The first vote I cast for president was for Jimmy Carter, thereby providing additional evidence that the 26th Amendment was a mistake.
I've probably seen my candidates lose as often as not since then, but also confess to never having lost any sleep over it, including this year. I certainly never felt as bad the day after an election as I did when the Cowboys lost to the Steelers back in Super Bowl XIII or when my Fighting Illini got beat in the 2005 NCAA basketball final by that semi-pro team from North Carolina.
Some things are more important than politics, or at least should be if we have normal lives with varied interests. All of which makes it difficult to understand all the whining and hysteria and silly "letters to my daughter" coming from this year's sore losers.
Granted, the idea of President Donald Trump is unsettling, but politics shouldn't matter so much as to make us cry and wail, at least if we are mature adults, and certainly not in a republic in which government has limited powers and a system of checks and balances prevails.
Although I find government sufficiently interesting to make it my life study, a central conclusion of that study has also been that it should play only a modest role in our lives.
The American system was ingeniously designed to both limit government and neuter political passions to the benefit of individual liberty. Those who fail to grasp this have no business voting, let alone experiencing a meltdown because their candidate didn't get enough votes.
We should also always remember that our political order is designed to limit power by diffusing it, at the vertical level between the federal and state governments (federalism) and at the horizontal level through separation of powers. The power of the federal government should be limited and the power of the presidency within that federal government limited as well.
In theory at least, the presidency should be a somewhat modest office, one generally deferential to the prerogatives of the legislative branch, the quintessential expression of democracy. Although an admittedly ironic source, Woodrow Wilson didn't exaggerate too much when he compared the president to a mere clerk in his congressional government and suggested the primary duties of the office were to carry out the wishes of Congress and avoid assassination.
The greatest threat to this constitutional order, and to the rights that so many liberals now think are suddenly jeopardized by Trump, is thus the same overly intrusive federal government with an outsized executive branch that liberals have long championed as an agent of transformation.
Indeed, the primary propellant of government expansion over time has been the left's pernicious idea that it exists to solve all problems and correct all injustices-when so much of the personal becomes political and the public sector relentlessly expands at the expense of the private we move ever closer to losing the rights that government was originally brought into being to protect.
In a healthy society, what Edmund Burke famously called the "little platoons," or what social scientists call "mediating institutions," should be diligently protected from encroachments by the state, and we should care more about our families, careers, churches and neighborhoods than about politics.
And if the election of an unfit man to the office of the presidency causes the kind of fear and loathing that we are now witnessing, it should alert us to the possibility that the powers of that federal government and of the presidency within it have grown too great.
If we sincerely wish to protect ourselves and our rights from such men (and women), then we should return to the idea of limits on the power of the presidency more specifically and the federal government more generally.
The people aren't always right, and the democratic process contains no guarantees against mistakes, but the only viable solution to such mistakes is to limit the damage they can wreak once installed in office. As the key designer of our constitutional order, James Madison, famously reminded us, it is because of human fallibility that we need both government and constraints upon it.
We might also benefit from remembering that, as government constantly grows larger and becomes more intrusive in response to our demands, life also becomes inevitably more politicized. And that with politicization also come the kinds of hyper-partisanship and polarization we are now witnessing: In a healthy society politics plays too minor a role to separate friends and neighbors; in an overly politicized one, where government touches everything, it can't help but push those (former) friends and neighbors into warring tribes.
When the media is pervaded by articles on how to get through Thanksgiving dinners without bitter arguments over politics among family members, we should know that something has gone awry.
Election outcomes that produce excessive euphoria and despair suggest that far too many of our citizens see too much at risk on Election Day and that the founders' vision of limited, moderate government on behalf of individual liberty has been undermined.
If nothing else then, maybe the arrival of a President Trump will encourage contemporary liberals to revisit the core insight of classical liberalism - that an all-powerful state and individual liberty are incompatible.
Freelance columnist Bradley R. Gitz, who lives and teaches in Batesville, received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Illinois.