Protip: anyone still discussing the Mar-A-Lago raid, including the affidavit, within the frame of "they were after X classified documents" is not a credible source on the matter. Inappropriately stored "Classified documents" is the formal purpose given by The Regime. The Formal meaning is irrelevant to the situation. It's the excuse. The Real meaning is what matters. Don't fall into the trap of operating within their frame.

Another contemporary example of this you'll undoubtedly recognize is "The Inflation Reduction Act." This legislation is primarily a Democrat wishlist of green energy garbage and expansion of the IRS. That's the Real Meaning of the act. The Formal Meaning is the title: addressing inflation. Trying to understand that legislation in terms of addressing inflation is akin to trying to understand the Mar-A-Lago raid in terms of the legitimate pursuit of classified nuclear secrets or some such nonsense. It is, and always will be, a trap.

It's worth re-reading an excerpt from James Burnham's The Machiavellians to understand this extremely important distinction:

“...it would be a great error to assume that Dante’s method in De Monarchia is outworn. His method is exactly that of the Democratic Platform with which we began our inquiry. It has been and continues to be the method of nine-tenths, yes, much more than nine-tenths, of all writing and speaking in the field of politics. The myths, the ghosts, the idealistic abstractions, change name and form, but the method persistently remains. It is, then, important to be entirely clear about the general features of this method. They may be summarized as follows:

There is a sharp divorce between what I have called the formal the meaning, the formal aims and arguments, and the real meaning, the real aims and arguments (if there is, as there is usually not, any real argument).

The formal aims and goals are for the most part or altogether either supernatural or metaphysical-transcendental- in both cases, meaningless from the point of view of real actions in the real world of space and time and history; or, if they have some empirical meaning, are impossible to achieve under the actual conditions of social life. In all three cases, the dependence of the whole structure of reasoning upon such goals makes it impossible for the writer (or speaker) to give a true descriptive account of the way men actually behave. A systematic distortion of the truth takes place. And, obviously, it can not be shown how the goals might be reached, since, being unreal, they cannot be reached.

From a purely logical point of view, the arguments offered for the formal aims and goals may be valid or fallacious; but, except by accident, they are necessarily irrelevant to real political problems, since they are designed to prove the ostensible points of the formal points of the structure- points of religion or metaphysics of the abstract desirability of some utopian goal.

The formal meaning serves as an indirect expression of the real meaning- that is, of the concrete meaning of the political treatise taken in its real context, in its relation to the actualities of the social and historical situation in which it functions. But at the same time that it expresses, it also disguises the real meaning. We think we are debating universal peace, salvation, a unified world government, and the relations between Church and State. When what it is really at issue is whether the Florentine Republic is to be run by its own citizens, or submitted to the exploitation of a reactionary foreign monarch. We think, with the delegates of the Council of Nicea, that the discussion is concerned with the definition of God’s essence, when the real problem is whether the Mediterranean world is to be politically centralized under Rome, or divided. We believe we are disputing the merits of a balanced budget and a sound currency, when the real conflict is deciding what group shall regulate the distribution of the currency. We imagine we are arguing over the moral and legal status of the principle of the freedom of the seas, when the real question is ‘who is to control the seas?’

From this, it follows that the real meaning, the real goal and aims are left irresponsible. In Dante’s case, the aims were also vicious and reactionary. This need not be the case, but when this method is used, they are always irresponsible. Even if the real aims are such as to contribute to human welfare, no proof or evidence for this is offered. Proof and evidence, so far as they are present at all, remain at the formal level. The real aims are accepted, even if right, for the wrong reasons. The high minded words of the formal meaning serve only to arouse passion and prejudice and sentimentality in favor of the disguised real aims. This method, whose intellectual consequence is merely to confuse and hide, can teach us nothing of the truth, can in no way help us to solve the problems of our political life. In the hands of the powerful and their spokesmen, however, used by demagogues or hypocrites or simply the self-deluded, this method is well-designed, and the best to deceive us, and to lead us by easy routes to the sacrifice of our own interests and dignity in the service of the mighty.

The chief historical effects of the French Revolution were to break up the system of the older French monarchy, with its privileged financiers and courtiers. To remove a number of feudal restrictions on capitalist methods of production. And, to put the French capitalists in a position of greater social power. It might well have been argued prior to the Revolution that these goals promised to contribute to the welfare of the French people and perhaps of mankind. Evidence for and against this expectation might have been assembled, however this was not the procedure generally followed by the ideologists of the Revolution. They based their treatises not upon an examination of the facts, but upon supposedly fundamental (and really quite mythical) notions of a primitive “state of nature,” the “natural goodness of man,” the “social contract,” and similar nonsense. They sloganized, as the aims of the revolution Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity, and the utopian kingdom of the Goddess Reason. Naturally, the workers and peasants were disappointed by the outcome, after so much blood; but oddly enough, most of France seemed to feel not many years later that the aims of the Revolution were well enough realized in the military dictatorship of Bonaparte.

No doubt, european unification under Hitler is a bad thing for the European peoples and the world. But this is no more proved by complicated deductuions to show the derivation of Nazi thought from Hegelian dialectic and the philosophic poetry of Nietzsche than is the contradictory by Hitler’s own pseudo-biology. “Freedom from want” is very nearly as meaningless in terms of real politics as eternal salvation. Men are wanting beings. They are freed from want only by death. Whatever the book or article or speech on political matters that we turn to- those of a journalist like Pierre van Paassen, a demagogue like Hitler, a professor like Max Lerner, a chairman of a sociology department like Pitirim Sorokin, a revolutionist like Lenin, a trapped idealist like Henry Wallace, a bulldozing rhetorician like Churchill, a preacher out of a church like Norman Thomas or one in like Bishop Manning, the Pope, or the ministers of the Mikado- in the case of them all, we find, that though there may be incidental passages that increase our fund of real information, the integrating method and the whole conception of politics is precisely that of Dante. Gods, whether of “Progress,” or the Old Testament, ghosts of saintly, or revolutionary ancestors, abstracted moral imperatives, ideals cut wholly off from mere earth and mankind, utopia’s beckoning from the marshes of their Never-Never-Land- these, and not the facts of social life together with probable generalizations based on those facts, exercise the final controls over arguments and conclusions. Political analysis becomes, like other dreams, the expression of human wish, or the admission of practical failure.

There are certain goals which are peculiar and proper to science; without which science does not exist. These are: the accurate and systematic description of public facts; the attempt to correlate sets of these facts in laws; and, through these correlations, the attempt to predict, with some degree of probability, future facts. Many scientific investigations do not attempt to go beyond these special goals, nor is there any need for them to do so. In the field of historical, social, and political sciences, as in other sciences, these goals might be (and sometimes are) alone relevant. But without these goals, whether or not there are others, an inquiry is not scientific.

If an inquiry is to remain scientific, but nevertheless pursue other goals than these that are peculiar to science, there are certain requirements which the additional goals must meet. In the first place, they must be non-transcendental- that is, they must be something formulated in terms of the actual world of space and time and history. Second, they must have a minimum probability of realization. For example, a scientist might have as his goal the development of a drug to cure tuberculosis or some other disease; or a new defensive weapon to counteract the offensive threat of bombers; or a new fertilizer that would help plants resist blights and insects; or a new method of transmitting electric power without wires. All of these goals are located in the actual world, they are all sufficiently specific to permit us to know what we are talking about (and, what is not unimportant, to tell whether or not they are reached), and all would have at least a certain minimum chance of being achieved.

We noticed, however, that Dante’s formal goals were either transcendental, as in the case of his religious and metaphysical ideals, or, as in the case of his plan for an eternally unified and peaceful world empire (in the 14th century), too wildly improbable to be worth debating. We noticed also, that his real goals, hidden beneath the formal goals, were, though specific enough, viscous and reactionary.

There is a further strict requirement by which science limits the function of goals or aims. The goals themselves are not evidence; they cannot be allowed to distort facts or correlations among facts. The goals express our wishes, hopes, or fears. They therefore prove nothing about the facts of the world. No matter how much we may wish to cure a patient, the wish has nothing to do with the objective analysis of his symptoms, or a correct prediction of the probable course of the disease, or an estimate of the probable effects of a medicine. If our aim is peace, this does not entitle us (from the point of view of science) to falsify human nature and the facts of social life in order to pretend to prove that “all men naturally desire peace,” which history so clearly tells us, they plainly do not. If we are interested in an equalitarian democracy, this cannot be a scientific excuse for ignoring the uninterrupted record of social inequality and oppression.

In short, though our practical goals may dictate the direction that scientific activity takes, though they show us what we are trying to accomplish by the scientific investigation, what problem we are trying to solve; nevertheless, the logic of the scientific inquiry itself is not controlled by the practical aims, but by science’s own aims, by the effort to describe facts and to correlate them. In this respect, too, Dante violates the demand of science. His treatise is merely an elaborate projection of his wish. It tells us nothing."