Dear Mrs. Clinton: Please concede the election, now

Last week Hillary Clinton reprised her notorious Wellesley graduation speech with another graceless graduation day speech at her alma mater. In her latest effort, the losing candidate in the 2016 presidential election continued her Sore Loser narrative that began the day after the November 8 election, and launched damp squib after damp squib at the president.

Honestly, I don’t know what Hillary Clinton thinks she is doing with all this “resistance” talk, and the foolish idea, told to New York magazine, that she “beat both of them,” Sanders and Trump. I suppose that what with all their postmodern prattle that Democrats these days don’t study political science, don’t study history and don’t study Germans like Clausewitz. All they do, one supposes, is go to seminars on Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals, courtesy of the Catholic Church, and spend their lives “organizing΅ and “resisting.”

Let’s go to the German. Clausewitz’s most famous aphorism is that “War is a mere continuation of politics by other means.” You German scholars will be anxious to see the quote in the original German: “Der Krieg ist eine bloße Fortsetzung der Politik mit anderen Mitteln." Interestingly, “bloße” means “naked” as well as “mere,” so go figure.

Let us boil Clausewitz down further: politics is a show of force; war is actual force. This means that all the words and the actions of domestic politics are really shows of force. In this view, an election is a sham war, in which the decision goes to the side that wins the sham battle on Election Day. In the old days, especially after a Democratic victory, the mainstream media would spend about two months arguing how we are all Americans and how we all come together after the election. This process would start with the concession speech by the losing candidate on election night.

The reason for conceding elections and dialing down the partisan rhetoric for a year or so after a big presidential election is that the point of politics is to avoid civil war, and win with shows of force instead of actual force. We have a good old set-to in the months leading up to the election and then we send all the political soldiers home. We ratify, in other words, a peace treaty between the Ins and the Outs, the Wes and the Theys, until next time.

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