Who Won the 2020 Election?

Political thinking beyond the myths of the American Regime

Kari Lake, like Donald Trump before her, is still in the midst of an attempted court battle to challenge the declared gubernatorial victory of Katie Hobbes. And now, according to The Guardian, her own efforts to expose corruption and malfeasance during the voting are being turned against her:

The Arizona secretary of state, Adrian Fontes, asked the state attorney general Monday to investigate and potentially charge the losing Republican candidate for governor with a felony for sharing images of voters’ signatures online.

Fontes, a Democrat, said GOP gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake may have violated a state law that protects a voter’s signature from being accessed or shared by anyone other than the voter or an “authorized government official in the scope of the official’s duties”. Violations of this law carry a class six felony charge, the lowest-level felony in Arizona.

The objective, as was argued in the aftermath of Trump’s loss in 2020, is to demonstrate that an accurate and honest counting of all demonstrably legal votes would result in a Lake victory.

That is to say, Lake and Trump were the true winners, while Biden and Hobbes were the losers, despite those in power-positions declaring otherwise.

But what does it mean to be a true winner without power? The entire model the well-intentioned and actively furious mainstream conservatives operate on is built on the assumption that a winner in an electoral contest is the political participant who receives the most votes. That is to say, they confuse the myth of electoral politics with the political reality of power.

James Burnham distinguished between these two in his study of what he considered to be the Machiavellian tradition of political realism. His famous quote argued that:

the primary objective, and practice, of all rulers is to serve their own interest, to maintain their own power and privilege. There are no exceptions. No theory, no promises, no morality, no amount of goodwill, no religion will restrain power.

One of the Machiavellians on whom Burnham builds his study is the great Italian political theorist Gaetano Mosca, who was emphatic that

Ruling classes do not justify their power exclusively by de facto possession of it, but try to find a moral and legal basis for it, representing it as the logical and necessary consequence of doctrines and beliefs that are generally recognized and accepted.

The application of these quotes, on the question of electoral victories, is that the electoral process is a useful justification for power, but is not itself the de facto possession of it. Electoral politics, to borrow from Sam Francis’ exposition of Mosca, is not a “true scientific or philosophical explanation of reality but rather a justification [of] a course of action for a particular group.”

Thus, when we ask ourselves “who won the 2020 presidential election?” or “who won the 2022 AZ gubernatorial election?” we operate in the realm of political myth when we seek our answer in the actualities of vote results.

The politically true answer to electoral outcomes is: whomever, after it is said and done, holds the reins of power. Joe Biden—and Katie Hobbes— won their respective elections because, as we can see plainly, they are in power. They hold the office. Electoral processes are not intended, at their root, to match up voting outcomes with office holders; rather they are intended to justify before the public mass the exercise of power.

If Donald Trump and Kari Lake and their backers wanted to win, they have to deal with political reality. They have to shake-off the chains of democratic narratives that hold the West captive and take a lesson from Burnham:

Only power restrains power.  That restraining power is expressed in the existence and activity of oppositions. When all opposition is destroyed, there is no longer any limit to what power may do.

The democratic process only works if there are blocks of true power oppositions underlying the visual layer with which the people participate. Without a unit that holds the political ability to confront with power its opposition, the “true election results” are politically meaningless.

Biden and Hobbes (and let’s throw Fetterman and others in there too) won because winning is defined as completing the election cycle as the holder of power. Those who define winning as “getting the most legal votes,” or some variation of that are operating on myths against a political body that operates on reality.

Maybe one day we will have a real opposition party that “steals” the election back, that exercises power against hostile legal institutions that have been politically captive by the Left. The trouble with conservatives so often is that they bind their own tactics to the limits of artifacts like the Constitution which is in political fact weaponized against them. Maybe if we can cast off the scales from our eyes that blind us to the fact that American political dynamics have nothing to do with Constitutional niceties, we can actually fight back.

The Left is willing to capture power, while conservatives take the noble path of losing with grace, and in the process gives up a civilizational inheritance that had been built over a thousand years. Is this cost worth Conservatism’s one-sided commitment to our twentieth century liberal-democratic political myths?