The difference between the way the democrats treat their activist base and the way the republicans treat theirs is the difference between an activist base that is more or less built from the ground up and a base that is more or less built from the top down.
The republicans power structure built theirs, the most recent and obvious example are the tea parties, but they aren't really the first, from the top down. Where are the tea party protests now that the wealthy aren't busing in the half Gould would have been paying to kill the other half? More or less no where.
For the most part the democrats base has been built from the bottom up. The most obvious examples are unions. Although they have been, from what I can tell, mostly corralled, still they are to a degree outsiders and are not completely directed by the party elite. The general rule is that the democratic base is built from the ground up and therefore must be denigrated by the powers that be or must be domesticated, (which is what has happened to the groups in the veal pen). .
Now this isn't to say that the republican fat cats are always going to get what they think they are going to get. The German conservatives were sure that they could control Hitler, after all.
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I still subscribe to the theory that if progressive groups actually didn't support Democratic politicians reflexively, those politicians would be a lot more conscious about trying to please those groups.
Your theory has merit, though. It's a bit like "not invented here" syndrome in engineering organizations. Progressives do things differently - it's part of the reason we're not conservatives, I think. It's hard to get us to agree on much of anything. And when you don't agree with the "conventional" view, you're wrong no matter what when things start to go bad.
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