Refusing to accept defeat

It's noble when Winston Churchill or Jimmy Valvano vow that they will never give up. Fighting a war or cancer are situations where there is no determined end. But an election is not like that. We have elections with set dates and one side wins and another loses. But Thomas Sowell points out that there is a trend which he believes has become prevalent among liberals to feel that they don't have to accept defeat if they lose. They seem to think that there is a right to win. He points to the bitter Hillary Clinton supporters who cling to the view that it was sexism that defeated their candidate rather than that she just ran a poor campaign and made a fatal decision not to throw her organizational money into the caucus states. He could also have pointed to all the Democrats who refused to accept either of Bush's elections and still maintain that there was something fraudulent not only in the 2000 decision but also in the 2004 victory.

What has really riled up Dr. Sowell is the reaction to Proposition 8's passage in California. We've seen mob protests against Mormons and racial epithets against blacks because polls show that black voters voted against gay marriage.

While demanding tolerance from others, gay activists apparently feel no need to show any themselves.

How did we get to this kind of situation?

With all the various groups who act as if they have a right to win, we got to the present situation over the years, going back to the 1960s, where the idea started gaining acceptance that people who felt aggrieved don't have to follow the rules or even the law.

"No justice, no peace!" was a slogan that found resonance.

Like so many slogans, it sounds good if you don't stop and think— and awful if you do.

Almost by definition, everybody thinks their cause is just. Does that mean that nobody has to obey the rules? That is called anarchy.

Nobody is in favor of anarchy. But some people want everybody else to obey the rules, while they don't have to.

As Abraham Lincoln said when Southerners seceded because they didn't like the results of the 1860 election, republican government can only succeed when we accept defeat when our side loses.

Our popular government has often been called an experiment. Two points in it, our people have already settled---the successful establishing, and the successful administering of it. One still remains---its successful maintenance against a formidable [internal] attempt to overthrow it. It is now for them to demonstrate to the world, that those who can fairly carry an election, can also suppress a rebellion---that ballots are the rightful, and peaceful, successors of bullets; and that when ballots have fairly, and constitutionally, decided, there can be no successful appeal, back to bullets; that there can be no successful appeal, except to ballots themselves, at succeeding elections. Such will be a great lesson of peace; teaching men that what they cannot take by an election, neither can they take it by a war---teaching all, the folly of being the beginners of a war.

As it was true in 1861, so it is true today. In every election one side must lose. Unless the losers can accept defeat, our form of government can not continue.