Have you noticed just how many aspects of American life are “rigged” these days?
“The game is rigged and it’s rigged in favor of those who have money and who have power,” said Elizabeth Warren.
“When we talk about a rigged system, it’s also important to understand how the Democratic Convention works,” Bernie Sanders said at a rally in Indiana. MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough, hardly a Sanders booster, agreed: “Why does the Democratic party even have voting booths? This system is so rigged.”
“The system is rigged. It’s crooked,” Donald Trump declared after he lost in a battle for convention delegates in Colorado. “The system is rigged. It’s rigged in all 50 states where they have different rules and that don’t take into account modern presidential campaigns,” complained Paul Manafort, Trump’s convention manager.
Americans seem to agree with Trump and Sanders: A Reuters/Ipsos poll found that more than half of voters believe that the systems used by the parties are “rigged.” But the insistence that bad outcomes reflect subterfuge and corruption goes well beyond the political arena. The NBA playoffs are rigged to ensure LeBron James appears in the finals, according to a sizable contingent of fans polled over the past few years. Dancing with the Stars? Rigged, fans claim. YouTube? Rigged against artists, contends a prominent manager in the music industry.
At the heart of such beliefs is the contention that a process designed to provide equal opportunity for all participants never provided anything of the sort. Gullible people, the thinking goes, are told they have a chance at the outcome they want when they really don’t, because institutions large and small have the same moral fiber as the guy on the corner beckoning you to play three-card monte.
Understandable though it may be, the public’s cynicism has potentially disastrous consequences for the health of our democracy.
There was a time when it was easy to dismiss these sorts of charges as sour grapes from bitterly disappointed people rationalizing their losses. In many cases, it still is. But we live in an era where powerful people exercise bad faith with disturbing regularity. Advocates of Obamacare later cheerfully admitted they had “rigged” the debate over its passage. The law’s “architect,” Jonathan Gruber, gloated that he and the administration had pulled a fast one over the public. “Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage,” he said. “And basically — call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever — but basically that was really, really critical for the thing to pass.”
David Axelrod said Barack Obama always supported gay marriage, and lied to the public about his actual views — in a church, to a pastor, no less! — in order to avoid the political consequences.
In a world where voters are so transparently snookered, who wants to believe a powerful figure’s denial that any event is rigged in favor of a particular outcome? How much faith can the average American have that the country’s institutions remain impartial and honest? With “fairness” in the eye of the beholder, how many losers are willing to say that they lost fair and square?
#related#Understandable though it may be, the public’s cynicism has potentially disastrous consequences for the health of our democracy. Increasingly, we’re turning a corner past which graciously accepting defeat becomes a sucker’s move. If you’re going to lose, the incentive to delegitimize the result on your way out the door is too great, given the number of people ready and willing to believe the worst. It’s a cynical play, to be sure, but a satisfying one insofar as it allows a loser to shirk responsibility for his loss.
“Don’t forget, I only complain about the ones where we have difficulty,” Trump told the New York Times during his recent spate of “rigging” accusations.
Leave it to the most brazen man in the room to make plain what everyone else keeps unsaid: The “rigging” game is, itself, rigged.
— Jim Geraghty is the senior political correspondent for National Review.