What part of party don’t you understand?

Comedian Sarah Silverman lathered up the crowd on the opening night of the Democratic National Convention on Monday by going off script to tell the “Bernie or Bust” contingent they were “being ridiculous.”

What exactly she could have meant by that could be interpreted a few different ways.

One way would be that Bernie Sanders supporters should recognize their efforts fell short and accept that Hillary is the nominee.

Or, it could mean that these mostly millennial liberals are “being ridiculous” because all they’re doing is affording an opportunity for a ruthless capitalist like Donald Trump to capture the White House.

And then there’s a third way of interpreting what it means to say the “Bernie-or-Bust” crowd is “being ridiculous” and that is that they are completely ignorant of how American politics works and always has worked — at least up until now, anyway.

I don’t know how many ways I can explain to my Bernie-backing friends that the nomination wasn’t stolen from Bernie and that it’s impossible for him to have been swindled because the nominating process is not an election — it’s a party.

Which candidate wins the primaries and caucuses is fundamentally irrelevant to which candidate the party wants to represent it. It is, after all, a party. What part of party don’t they understand?

In the 19th and most of the 20th century, there weren’t primaries to speak of. The big wigs would gather — many of them wearing big wigs — to decide the party’s choice, and everybody was pretty much OK with that because how you felt about issues you expressed moreso through your party affiliation rather than your liking for any particular candidate. Only recently have the primaries and caucuses come to the forefront, and mostly as a way to make the voting public feel more a part of the process than they actually are.

The old way sounds very shifty and undemocratic, but without parties, there can be no democracy. What you wind up with instead — and what was on its way to happening in the Bernie Sanders phenomenon — is an autocrat.

We mock the Brits and other Europeans for hanging on to figurehead monarchs. But in truth, it’s us, not them, that has the craving to be ruled by royalty.

If it wasn’t for Barack Obama, our presidential succession for 28 years would have gone Bush-Clinton-Bush-Clinton, which, on its face, is proof enough of our regal want. But scratch the surface a little and you’ll trace that pattern back to an insatiable need to vote for the person over the policies they favor and over the parties they represent.

This was never moreso the case, in my lifetime anyway, than it was with Bernie Sanders in 2016.

At a certain point — and I think it was the moment the bluebird landed on his podium and didn’t move while he was speaking to thousands of people — ‘Feel the Bern’ stopped being about addressing college debt and income inequality, and became all about the holy man himself. College girls screamed for and swooned over this Septuagenerian Senator, as though he were a Beatle circa 1963, teamed up with ‘Bernie Bros’ to fall helplessly in love with Sanders, and attacked Clinton’s scurrilous record with more venom than Republicans ever could.

The movement succeeded wildly in moving Clinton and the Democratic Party to the left, but at a certain point, the movement stopped being about ideology — it became about touching even the hem of his garment.

Sanders wasn’t the only, or even the biggest, cult of personality in the race. Certainly Trump carves out that real estate, but even had the nomination been ‘stolen’ from Trump at the Republican convention, you don’t get the impression that even his most ardent supporters would have self-immolated on the floor of the Quicken Loans Arena. Part of that may be because Trump isn’t such a nice guy, but it’s also because Trump’s supporters are drawn to him by his policies more than his personality. None of them would care about Donald’s hurt feelings in defeat the way Bernie’s do about his.

If the two-party system doesn’t work anymore, that’s fine, we could go to five: Socialist (Sanders), Labor (Clinton), Tory (Bush), Conservative (Cruz), Nationalist (Trump), and align behind those labels rather than the names in parenthesis.

If we want to move beyond these difficult days of gridlock, executive orders and government shutdowns, and move into the next chapter of democracy, we’ve got to get away from personalities and back to the party.