I thought that the GOP had winner-take-all delegates (i.e. the winner of that state gets ALL of that state's delegates). Come to think of it, that's not very democratic, either. It's just that the Democrats' system is so transparently crooked. The party elites have the ability to just override the people's votes.
The GOP has a mix of proportional and winner-take-all states. The latter is somewhat less democratic than the former; but is still more democratic than the superdelegate system.
The Superdelegate system is a modern innovation, proposed in the 1970s, and finally implemented in 1982; in response to previous changes to the Democratic Party convention procedures that were implemented to make them more responsive to voters. It was explicitly done to protect party leaders and the establishment structure against grassroots candidates, which was acknowledged recently by the current DNC chair. Only the Democratic Party uses superdelegates.
You must be talking to different "Clinton people". The ones I've seen are flipping out because their party is being taken over by an outsider socialist who represents the "loony left". I think that the Clinton people look at Sanders' fans the same way that the rest of the Republican Party looks at fundie Christians. You can just hear them thinking "Wow, those people are nuts, but we need their votes."
That's the general tenor of many of the Clinton supporters I've been exposed to; though more often it's more of a "these people are too young/stupid to know what's best for them" attitude. That was certainly the tenor of the Clinton supporters at the local caucus, they were nearly all middle-aged and older, and quite condescending to Sanders supporters.
And the Clinton people have the gall to pretend like we're really on the same side when we aren't.
And this is what it all comes down to. Clinton supporters and Sanders supporters are really not that closely aligned; which is why Clinton and her supporters have been pushing the politics of fear in order to coerce Sanders supporters to vote for her. They criticize Sanders for not supporting other Democrat candidates, but that's patently false, because he does. The difference is that Clinton is pouring her money and support into preserving the elitist establishment wing of the party, while Sanders is putting his support and fundraising behind actual progressive candidates. She and her inner circle seem incapable of understanding that it's that very establishment and the politics it engenders that Sanders and his supporters are against, just like the GOP has a hard time understanding why so many conservative voters have supported Trump's (pseudo-)anti-establishment message.
That's why Steinem and Albright's outright insulting of younger female Sanders supporters has resulted in such a backlash against the Clinton campaign by their target audience. They're attempting to outright
order Sanders supporters to vote for Clinton, failing miserably at it, and failing to understand why.
Clinton and her supporters like to pretend to be progressive; but by the standard of the rest of the developed world, they're very much on the conservative side of the spectrum. They're only "left" by contrast to the GOP, which is now so far to the right it can't even see the center. Sanders, by contrast, is a return to the Democratic Party of Roosevelt's time. He's effectively a New Deal progressive, which is something the party elite of that time found as distasteful as the party elite of today does.
Thanks in large part to the Internet, a new generation is growing up into voting age with better access to information unfiltered through traditional biases; and have a far greater direct exposure to world culture and world politics than their predecessors have had. That's a large part of why we're seeing such a huge shift toward progressive politics, and a liberalizing of attitudes toward GLBTs, immigration, internationalization, and so on. They're less satisfied with the paternalism of the elites in either party.
It's no wonder that Clinton's strongest support has come primarily from traditionally conservative, and highly religious regions of the country; and her demographics are predominantly older and religious, and outside of the 1% elites, not as well-connected to world culture. She certainly plays up her religious beliefs in connection to her politics every bit as much as the Republicans do.
