How the System Is ‘Rigged’

In what sense is the system rigged?

Consider Big Media—the elite columnists and commentators, the dominant national press, and the national and cable networks, save FOX. Not in this writer’s lifetime has there been such blanket hatred and hostility of a presidential candidate of a major party.

.. There are more than 11 million illegal immigrants here, with millions more coming. Yet the government consistently refuses to enforce the immigration laws of the United States.

Why should those Americans whose ancestors created, fought, bled and died to preserve America not believe they and their children are being dispossessed of a country that was their patrimony—and without their consent?

.. In the Civil Rights Act of 1964, a Congressional majority voted to end discrimination against black folks.

When did we vote to institute pervasive discrimination against white folks, especially white males, with affirmative action, quotas and racial set-asides? Even in blue states like California, affirmative action is routinely rejected in statewide ballots.

.. We now know, thanks to leaked emails, that not only the superdelegates and the Obama White House but a collaborationist press and the DNC were colluding to deny Sanders any chance at the nomination.

The fix was in. Ask Sanders if he thinks the system is rigged.

.. If there is an issue upon which Americans agree, it is that they want secure borders and an end to trade policies that have shipped abroad the jobs, and arrested the wages, of working Americans.

Yet in a private speech that netted her $225,000 from Brazilian bankers, Hillary Clinton confided that she dreams of a “common market, with open trade and open borders” from Nome, Alaska, to Patagonia.

.. That would mean the end of the USA as a unique, sovereign and independent nation. But the American press, whose survival depends upon the big ad dollars of transnational corporations, is more interested in old tapes of the Donald on The Howard Stern Show.

.. And if they do, Middle America—those who cling to their bibles, bigotries and guns in Barack Obama’s depiction, those “deplorables” who are “racist, sexist, xenophobic, homophobic,” who are “not America” and are “irredeemable” in Hillary Clinton’s depiction—will have to accept the new regime.

Taking Trump voters’ concerns seriously means listening to what they’re actually saying

There is absolutely no evidence that Trump’s supporters, either in the primary or the general election, are disproportionately poor or working class. Exit polling from the primaries found that Trump voters made about as much as Ted Cruz voters, and significantly more than supporters of either Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders. Trump voters, FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver found, had a median household income of $72,000, a fair bit higher than the $62,000 median household income for non-Hispanic whites in America.

..  Trump support was correlated with higher, not lower, income, both among the population as a whole and among white people. Trump supporters were less likely to be unemployed or to have dropped out of the labor force. Areas with more manufacturing, or higher exposure to imports from China, were less likely to think favorably of Trump.

.. In the primary, though, the story was, as my colleague Zack Beauchamp has explained at length, almost entirely about racial resentment. There’s a wide array of data to back this up.

UCLA’s Michael Tesler has found that support for Trump in the primaries strongly correlated with respondents’ racial resentment, as measured by survey data. Similarly, Republican voters with the lowest opinions of Muslims were the most likely to vote for Trump, and voters who strongly support mass deportation of undocumented immigrants were likelier to support him in the primaries too.

.. The white nationalist wing was gaining in strength, and due for a win. It got one in Trump.

.. Taking Trump supporters seriously means not pretending their concerns are about the economy

.. There’s a parallel temptation among leftists and social democrats who, in their ongoing attempt to show that neoliberal capitalism is failing, attempt to tie that failure to the rise of Trump. If economic suffering among lower-class whites caused Trump, the reasoning goes, then the solution is to address that suffering through a more generous welfare state and better economic policy, achieved through a multiethnic working-class coalition that includes those Trump supporters

.. But we have a good case study we can examine to see if Western European–style welfare states can prevent far-right racist backlashes from popping up. It’s called Western Europe. And Sweden’s justly acclaimed welfare state did not prevent the rise of the viciously anti-immigrant Sweden Democrats, which has its origins in the Swedish neo-fascist and white supremacist movements and is now the third-largest party in Swedish parliament.

.. Nor has Germany’s strong, manufacturing-heavy and export-oriented economy, arguably the strongest in Europe, kept the far-right AfD party from gaining in recent local elections. It’s telling to note that while economically thriving Germany is facing a far-right menace, Spain, where unemployment is 20 percent (similar to the US in the Great Depression), has no far-right movement of much consequence.

.. Comprehensive welfare states are very, very good. They do not solve racism. Whites in both Europe and America have made it very clear that they will not accept becoming a demographic minority without a fight, and will continue to vote for candidates that speak to that concern and promise immigration policies that put off white minority status for as long as possible.

.. If Trump’s supporters are not, in fact, motivated by economic marginalization, then even full Bernie Sanders–style social democracy is not going to prevent a Trump recurrence.

.. What’s needed is an honest reckoning with what it means that a large segment of the US population, large enough to capture one of the two major political parties, is motivated primarily by white nationalism and an anxiety over the fast-changing demographics of the country.

Trump’s Fans Have More to Lose Than Trump Himself

If the Republican nominee loses, the millions of Americans supporting him will feel more isolated and disillusioned than ever before.

This is what Trump has done over the last year: He’s whipped up the darkest, angriest demons in the electorate. He has not simply given people permission to indulge any racist, sexist, xenophobic, or religiously intolerant tendencies they may harbor. He has insisted—loudly—that such bigotry is only common sense and mocked anyone who refuses to see the danger presented by “the other” as a blind idiot.

.. “I feel he’s the last chance we have to establish law and order and preserve the culture I grew up in.”

 

How Donald Trump Set Off a Civil War Within the Right-Wing Media

Since the candidate clinched the nomination,
the green room has become a chilly place.

.. Erickson, who is now 41, is a conservative absolutist who made his name in the mid-2000s by “blowing up” — in the Twitter parlance he jovially employs — Republican leaders he viewed as insufficiently principled.

.. Five years later, he chided the National Rifle Association for being too willing to compromise, labeling it “a weak little girl of an organization.”

.. By 2015, a number of the coming cycle’s aspirants — Rubio, Cruz, Perry and Bobby Jindal — had given him their personal cellphone numbers, and he had traded emails with Jeb Bush.

.. Days earlier, Erickson had unimpeachable credentials in the conservative movement. But by crossing Trump, he was now, in the eyes of his former allies, “a tool of the establishment.”

.. But alongside the institution-builders like Buckley and Ailes, the conservative-media landscape has also produced a class of rowdy entrepreneurs who wield their influence in more personal, protean ways.

.. The godfathers mostly came to power in the 1990s: Clinton-administration antagonists like Rush Limbaugh

.. they rarely challenged the ideological principles

.. What they mostly did was provide the Republican Party with a set of exceptionally loud megaphones

.. “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best,” he told the crowd at Trump Tower. “They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.”

The line struck Sykes as awfully familiar when he heard it.

.. “When Trump used that line, I instantly recognized it as Ann Coulter’s.”

.. . She told Lewandowski that he should buy a dozen teleprompters and put them in every room of Trump’s house until he learned how to use them.

.. Some of Trump’s supporters within the conservative media are attracted to his actual positions on issues. One is his trade policy

.. But Trump also simply fulfills the ineffable urge many have to, as Michael Needham, the chief executive of the conservative policy group Heritage Action for America, puts it, “punch Washington in the face.”

.. Then in 1992, the British-American journalist Peter Brimelow wrote a 14,000-word essay for National Review titled “Time to Rethink Immigration?” which would later become a sort of ur-text for today’s alt-right, the ascendant white-nationalist movement that has found its champion in Trump.

.. Brimelow cast the current wave of American immigrants in dismal terms: less skilled, less European, less assimilated, less law-abiding and less Republican than the previous newcomers

.. Twenty-four years later, Coulter helped formulate Trump’s immigration-policy position, which she hailed on Twitter as “the greatest political document since the Magna Carta.”

.. Her additional tweet on the subject — “I don’t care if @realDonaldTrump wants to perform abortions in the White House after this immigration policy paper”

.. Still, she has become the Trump campaign’s most unrepentant brawler.

.. “I don’t use the word ‘frightening’ often,” he told me. “But it’s frightening to know this person” — Trump — “would have the nuclear-launch codes. The world is getting really dangerous. His friend Mr. Putin is dismantling a nation in the center of Europe. Some trigger-happy captain of a Chinese boat with ship-to-ship missiles might make a mistake in the next three years near the Spratly Islands. All kinds of things can go wrong. And the idea that this guy will be asked to respond in a sober, firm way? My goodness.”

.. More than 2.4 million weekly viewers and 13 million listeners have witnessed Hannity sticking his neck out on behalf of a first-time politician and sometime Republican who has voiced support for Planned Parenthood while vowing to limit America’s military footprint and shred trade deals that the G.O.P. has backed for decades.

.. I have my own place — on the other Florida coast, in Naples,” he said.

.. “Donald Trump, Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly all share the same resentment that they will never be accepted into Manhattan’s polite society no matter what they do.” (Trump is from Queens; Hannity and O’Reilly are from Long Island.)

.. No presidential candidate in history, Hannity told me, understands television better than Trump — “not even close.” On this score, I couldn’t disagree.

.. He stage-manages the on-set lighting. He is not only on speaking terms with every network chief executive but also knows their booking agents.

.. I told Jared at one point: ‘Jared, your father-in-law listens to me more when I’m attacking him on television than when I’m trying to convince him to be rational for the sake of the party.’ I think he’s a creature of TV.”

.. The prospect of getting in on the ground floor of a Trump administration that is short on policy ideas and disdainful of old Washington hands amounts to a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. By employing the Breitbart publisher Steve Bannon, and by including both Ingraham and Roger Ailes in his debate preparations, Trump has implicitly encouraged the conservative media to consider itself part of the campaign team.

.. Hannity’s service to the Trump campaign well exceeds that of ritually bashing Clinton and giving Trump free airtime. He has offered private strategic advice to the campaign. The same Trump confidant told me of at least one instance in which Hannity drafted an unsolicited memo outlining the message Trump should offer after the Orlando nightclub shooting in June.

.. Taken alone, George Will or even National Review might have little impact on Trump’s standing in the race, Hannity argued, but “cumulatively they do. I can look at the poll numbers. If you go back to a month ago, he was garnering 73 percent of the Republican vote. The most recent, I think he had 88 percent. He needs to get to 93.” And the key to the last 5 percent might very well lie with the noisy holdouts, like Erick Erickson.

.. “1 Corinthians is very explicit,” he told me. “If someone holds one’s self out to be a Christian and doesn’t behave that way, Christians are supposed to judge him. This is a guy who’s bragged about his affairs.”

This was Erickson’s principal argument during the debate. Trump was not merely a sinner, he said, but a gleefully unrepentant one

.. Erickson’s debating partner, the conservative activist Bill Wichterman, argued that Trump appealed to the worst in America: His bullying, his lying and his bigotry were “corrosive to our national character.” Erickson could testify to this. At one point, he was receiving as many as 300 emails a day from Trump supporters.

.. “I’ve never had Obama or Romney or McCain or Clinton supporters come to my home or send me nasty letters,” he said.

.. “I do think there are a lot of people that have just concluded that this is it — that if we don’t get the election right, the country’s over,” he said. As to where they might have gotten that idea, Erickson knew the answer. It was the apocalyptic hymn sung by talk-radio hosts like his friend and mentor Rush Limbaugh, whose show Erickson once guest-hosted

.. This February, Limbaugh, who has applauded Trump without endorsing him outright, posed to Erickson the question of whether a commentator should try to act as “the guardian of what it means to be a conservative.” In effect, the legend of talk radio was laying down an unwritten commandment of the trade, which applies as well to cable TV: Do not attempt to lead your following.

.. On his own radio show, Erickson found that the more he denounced Trump, the more female listeners he picked up.

.. “I have to admit that while I may view Hillary Clinton’s campaign as anti-American, I view Donald Trump’s campaign as un-American. … While I see Clinton as having no virtue, I see Donald Trump corrupting the virtuous and fostering hatred, racism and dangerous strains of nationalism.”