2020 Election
Presidential election in which Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump (306–232 Electoral College); Trump refused to concede and promoted the “Big Lie” that the election was stolen through widespread fraud; his allies’ efforts to overturn the results culminated in January 6 2021
The 2020 election is the critical event linking the New Right’s intellectual project to actual anti-democratic action. The Flight 93 Election’s catastrophism — vote Trump or all is lost — provided the affective framework that made refusing to accept the results feel principled rather than authoritarian.
Key intellectual connective tissue:
- John Eastman’s memo — drafted a legal strategy for Vice President Pence to reject Electoral College results from contested states; foundational document for January 6
- The Claremonters — provided intellectual cover; Charles Kesler’s Claremont Review of Books treated the election as “complicated” rather than settled
- Glenn Ellmers’s “The People Are Not the Country” (March 2021) — written after the election; applied Schmittian friend/enemy logic to declare that “real Americans” (Trump voters) were the only legitimate political community
The election also sharpened the divide within the New Right between those willing to cross the anti-democratic threshold and those who held back. Robert P. George, Oren Cass, Julius Krein, and Sohrab Ahmari all declined to support overturning the results; Eastman, Williams, Ellmers, and the Claremont core did not.
Cross-References
- January 6 2021 — the violent culmination of the effort to overturn results
- John Eastman — architect of the legal strategy to overturn the election
- The Claremonters — institutional nerve center of election denial
- The Flight 93 Election — catastrophist framework that normalized rejecting defeat
- Glenn Ellmers — “The People Are Not the Country” (March 2021)
- Charles Kesler — CRB coverage treated the election as ambiguous