The growing narrative about the Trump lame-duck looks like it is going to be that it was more or less a disaster politically, and if that becomes the conventional understanding across the political spectrum, it's definitely a good thing for the country going forward.

If every politician's and party's learned takeaway from the last two months is that the personal forward-going value of absurdly refusing to concede is vastly outweighed by public, party, and personal costs, that's great.

And note that this is almost certainly a good "belief norm" for the system to hold, regardless of whether it's actually true in practice.

In a stable and well-functioning democracy, you just want people who do existentially reckless things to be politically punished, and you want everyone to believe that that's the result when they are considering doing existentially reckless things.

The system is a collection of individuals. Just as individual firms don't necessarily care about the free market, individual politicians and parties don't necessarily care about democracy. A healthy system tries to channel individual incentives toward systemic stability.