Political commentator Eric Wargotz argued this week that the gravest danger facing the American republic is not which party wins the next election, but the growing conviction among citizens and leaders that a lost vote strips the government of its legitimacy.
Wargotz, a physician, judge and commentator on public policy, philosophy and spirituality, made the argument in an op-ed published by the Washington Examiner under the headline “Your party losing is not an existential threat. Your temper tantrum is.” The piece was circulated widely by the Examiner’s own account, @dcexaminer, which introduced the column by quoting its central thesis: that a party’s defeat is not an existential threat, but the reaction to it may be.
The column opens on what Wargotz describes as an age of fractures — tribal politics, atomized communities and a public square that has become a battleground. As the next election cycle approaches, he writes, the cultural chatter is entirely predictable: analysts, talking heads and politicians screaming a familiar refrain that this is the single most consequential election in American history.
Wargotz argues that framing every cycle as an existential apocalypse causes the country to miss a deeper and more sobering truth. Every American election is monumental, he writes, but the real danger today is not who wins the next vote.
“The true threat is the toxic sentiment taking root across our entire society: the idea that if your preferred faction loses, the government itself loses its legitimacy,” Wargotz writes.
From the voting booth to the halls of Congress, he argues, citizens and leaders increasingly feel justified in withdrawing their allegiance, withholding civic duty, or actively wishing for institutional failure. He calls this a profound moral mistake and contends that true patriotism demands a deeper and more enduring commitment — that Americans must support their country and its constitutional structure regardless of which political party holds what he calls the temporary lease on power.
The column appeared as the latest entry in a genre of commentary that has grown louder on both sides of the aisle in recent cycles. The Examiner’s own summary of the piece distilled the argument to a single line: the true threat to democracy is not losing an election, but withdrawing allegiance to constitutional order when your party loses.
That summary was the frame the outlet’s account @dcexaminer carried onto the platform, presenting the op-ed’s thesis to readers ahead of the next election cycle. The post directed readers to the full column, which the Examiner made available behind its subscriber paywall, describing it as the news, analysis and commentary that matter most, with full access for subscribers.
Wargotz’s argument lands in a political moment in which both parties have increasingly described the opposing side’s victories as threats to the nation’s foundations. The op-ed does not single out one faction. It describes a sentiment that has taken root across the entire society — a willingness, when the other side wins, to treat the government itself as illegitimate rather than merely wrong.
The column’s title uses the phrase “temper tantrum” to describe that reaction, and its opening line pairs the two ideas directly: your party losing is not an existential threat; your temper tantrum is. The piece does not call for abandoning political combat, nor for refusing to contest elections. It calls for separating the outcome of any single vote from the legitimacy of the constitutional structure that produced it.
In Wargotz’s telling, the pattern is now visible from the voting booth to the halls of Congress, where the refusal to accept an outcome has become, for some, a form of civic virtue rather than a breach of it. He characterizes that shift as a moral error rather than a strategic one, and grounds his objection in the idea that allegiance to the country and its constitutional order outlasts any temporary lease on power held by a political party.
Wargotz brings a background in medicine, the judiciary and commentary on public policy, philosophy and spirituality to the argument, according to the publication’s own description of the author accompanying the piece. The op-ed was distributed through the Examiner’s account as the next election cycle approaches, a period in which the outlet says the familiar refrain about the stakes of the coming vote is already being sounded by analysts and politicians alike.
The column’s closing sections, like its opening, are addressed to the reader as a citizen rather than as a partisan. It urges a commitment that endures past any single election result, and warns that the alternative — treating each defeat as grounds for withdrawing from the system — does more damage to the country than any single victory or loss at the ballot box.
Next News Network could not independently verify the claims and characterizations advanced in the column.
Our Take
Wargotz is right about the diagnosis, and the diagnosis is the whole ballgame. For the better part of a decade, Americans have been told by their own leaders that the other side’s victory would end the republic as we know it. That message has been delivered from both parties, from both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue, and it has worked. Voters have been trained to treat every election as the last one — and when you believe the last election has been lost, the logic of resistance follows naturally. Wargotz does not pretend that policy differences are trivial or that elections do not matter; he argues, correctly, that a constitutional order worth preserving cannot depend on your side winning every time. The people who scream loudest that this is the most consequential election in American history are often the same people who, the morning after, tell their followers that the system itself is rigged. That is not civic engagement. It is the temper tantrum the headline names, and it is being sold to Americans as patriotism. The healthier posture is the one Wargotz prescribes: fight hard for your side, accept the result, and remember that the lease on power is temporary while the Constitution is not. Conservatives who spent years warning about the delegitimization of institutions should recognize the argument instantly. So should liberals who spent other years warning about the same thing. The country cannot survive a permanent state of refusal, and no party has a monopoly on the grievance that fuels it. The remedy is not a new election. It is a recovered sense that losing a vote is not the same as losing the country.
