The main reason why people are so pissed right now appears to me to be that they lost.    Losing is never fun, and losing when you think you’re for sure gonna win really sucks (trust me on that, I’m a Seahawks fan.)  They have reasons, but I don’t think those are REALLY really the reasons.  I think they’re assigning noble words to nasty emotions and the main nasty emotion they’re having right now is pissed-offedness that they lost.

My question to Hillary supporters is not why are you angry that you lost, but why do you think you get to win on every front all the time with no opposition??  Why is the only win acceptable to you, the unconditional surrender and eradication of the other side while you stand over their bodies and scream victory at the sky?

I know that most on the left do not know what I’m talking about right now.  I’m speaking Greek to them.  Because they believe that their way is the only way because it’s the only RIGHT way.  It’s self-evident and everyone all around them also believes it is self-evident.  Our team is totally right, we have the moral high ground, and thus we should always win, because we are totally right and we have the moral high ground.  But the funny thing about moral high grounds is that standing righteously upon them can make you see everyone else not on that high ground as not only wrong, but immoral.

But here’s the thing.  You may have lost an election, but you’re still winning the war.   Why do you have to win EVERYTHING?

After 8 years of an African-American president, the nearly successful presidential candidacy of a woman, the legalization of gay marriage, and your apparent total control of the media, why are so many people not jumping for joy right now??  Why are they screaming for blood??   Guys, YOU’RE WINNING.  Why can you not accept that a lot of people just didn’t like Hillary, and some people just aren’t liberals, and gee whiz guys, let’s do better next time?  Let’s think about how we can woo and persuade, how we connect with voters instead of demonize them, how we can change hearts and minds.  That’s how rational people come back after a setback.  Burning people in effigy and destroying the city in America that most represents your values, is not.

While I hate invoking other countries to describe the anomaly that is America, a lot of other countries have some political parties that are in direct opposition to each other.  Conservatives and Labour, in the UK, for example.   Sometimes the Conservatives win, sometimes Labour wins.  And that’s ok.  In most countries, neither side has the expectation of totally winning on every front, every election, every issue, all the time.  In a world full of diversity, no one should expect that.   Some countries even have several parties all representing different subsections of the populace and they are quibbling about this or that.  None of them expect to come out victorious over their enemies, not really.

In the US until very recently, neither side ever had the expectation of totally winning on every front.  I think that the Republicans still do not have that expectation.  That’s why they’ve been so passive about everything.  Their supporters have been typically patient and reasonable.  That’s why they send us Jeb Bush as a presidential candidate.  Because they still think this is business as usual and that “ya win some, ya lose some” and that is why they look so flat-footed next to the Democrats who are on a clear mission.

Why is the default mindset for so many on the left over the last decade or so, a scorched earth policy in which your opinion is the only one that is allowed to be voiced and the rest of America needs to, oh, I don’t know, crawl off somewhere and die?

It is because this has become a moral issue.  Democrats good, Republicans bad. Conservatives, bad.  Libertarians, bad, and kind of weird.  Christians, very, very bad.  The wicked shall not be unpunished, but the seed of the righteous shall be delivered.   And the method of that punishment shall be social media.  It’s not enough for progressives to win, most everything, most of the time.  They have to grab their torches and pitchforks and chase those Frankenstein’s Monsters that live in Flyover Country and those weird neighborhoods in New York City that no one cool ever goes into, down and stab them a few times.  And then burn whatever remains, with sick burns on Twitter.

The wicked shall not be unpunished.

And it is NOT Donald Trump, don’t tell me that it is, because I saw this trend rising long before this latest election cycle.  Donald Trump is not a conservative or a Christian and he’s really not even a Republican.  Donald Trump is irrelevant to this conversation.  He’s just what people threw at you to try and stop this insanity.

It is not right or normal to expect your personal moral views to become the law of the land with no room for compromise or dissent or the simultaneous existence of anyone else’s morality.  That is how the Taliban thinks.  That’s how ISIS thinks.  They may call it religion instead of social justice, but the upshot is the same.  It’s theocracy.