Sen. Bernie Sanders and the Democratic National Committee chairman he opposed have recently been on a "unity tour." It's apparently not going very well.

Per CNN, the tour "has gotten off to a rocky start." NPR noted that "there has not been too much unity" on display. A Vice headline said simply, "The Democrats are falling apart." It's #DemsinDisarray all over again, as the popular hashtag says.

Republicans and other conservatives have chortled about crowds being less than happy to see DNC Chairman Tom Perez and guffawed over Sanders' refusal to even call himself a Democrat. Sanders, remember, didn't want Perez to be chairman, preferring Minnesota Rep. Keith Ellison, instead.

All in all, unity this ain't. But unity is overrated anyway.

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Obviously, for many Democrats, the unity tour's failure to turn Perez and Sanders into one big happy family rubs salt in the unhealed wounds of the 2016 presidential primary, when Sanders, the independent senator from Vermont, pushed eventual nominee Hillary Clinton far harder and longer than anyone expected. Some among the Democratic establishment still blame Clinton's subsequent loss to President Donald Trump on Sanders, at least in part, laying the foundation for opposing her. His attacks on her coziness to Wall Street, her foreign policy hawkishness or her overall lack of populist cred helped out Trump later, the theory goes, by soiling Clinton's historic candidacy as just another establishment effort.

Anything that reveals those same rifts, therefore, is supposed to be bad news for the party as it tries to oppose the Trump administration or win some of the special congressional elections happening across the country.

I don't buy it.

At this point in the electoral cycle, it's more important for Democrats to have a real debate and figure out where they want the party to go than to link arms and sing "Kumbaya" as if their differences don't matter. The next big election isn't for quite a while, after all, and the left should be road-testing different messages now, even while they're opposing Trump. They can walk and chew gum at the same time. And considering the success Sanders had in 2016, figuring out which parts of his platform to cling to and which parts to discard is an incredibly important project. Dismissing him now seems to be the tactic that would set the party up for failure later, rather than his attempts to push the party's economic platform in a more progressive direction.

In fact, it may be that Sanders-style candidates really are the future of the party, and it'd be better to know that sooner rather than later if it is indeed the case. Or maybe his type of candidate really can't play in some places. As Ryan Cooper ably noted in The Week, we'll never know until someone gives it a try. Few thought a boorish, ignorant reality television star could be elected president of the United States until it happened.

I get that there's a fear that Trump will run roughshod over a non-unified opposition or that, if Democrats win in 2018 without a cohesive message, they'll fall prey to the same pitfalls that have prevented the tea party or the Freedom Caucus – those bastions of right-wing nuttery that keep tripping up the rest of the GOP – from actually getting anything done. There's also a feeling, often fueled by the political punditocracy, that divisions at the national level will trickle-down to affect anything and everything a party does.

However, those fears are overblown. Are we all really scared that Sanders' lack of enthusiasm regarding Jon Ossof, a candidate in Georgia's special election, is going to doom him? (Sanders has since put out a more forceful statement of support.) I'd wager that's putting too much national import on what is an election that is still about just one Georgia district. If Ossof loses because of a "meh" from a Vermont senator, that says more about him than it does Sanders. It's not a signal that the Trump opposition has stumbled.

In fact, most Democrats are doing just fine standing up to Trump, considering he has a total lack of substantive accomplishments and an approval rating that's at historic lows for this point in a presidency. Has the party faltered in some way in recent weeks that I haven't noticed thanks to Sanders? Nah.