Power is Decided Before Votes Are Ever Cast
How influence, patronage, and institutional leverage shape outcomes long before legitimacy appears.
Most people think power begins when a faction captures offices. When votes are counted. When authority becomes official.
That belief is most convenient and beneficial to the powerful.
It keeps attention fixed on the final act, where everything already looks decided.
In reality, power settles long before legitimacy is assigned. Offices do not generate power. They implement arrangements already made before the votes were even cast. People arrive in authority believing they have won something. In most cases, they have simply been selected to carry out the agenda of the oligarchs.
History never concealed this. Rome was blunt about it. Generals did not rise because the republic willed it. They rose because wealth and allegiance moved first. Patronage chose candidates, financed loyalty, and secured outcomes before the rituals of public approval took place. The office followed influence. It always did.
What changes over time is not the structure.
Only the refinement of how power infiltrates and uses that structure.
Where gold once bought legions directly, it later bought allegiance, then access, then silence. Influence learned to operate without spectacle. Open patronage became discreet sponsorship. Control of force gave way to control of narrative, and then to control of what could be said at all without consequence.
Those who understand power do not compete for positions. They embed themselves upstream. In institutions that cannot be challenged without destabilizing everything beneath them. They shape incentives quietly. They decide what advances, what stalls, and what never becomes visible enough to oppose.
Public authority is loud because it has to be. It must justify itself. It must be explained. It must pretend to rule.
Real leverage does not argue. It does not campaign. It waits.
Most people only recognize power once it occupies a seat.
By then, it has already made arrangements for its own survival.