“Donald Trump has gone low, but recently he said something that was truly horrifying. He refused to say that he would respect the results of this election (crowd boos). I know. It has never been done before. Nobody. If you go back, nobody running for president representing one of our two major parties has ever said that. And I have to say the first thing a president does on Jan. 20th is to take an oath to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States (crowd cheers).”

-Hillary Clinton

I am reminded of a simpler time. A time when Clinton supporters thought they were going to win by a landslide without the slightest doubt––even conservatives were already conceding defeat. Liberals had their thumb on the cork of celebratory champagne, one foot on the podium ready to accept their crown to another four years of power. This proved premature, however, as the crown was snatched from their eager fingers and given to the gleeful, and frankly surprised, conservatives. Even more shocked were the liberals, who shook their head in disappointment and bitterness. But soon, conceding that the system was fair and that the people had spoken, they moved on with their lives as part of a functioning democratic system, as they waited patiently to see what executive actions their new president would take.

Oh, if only.

Instead, mass hysteria swept through the nation as liberals outright rejected Trump’s election, taking to the streets to riot. Mobs of angry, distraught social justice warriors marched their college campuses and main streets chanting “not my president! We reject the president-elect!” as they smashed property and burned effigies. Multiple reports of violence and assault ensued, as countless Trump supporters were hospitalized simply for casting their vote.

For a faction of society that deems itself the more educated people of America, I have never seen a bigger display of ignorance and benightedness from the liberals. First off, if you want to express your distaste in something political, how about trying a bit of peaceful protesting in lieu of instigating a battle royale in the middle of Times Square? Just the fact that you tout freedom of speech does not grant you the right to infringe upon others’ human rights. While you are at it, maybe wait until Trump has actually done something worthy of rioting, rather than grabbing your pitchforks before he has even been inaugurated (even now, Trump has proposed to keep certain parts of Obamacare and has erased his Muslim removal plan from his website entirely). This display of utter contempt for the democratic process has been so repulsive that it has made me embarrassed to call myself liberal, and has almost made me side with the conservatives. Almost.

Such liberals are so naive that they actually believe that the Electoral College will overturn the biggest democratic decisions in their country one-by-one until Clinton wins––just because the people threw a temper tantrum, upset that the election did not turn out the exact way they wanted to. Sorry to burst your bubble, but that’s not happening. The harsh, cold truth is that the election was entirely fair, and burning a paper mache piñata of Trump is not going to change that fact. Just because Katy Perry tweets about how it is “time for a revolution” does not make her Che Guevara, nor does it make you him.

Some liberals have made a move to repeal the Electoral College entirely. But while the Electoral College system may be perplexing, it actually holds an important purpose in our political system. Our country is not a democracy; it is a republic of states, states that have a wide variety of demographics and hold different and unique lifestyles. With a popular vote, small agrarian states like Wyoming with barely over 600,000 people have little to no electoral value next to states like California with over 38,000,000 people. Legitimizing the popular vote would mean candidates would no longer have to actually listen to such minor states and their needs. All candidates would need to do is pamper to a few big states, and the election would practically be in their hands. The Electoral College assuages this problem by giving more power to smaller states so that their voice for their population can be heard. The uniqueness of America lies in the fact that it is not homogenous––it is a melting pot of lifestyles. By regarding the Midwest as fly-over states with no real input to the American society, liberals are flying in the face of democracy itself, and instead supporting a tyranny of the majority.

In this way, the intrinsic nature of the liberals’ demands completely contradicts what they are fighting for. They demand the protection of their right to engage in increasingly violent riots––they scream in the name of democracy for it––yet they do not realize that by doing so they are protesting the very thing they claim for themselves: a democratically held election in the interest of representing the entirety of the United States. It comes to a point of hypocrisy where we must ask: do these people really want democracy, or do they just want things to line up with their personal ideologies? The idealistic value of democracy seems to be a tool used by drama queens who don’t hold it dear until it becomes convenient to them, and this is yet another example of that happening.

These liberals have become so convinced of their superiority, so indignant of what their view of what it is right for society is, that they want to label nearly half of the opinions of the country as illegitimate. This, in of itself, is hypocritical. Liberals strive for an America devoid of classification and stereotypes, yet they make conservatives out to be this monolith of evil, racist, stupid, almost sub-par group of citizens that are defined only by the very worst of Trump’s rhetoric. Of course, conservatives are also guilty of this, but the point is that by waging this war against its own people the only thing the American public accomplishes is stratifying itself further apart.