The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of Townhall.com.

There is a lesson in every defeat, if you’re not too pigheaded to learn it. When it comes to the shellacking Democrats have taken in the last few elections, pigheaded doesn’t begin to cover their reaction.

With the exception of President Obama’s re-election in 2012, Democrats have been on a severe losing streak since 2010. It couldn’t happen to a nicer, more deserving group of people.

Americans had a large plate full of unfettered progressive rule in 2009 and 2010, and they did not like it. Ever since, they’ve been rejecting Democrats like a transplant patient rejects a bad kidney.

With the exception of Barack Obama.

The cult of personality surrounding the president is disturbing, but less so over time as it became clear it was not contagious. Every candidate he personally pushed for went down in flames. Every time he put himself on the line for someone or something other than himself, he lost.

One shining example came when Martha Coakley lost to Scott Brown, a Republican in the blue state of San Francisco, er, Massachusetts, in a crucial Senate race. The only issue was the president’s health care bill, and it lost.

He is personally popular, but what he stands for is ants at a picnic. People have separated the two with him but married the policies and the party for everyone else.

Barack Obama is the best thing to ever happen to Republican get-out-the-vote efforts. The GOP realizes this, but Democrats are in denial.

You hear it all the time – MSNBC and CNN hosts and pundits can’t fathom the concept of their policies being unwanted any more than they can accept that they don’t work. Their losses have to be caused by other factors.

Since the election, Democrats have blamed everything but a comet, a plague and the death of Prince for the GOP winning the White House and holding Congress. A couple more appearances by Howard Dean on TV, and you probably will start to hear about comets and plagues.

That’s the problem for Democrats – they don’t like looking into the mirror any more than the American people like looking at them.

I get that one of the stages of grief is denial. In fact, it’s the first one. Since having their posteriors handed to them in 2010, Democrats haven’t moved past stage one.

They blame the voters for being duped, self-destructive, even stupid. This year, with the rejection of Hillary Clinton, we’ve gone from being a racist nation that twice elected a black man to being a racist and sexist nation for twice not electing a woman – and for electing Trump. Oddly, the black man who beat her the first time avoided the sexist label because the left manufactures the labels. In the ultimate fit of irony, leftists even have taken to blaming media bias for their losses.

Missing from Democrats’ blame game is anything having to do with Democrats. It’s not that Clinton was a horrible candidate running to continue unpopular policies that have brought about economic stagnation; it’s that all of us who voted against her are a bunch of misogynists.

It’s not that Hillary’s corruptions were something the people did not want to reward; it was the media for reporting on them too much. It wasn’t Clinton’s decision to obfuscate disclosure rules and put national security at risk for reasons no one can believably explain; it was a letter the FBI Director sent so he wouldn’t have been found to contradict his sworn congressional testimony.

It’s always something else, never Democrats.

The last week and a half have demonstrated the power of denial and just how addicted the left is to it. They’re being rejected at every level of government. In many cases, Republicans won simply because they were running against Democrats.

Given the names being floated to head the Democratic National Committee – the rehash of Dean and radical Congressman Keith Ellison of Minnesota – Democrats have shown they will not take that long, sobering look into a reflective surface anytime soon. They have learned nothing from the Obama years. Good.

But Republicans clearly haven’t either.

That the first thing they did after winning the White House and narrowly maintaining control of Congress was to attempt to reinstate earmarks shows this. How arrogant and self-destructive can they be? Wait, don’t answer that. Thankfully Speaker Paul Ryan killed that idea for now. But we have confirmation, as if we needed it, that Republicans are as obtuse as we feared and have learned nothing.

They say the job of parents of young kids is simply to keep the kids from killing themselves. It’s not that they're suicidal. It’s that they don’t know any better, and curiosity forms before the rational brain.

With politicians, the rational brain works, but the arrogance of power overrides it.

Thomas Jefferson said, “Eternal vigilance is the price we pay for liberty.” With the clowns we have in Washington, both in the minority and majority, we can’t afford complacency.

If Democrats somehow regain power, they will push the same policies, with the same arrogance, and the people will continue to reject it as if it were a compulsion. If Republicans go unchecked, they will turn into Democrats.

Each of the elections in the 21st century have sent clear messages to politicians about what the American people want and what we will accept, with each message louder than the last. The old way of doing things is unacceptable.

People want their liberty protected from government as much as they want it protected by government. It remains to be seen which way President-Elect Trump will slide on the scale, but Democrats and Republicans already have started to slide into their old habits.

If you thought electing Trump and retaining Republican control of government was the end of the fight, sorry to wake you; Democrats are out there ready to strike, and Republicans are ready to be Republicans again. This election was a game-changer with important lessons to learn. And there’s every reason to believe elected officials from both parties didn’t learn a damn thing.