It feels a bit hacky to me, but the way I ended up doing it is to add a sortable class to the parent li's.
<ul class = "demoOne">
<li class="sortable"><a href="http://somelink.com">Some text</a></li>
<li class="sortable"><a href="http://somelink.com">Some more text</a>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://somelink.com">Some nested text</a></li>
<li><a href="http://somelink.com">Some more nested Text</a></li>
<li><a href="http://somelink.com">Even more nested Text</a></li>
</ul>
</li>
<li class="sortable"><a href="http://somelink.com">Still more text</a></li>
<li class="sortable"><a href="http://somelink.com">Even more text</a></li>
</ul>
Then I grabbed and sorted those li's by class name.
$('.sortable').not(".sortable li").sort(function(a, b){
return $('a', a).text() > $('a', b).text();
}).appendTo(".current");
I would still love to see a way to do this without the use of an additional class. If anybody knows a way to do that I'd gladly take this answer down and accept that as a better answer.