The 2020 Election as a Lesson in What Not to Do

The definition of insanity is…

Previously I wrote an article laying out why I will not vote for Donald Trump in this election, despite being very much on the right side of the political divide. I think this was my least well-received and most heavily-criticized post, which makes perfect sense given how right-wing my readers probably are. I imagine that this post might encounter a similar degree of pushback, which is all the more reason to write it, as such feedback signals to me that it’s something worth discussing.

My basic premise in this post is that Donald Trump’s behavior and actions following the 2020 election were bad even if you entirely discount the usual narrative about how he “attempted a coup” and is “a threat to democracy” and blah blah blah. I get why people aren’t interested in giving that crap the time of day. Almost everyone who says that stuff did not vote for Trump, would never vote for Trump anyways, and already wanted Trump to just go away regardless of anything to do with January 6.

To play into these narratives about the supposed threat of “election denial” is therefore to simply carry water for one’s enemies. When right-wingers refuse to do that, they are correctly intuiting politics as war by other means and acting accordingly. This is possibly the greatest positive change in the right since Trump’s arrival—the replacement of naïve boomer complacency with a more realistic understanding of politics as nasty, cynical, and fundamentally dishonest. We settle our differences this way because it’s the alternative to literally picking up guns and shooting each other, not because we are actually great buddies with a genuine fondness for “principled disagreement” and liberal values and all the other fake bullshit.

Even if we adopt this framing of politics, though, it’s still impossible to deny that 2020 was a crushing defeat, and that the tactics deployed by Donald Trump and his surrogates simply failed. In war, you can’t pretend that a loss isn’t what it really is, because there will be dead bodies and the wreckage of the battlefield staring you in the face. In politics, it’s much more possible for us to sit here and cope and seethe about what really happened. The left engaged in a pretty intense form of this via “Russiagate” after 2016, telling themselves for years on end that Trump only won because Vladimir Putin somehow rigged the election on his behalf.

Now people are likely to interject here: “But 2020 actually was stolen!” I am personally agnostic on this. I am inherently distrustful of an election result that isn’t determined until weeks after the actual election day. At the same time, I have seen no single piece of “smoking gun” evidence which clearly demonstrates a “stolen” election. It’s been four years and Lord knows a lot of people have been motivated to look for such a thing. My heuristic here is that if it existed, every right winger would probably know about it and spam it as a talking point.

I am sure that someone will comment on this post saying “but look at this, this proves the election was stolen!” My issue with that is: Go show it to a liberal, or even a centrist/fence-sitter, and see what they have to say about it. Whatever it is, they’ll probably dismiss it, or at best give some kind of waffling unsure response. No matter how convincing you think it is, it’s unlikely to convince anyone who isn’t already on your side. This whole conversation has already played out in the public discourse and people’s minds are made up.

It's likely to be the same thing this time around. If Trump loses, it could easily be another situation where Kamala barely pulls it out in all the swing states after key Democrat-controlled precincts take weeks to report their votes. In fact, that’s my personal prediction as the most likely outcome, although I make the prediction with a fairly low level of certainty. In the aftermath of such an outcome, people are going to have the same reaction of immediately claiming that it’s a steal. I’m not saying not to say that. Say that it’s stolen, use your heckin’ freeze peach.

However, we have to grapple with the reality that the country at large is not going to accept a narrative of the election being stolen from Trump, just as it refused to accept such a narrative in 2020. Indeed, since we’ve already been through that whole song and dance once, it’s even more likely to play out exactly the same way again—just like we expect this election to be stolen, everyone else expects us to immediately cry that it was stolen. They’re already primed for such a narrative and ready to dismiss it out of hand, no matter what evidence you try to show them.

This means we need to consider what we can actually do in this situation. Yelling “it was stolen!” and stomping our feet and flailing around a lot isn’t going to do anything. I was and still am quite frustrated by this attitude. After 2020, people yelled “Stop the steal!” a whole hell of a lot, without there ever being any sort of plan for how anyone was actually going to stop anything. The scheme to have Mike Pence refuse to certify the election was retarded and was never going to work. Anyone who thinks the regime would’ve given that the time of day hasn’t been paying attention.

The only way you’re going to overturn the current regime in circumstances of a disputed election would be an actual military coup. Not that cute little “riot” with granny plodding around in the Capitol for a couple hours, actual generals in the US Army saying “look at me, look at me, I’m da state now” and detaining anyone who doesn’t like it. Where would things go from there? Who the hell knows. I think people would be right to say this is a really high risk situation that may not be worth the consequences even if we could achieve it.

So if you really want to toss out an election that the regime says is theirs, you should petition the Army and the Marines. If anyone can actually do it, they’re probably the ones who can. I wouldn’t do this if I were you though. I rate the odds of such a plea succeeding as very low, what’s likely to happen instead is just that you’ll get placed on a watchlist as a potential domestic terrorist.

The other option is an actual unironic Civil War 2.0, which is an even worse idea. Are you really willing to pick up your AR-15 and die over this shit? I’m not, I’m moving to an area that is sparsely populated and supermajority white and waiting it out, that’s what I’m doing. Based on sentiments I see about what to do if the shit hits the fan, I think most people feel the same as me. I see a lot of talk about prepping, avoiding cities, forming close-knit defensible communities, etc., and not so much talk about trying to form a militia to march on DC, which is a good thing.

Now comes the next likely objection: “Well are we just supposed to do nothing? You’re demoralizing! Stop blackpilling!” This brings me to my second angle of frustration with the stolen election narrative. Conservatives seem to be rather schizophrenic about this—they get very puffed up and animated when they’re talking about it, then when the conversation is over, they immediately go back to acting like it never happened. What’s the main thing people are focused on doing right now, in order to rectify the “stolen” 2020 election?

They’re focused on just voting for Trump again. If this election ends up “stolen” again, well then, what did you expect? If they cheated last time and got away with it, why did you think you could just do exactly the same thing over again and get a different result? I’m sorry, but that’s absolutely bonkers. On the other hand, if voting harder actually works and Trump wins this time, how do we interpret that outcome?

What would be the explanation for why the election wasn’t stolen from Trump this time? Was 2020 a one-off and now the enemy is done cheating? Why would that be the case? I’m sure people will come up with copes for this scenario, and I’ve done a bit of thinking on it myself. But when you start making up stories to explain this degree of inconsistency you’re straying into the realm of motivated reasoning, creating these speculative just-so narratives to fit your preferred interpretation of events rather than evaluating them objectively.

Personally, if Trump wins this time, I’m taking that as a pretty strong blow against the “stolen election” narrative. It certainly doesn’t prove that 2020 wasn’t stolen, but I’d have to rate the likelihood considerably lower in light of it, because it just doesn’t make any sense to me that 2020 was super duper stolen but then all of a sudden for some reason 4 years later the same people are no longer willing or able to steal it from Orange Hitler again. Maybe there is a degree of fraud but it’s relatively minor, or maybe Trump just really actually did lose a really close election during a chaotic time.

Anyways, back to the what-if-Trump-loses scenario. Here are some things people should adopt and internalize, probably regardless of the outcome, but definitely if Trump loses again:

1.      A narrative that poorly-run elections which take weeks to return results are a “threat to democracy.”

2.      An attitude that most of the core moral issues at play in our so-called elections are things that really shouldn’t even be up for a vote in the first place.

3.      A serious push for decentralization of power, with more authority granted to the states vis a vis the federal government.

I’ll go over these briefly in order.

There is absolutely no excuse for our elections taking even a single day past election day to return results. There is also absolutely no excuse for elections to proceed without stringent protections against voter fraud, given the current state of things. Requiring voter ID should be viewed as a bare minimum for any election to be considered legitimate. When liberals complain about “election denial,” spam this at them, ask them why they oppose election security and integrity. Instead of (or I suppose in addition to) saying “the election is definitely stolen,” say that we can’t know if it was or wasn’t because liberals are explicitly against transparency and want to make it easier to cheat/harder to audit results. Put the burden of proof on them.

The left loves to harp on about “democracy,” but they need to be reminded at every turn that when push comes to shove, they’re perfectly willing to shove “democracy” aside in favor of protecting their sacred values. The most egregious examples of this are abortion and “gay marriage,” two core social issues which the left imposed top-down through illegitimate Supreme Court rulings, illegitimate in the sense that the rulings were clearly motivated by ideology rather than legal interpretation. The Constitution obviously does not guarantee any right to abortion or “gay marriage,” and these things could not be secured “democratically,” as when put to a vote they failed—but the left was perfectly willing to force them through in spite of that, and they don’t feel bad about it at all.

Leftists have an implicit, religious-level belief that their views are the only correct ones, and that the degree to which anyone voted for or against anything doesn’t really matter by comparison. This is much more well-aligned to the reality of politics as a pure power struggle than all the noble lies believed by boomercons about pluralism and American values and such. The right has gotten better about this, but the only way we’ll know we’ve gotten good enough is when we actually win. Plus, it’s really not that hard to argue that most core leftist positions are fundamentally illegitimate: The left shouldn’t be able to simply vote for an open border to import more voters, for instance, or vote for policies which amount to taking more stuff from the productive in order to buy the support of useless people.

Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, conservatives need to start demanding that red states stand up to the federal government. Once again, the left has already shown us the way on this, with their practice of “sanctuary cities” that blatantly refuse to enforce federal immigration law. If they can’t get their way federally, then they passively refuse compliance at the local level, as much as they can get away with. Make the feds make you do it. We caught a glimpse of this when Texas pretty much told the feds “lol no” in a dispute over border security earlier this year. This situation betrays just how fragile the federal government’s authority really is—it mostly relies on people’s willingness to recognize it.

This provides a path for the right to impose costs on the blob and fortify territory against it without giving them any easy ways to hit back. If you reject federal authority at the local level, now the onus is on them to do something to you about it from Washington, DC. It also provides an avenue for the regime to negotiate with the right if it wants to—recognize some of our grievances and maybe you can regain some of our trust, or keep escalating and watch as national cohesion continues to crumble. With US hegemony currently under the greatest threat it has faced abroad since the end of the Cold War, the regime has a real incentive to shore up national unity and avoid internal strife.

These are some of the tenets that the right needs to accept in order to face the world as it is, rather than as we wish it were. Yelling that the election is stolen is impotent because the ask is completely uncalibrated to the amount of leverage that the right actually has. The reality is that, even if you could produce some sort of undeniable “smoking gun” evidence of a stolen election and show it to liberals, many of them would probably respond with “Well yeah, of course we stole it, we had to stop Hitler. What are you going to do about it, chud? LOL!”

It’s naïve to think that somehow, if we just try hard enough, we can actually convince our enemies to agree to a complete surrender without even putting up a fight (which is what accepting the “stolen election” narrative would amount to for them). Getting past this sort of thinking is a necessary step in developing more effective right-wing advocacy. Remember that if politics is nasty and fundamentally dishonest, then the advantage goes to he who is the most cynical. Maybe that’s not a very nice thing to believe about the world, but it represents the difference between the left (who keep winning) and the gullible worldview of the boomercons (who have never done anything but lose).