assuming the worst crazy shit people say about Clinton, fact is the next president will get to determine the Supreme Court’s direction for at least a generation, if not longer than that. It will be a new liberal Supreme Court that will overturn Citizens United, that will protect voting rights, that will protect labor unions, that will end partisan gerrymandering, that will undo the myriad roadblocks to citizens participation in our democracy — the very roadblocks that are keeping the Republican Party nationally relevant when they should be a rump regional party.

Did I mention the pony for everybody? And of course the notion that the Republicans ‘ought to be a rump party’ — unlike, say, the Democrats — sheds an interesting light on Moulitsas’ inner world, where one sports team apparently ought to win all the time.

This general order has a good many highly specific lemmata, which the rather Napoleonic little Kos doesn’t hesitate to spell out, with commendable frankness:

I will no longer tolerate malicious attacks on our presumptive presidential nominee….

Constructive criticism from the Left is allowed. There’s a difference between constructive and destructive criticism. Do I need to spell it out? … In general, if you’re resorting to cheap sloganeering like “oligarch” or “warmonger” or “neocon”, you might want to reframe your argument in a more substantive, issue-focused and constructive matter….

Saying you won’t vote, or will vote for Trump, or will vote for Jill Stein (or another Third Party) is not allowed….

If you are going to be pessimistic, you better support it…. Rank, unsupported pessimism is anathema to our data-driven, reality based culture.

If you are a Clinton supporter, spiking the football in the face of Sanders supporters isn’t a productive way to move us forward. After March 15… such spiking [is] bannable.

One wonders how many people are still drinking this authoritarian Kool-Ade. It seems likely that Daily Kos has dwindled a good deal since the Howard Dean glory days, but who knows? In any case, there will always be people who enjoy being bossed around in this fashion.