Back when I was a young man I had a Greek-American friend that taught me Rule One about democratic politics. This was back in the mid-1970s when the Greek colonels had just conceded power back to the center-right party in Greece.

What was needed now in Greece, my friend insisted, was that the center-right party concede power to the center-left party at the next election, and that the center-left party concede the next-but-one election to the center-right party.

Here in America, the Democrats have failed to concede the last two normal change elections that went against them: the 2000 presidential squeaker election and the 2016 election.

But you will search long and hard among your liberal acquaintance for anyone that understands how serious this is.

Now we have a piece on “This Civil War” from Daniel Greenfield, a speech given to the Tea Party convention of South Carolina. When you have a party that doesn’t concede elections then you have a civil war, he says. How do you know you have a civil war?

Two or more sides disagree on who runs the country. And they can’t settle the question through elections because they don’t even agree that elections are how you decide who’s in charge.

That’s the basic issue here. Who decides who runs the country? When you hate each other but accept the election results, you have a country. When you stop accepting election results, you have a countdown to a civil war.

Moving on, Greenfield says there are two kinds of government. You can have a “voluntary government” or a “professional government.”

This is a civil war between volunteer governments elected by the people and professional governments elected by… well… uh… themselves.

Of the establishment, by the establishment and for the establishment.

Go ahead, read the whole thing.

But I think there is an additional factor that Greenfield misses. It is that the Deep State, the Permanent Government, the “professional government,” whatever, are fools, knaves, and weaklings, and they are going to lose.

Think about what Comey and Strzok and Page and Clinton and Fusion GPS were doing in 2016. One thing comes through to me: these are weak, foolish people playing bush league but that think they are major league. Because they went to selective colleges or something.

You want to know what big-league looks like? Try Hamilton in the Federalist Papers arguing about the problems of weak federations. Or Hamilton’s debt refunding plan that launched the U.S. economy into the stratosphere. Or Reagan’s tax-rate cuts that ignited a 20 year boom.

Why are the weaklings so blind? It’s because to believe in their top-down administrative state run by the professionals they have to keep the blinders on, and resolutely ignore the settled science, such as:

Socialism cannot work because it cannot compute prices. And that goes for administrative government too. This is called the  “economic calculation problem.”

Under socialism or under the administrative state, the government gets captured by the special interests. This is called “regulatory capture.”

Under any government, no government program gets fixed until way after it breaks. That’s because the ruling class fears government program beneficiaries, who fight any reduction in their benefits to the knife. This is called Chantrill’s Law.

Socialism or the administrative state assumes that everything, even plastic straws in restaurants, should be regulated by the state. In other words businesses, even restaurants, cannot be trusted to know what is good for themselves and their customers.

In fact, the opposite is  true.

See, the dirty little secret is that the administrative state of our ruling class doesn’t work. At its best, piling on Obamacares and regulations, it can putter along at low growth like the Obama years. At the medium, it descends into Venezuelan hyperinflation. At its worst it descends into Nazi or Soviet or Chinese genocide.

And meanwhile the bribed apologists of our ruling class geniuses think they are #TheResistance. When in fact, to coin a phrase, they “literally know nothing.”

Last time that the losers started looking for Reds under the bed it was the Republicans in the late 1940s just after the GOP had lost five presidential elections in a row. Hey, they had a point! Alger Hiss (“from substantial Baltimore families”) and Harry Dexter White were genuine Soviet spies!

It was in 1992, when I was 46, after the Democrats had lost three elections in a row, that I decided that starting right now I was going to start voting for the out party after two successive presidential terms. Because democracy. Hey, you get to vote for a lot of winners that way: Clinton, Bush, Obama, Trump!

But now we have Democrats seeing Russians under the bed after the other side has won a single presidential election.

Do you see why I think the Gores, the Hillarys, the Chucks and Nancys, the “very fake news” are fools, knaves, and weaklings?

Christopher Chantrill @chrischantrill runs the go-to site on US government finances, usgovernmentspending.com. Also get his American Manifesto and his Road to the Middle Class.