Obsession

Remember this typical mid-80s ditty?

It's supposedly about the usual Topic A, but there's an undercurrent as well:

You are an obsession 
I cannot sleep 
I am your possession 
Unopened at your feet 
There's no balance 
No equality 
Be still I will not accept defeat

Seems like more than a few people can't accept defeat these days. Writing for Commentary, Jonathan Tobin has noticed:

Like the effort to force recounts in swing states won by Trump, the attempt to persuade the Electoral College to see the president-elect as part of a Russian plot or to channel The Federalist Papers and pick someone else flopped. So now that the fantasies that the bad dream can be made to go away are exploded, what are Democrats who are still refusing to accept they lost to do?

The answer from the left is “resistance.” That’s what Moveon.org — which helped organize some of the protests at the various Electoral College ceremonies as well as other anti-Trump demonstrations — is saying. What form will “resistance” take? That’s far from clear. The group’s leader Anna Galland seems to be primarily interested in more mass street theater. According to radical TV talker Keith Olbermann, it should consist of daily reminders to Republicans that Hillary Clinton won the popular vote and refusing to refer to Trump as the president.

Stomp those little feet a little harder. It's a wonderful thing, actually, if you're a Trump supporter. Back to Tobin:

What this means is that rather than a fraction of the party’s extremists starting the new administration enmeshed in a new derangement syndrome, it appears the critical mass of the party that won 48 percent of the vote is unable to move past a disappointing election.

That’s a critical mistake not so much because it is unproductive—which it is—but because it allows Trump look like a relative moderate. After a year of warning the country that Trump was a threat to democracy who would never respect the process, it turns out that it was the Democrats who have been the sore losers and unwilling to pull together for the good of the country. If, as is likely, the bulk of the Democratic Party continues to act as if Trump is not a legitimate president who won a free and fair election, then they will be the ones who are marginalized. 

I don't blame them, I guess. There's a lot of hard work ahead for the Dems. Barack Obama left the cupboard bare. There's no bench and no obvious candidates to challenge Trump in 2020 who aren't septuagenarians. The Democrats are largely confined to large metropolitan areas and are having a hell of a time finding people to carry their banner in large swaths of the country. It's not a formula for longtime success.

You protest 
You want to leave 
Stay 
Oh, there's no alternative

It would appear not.