Baseless accusations of cheating reflect our increasingly irresponsible culture.
Donald Trump, campaigning in Columbus, Ohio, Monday declared, “I’m afraid the election is going to be rigged, I have to be honest.”
He also contended that the presidential debate schedule, announced in April 2015, reflected another plot to rig results. He tweeted, “Hillary & the Dems are trying to rig the debates so 2 are up against major NFL games.”
This follows Trump’s lament that the GOP primaries were rigged in April. In June, he charged: “It’s the whole economy. It’s rigged by big donors who want to keep wages down.” In July, he concluded that the FBI’s decision to not recommend criminal charges against Hillary Clinton was “the best evidence ever that we’ve seen that our system is absolutely, totally rigged.”
But Trump’s far from alone in seeing multiple efforts to “rig” the outcome against him.
Bernie Sanders declared that the Democratic presidential-nominating process was rigged in May. At the 2012 Democratic convention. Elizabeth Warren declared: “People feel like the system is rigged against them. And here’s the painful part: They’re right.”
No one ever just loses anymore. There are no honest defeats. The philosophy of the disgruntled toddler has taken root, far and wide, across the political spectrum: If I win, the game was fair. If I lose, the only possible explanation is that the other guy cheated.
If I win, the game was fair. If I lose, the only possible explanation is that the other guy cheated.
This instinct is not limited to Republicans. Perhaps the 2000 recount interrupted what had been, up until then, relatively clear election results and smooth transitions of power. (Richard Nixon chose to not contest the 1960 presidential election or request a recount, even though many Republicans believed there had been rampant voter fraud in Illinois.) It’s exceptionally rare for a presidential candidate to concede the election, drive to the site of the concession speech, suddenly stop, and call back and rescind his concession.
The Supreme Court’s decision that Florida could not conduct a separate hand recount of four heavily Democratic counties left many grassroots Democrats insisting that the election had been stolen. Subsequent recount efforts by two different media consortiums determined that the hand recount in those counties wouldn’t have made Gore the winner, but that didn’t matter to those who wanted to believe. Now Democrats had a soothing, passion-stirring article of faith: Their man had won, and those nefarious justices reversed the true election results.
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The Clinton administration did its part to delegitimize Bush; after Florida certified its vote results, the General Services Administration initially declared it would not release to Bush the $5.3 million in government funds to help the next president prepare for office.
Many liberals believed that Bush’s reelection in 2004 could not possibly be legitimate; in March 2005, no less a political writer than Christopher Hitchens declared that the Ohio results were “impossible to swallow.”
#share#Perhaps it’s a short step from believing a despicable Republican would steal an election to believing that one would be complicit in a terror attack. By 2006, 23 percent of Democrats said it was “very likely” that “the federal government either assisted in the 9/11 attacks or took no action to stop the attacks because they wanted the United States to go to war in the Middle East” and another 28 percent said it was “somewhat likely,” according to a University of Ohio–Scripps Howard poll. In other words, roughly half the Democratic party bought into the theory that 9/11 was an inside job. The worst day in American history — also rigged.
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Wes Clark, running for president in 2004, fed the theories that the Bush administration chose to let bin Laden run free: “Newsweek magazine says he’s in the mountains of western Pakistan,” Clark told a Concord senior center. “And I guess if Newsweek could find him there, we could, too, if we wanted to.” Add the entire War on Terror to the list of things allegedly rigged.
Then again, our political world might simply be reflecting the culture at large, where unwanted outcomes are regularly attributed to rigged systems, from the NBA Playoffs, to Dancing with the Stars, to YouTube’s payments to artists. Our ancestors blamed malevolent spirits and gremlins; now we blame the web of sinister and powerful but hidden forces that keep their thumbs on the scale.
#related#Why has admitting mistakes and learning from defeat become too difficult? To acknowledge our own faults, flaws, and responsibility would give us less to say. It would require introspection and self-evaluation, not attention. We would have to turn away from the spotlight and television cameras and our social media platforms.
Modern American culture simultaneously celebrates victims and mocks those who try hard but never quite succeed. Casting blame, aspersions, and accusations of a rigged outcome ensures you’re never quite defeated, just cheated. It’s a much easier identity to adopt than that of one who fell short. You’re not a “loser,” to use one of Trump’s other favorite words. You’re “the one who should have won.”