Is the Election ‘Rigged’?

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/12/magazine/is-the-election-rigged.html

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In an episode called “Hope” on the most recent season of ABC’s hit sitcom “Black-­ish,” three generations of an African-­American family gather in the living room to watch the news. They’re waiting to learn whether a police officer will be indicted on a charge of repeatedly firing a Taser gun at an unarmed black man. The characters — who have basically achieved the American dream but don’t always feel comfortable living it — debate who is to blame, and how much, before their discussion culminates in a dispirited conclusion: “The system is rigged against us.”

The line is spoken by Andre Johnson, the father on the show (played by Anthony Anderson), who has been invoking Malcolm X. His wife, Rainbow Johnson (Tracee Ellis Ross), was defending the police and the law. “Maybe it is, Dre,” she says to her husband. “But I don’t want to feel like my kids are living in a world that is so flawed that they can’t have any hope.” Barack Obama appears on the screen, waving to a crowd at his 2009 inauguration. “Tell me you weren’t terrified when you saw that,” Dre said, tears in his eyes. “Tell me you weren’t worried that someone was gonna snatch that hope away from us like they always do.” In a few strokes, “Black-­ish” sketched the difficulty of confronting injustices that have leached into the country’s bones without succumbing to despair.

Dre’s scalding reproof — “The system is rigged” — has long been a refrain of African-­Americans; this campaign season, it’s also the mantra of Bernie Sanders and Donald J. Trump, yin-and-yang candidates with restive and largely white voting bases. Bellowing the charge from lecterns in their New York accents, Trump and Sanders play up their outsider status and channel their supporters’ unease. “Millions of Americans are giving up on the political process,” Sanders said at a Democratic debate in February, “because they understand the economy is rigged. They are working longer hours for low wages.” Trump, with his ear for populist rhetoric, spoke in a similar key. “If you think about it,” he said at a campaign event in April, “the economy is rigged, the banking system is rigged, there’s a lot of things that are rigged in this world of ours, and that’s why a lot of you haven’t had an effective wage increase in 20 years.”

Calling the economy “rigged” generates outrage without saying who, exactly, is at fault, or how to take away their power. It’s a vaguely anti-­authoritarian sentiment that Trump and Sanders have effectively turned against the Republican and Democratic parties. Both men invite the angry conclusion that they’re being disadvantaged by the same establishment forces they blame for dooming their constituents. “The system is rigged in favor of the candidate who’s won three million more votes,” Nate Silver of the Five­Thirty­Eight website dryly tweeted in late May, dismissing Sanders’s supporters’ claim that he is being robbed of the nomination. “Unbelievable.” But however exaggerated, the argument seems to be working: More than half of voters now agree that the presidential nominating process is “rigged,” according to a recent Reuters/Ipsos poll.

In its current usage, “rigged” exposes a structure that is rotten to the core and lights a match to burn it down. Dating back to the 19th century, the word “rig” has meant “a trick, a scheme”; it also carries an association of expert hands setting up equipment or tinkering with machinery. To rig a fleet (or jury-­rig another conveyance) connotes competence and pluck. But the “rigging” Sanders and Trump have in mind involves a swindle, and it has been deployed in American politics at several points over the last century, including in the Great Depression. Calling for an inquiry into the stock market in The Washington Post in 1932, a Republican senator attributed its gyrations to “a rigged game of crooked gambling pools.” In the wake of Watergate in the 1970s, “rigged” appeared frequently in the press. Liberal leaders, some newly elected after the scandal, attacked not only Nixon but also campaign finance, the primary process and government agencies as being controlled by corporate and political elites.

“The system is rigged” has served, beyond politics, as blunt and useful shorthand for systemic injustice and the limits of American meritocracy. The congressman and civil rights activist John Lewis wrote about finding in Alabama in 1962 a “system rigged against them,” in which only 2 percent of black people were registered to vote in Selma. Black intellectuals have also used “rigged” to reveal the power of more hidden barriers to full citizenship and prosperity. Ta-­Nehisi Coates, in his influential 2014 Atlantic article “The Case for Reparations,” enumerates the predatory lending practices, redlining and restrictive covenants that prevented black people from buying homes in middle-­class white neighborhoods, setting patterns of segregation and wealth disparity that continue to this day. He describes these strategies as “the plunder — quiet, systemic, submerged.” The “rigged system” is “working as intended” when it privileges the few, he wrote me in an email.

And yet white people may now be the most pessimistic group about the direction of the country; a 2015 Atlantic/Aspen Institute poll found that 81 percent of whites believe that “the American dream is suffering,” while 57 percent of their African-­American counterparts do. Senator Elizabeth Warren became a progressive hero by affirming voters’ sense that “the system is rigged” against average Americans. “Here’s the painful part: They’re right,” she said, in her prime-time address at the 2012 Democratic convention. Warren took aim at oil companies’ “guzzling” billions in subsidies, wealthy executives’ paying lower tax rates than their secretaries and C.E.O.s who wrecked our economy and “still strut around Congress, no shame, demanding favors.” The crowd roared. Warren thought about naming her 2014 memoir “Rigged” (she went with “A Fighting Chance” instead), and her office issued a report this year called “Rigged Justice,” arguing that corporate offenders get off easy when they break the law.

While some on the left embrace the tell-it-like-it-is realism of “rigged,” they risk leaving people despondent about the brokenness of law and government — which Democrats, more than Republicans, want the public to see as effective. Last August, the Harvard University law professor Cass R. Sunstein took Warren on, in an op-ed in Bloomberg View titled “The American System Isn’t Rigged.” Arguing that “the United States is in a period of extraordinary reform,” Sunstein listed a series of changes, including Obamacare, the Dodd-Frank rules for the financial system and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau that Warren herself helped create. Despite these strong examples of repair, “rigged” still captures a widespread sense of futility — which Trump milks for his own gain.

Hillary Clinton is the single remaining candidate for president who does not call the system rigged. She uses more calibrated language: “The deck is stacked in favor of those at the top.” It’s easier to reshuffle a deck of cards than to tear a system down and rebuild it; Clinton’s language registers on the populist meter without undermining government institutions. It also seems close to Obama’s recent thinking. On the campaign trail in 2008, the future president denounced the system for being rigged in much the same tone as Warren and Sanders. But by his final State of the Union address this past January, Obama was in a different mood. Democracy breaks down when people believe “that the system is rigged in favor of the rich or the powerful or some narrow interest,” he said. “Too many Americans feel that way right now.” The “rancor and suspicion” that has come to dominate politics, he continued, “is one of the few regrets of my presidency.”