America unified in seeing a “rigged economy” that favors the rich
We’re told the country is completely divided, but we’re actually united by the belief that the U.S. economy is a rigged game.
Shortly before midnight on Election Day, as “President Trump” was becoming inescapable, a Reuters/Ipsos poll reported 75% of those who had voted earlier that day agreed, “America needs a strong leader to take the country back from the rich and powerful.”
The second question in that same exit poll found that 72% were sure “the American economy is rigged to advantage the rich and powerful.” And responding to pollsters third and final question, 68% said they felt “traditional parties and politicians don’t care about people like me.”
Those numbers were based on some 10,000 early exit interviews nationwide. The percentages dropped slightly (1 to 2 points) as full results from a total of some 45,000 exit interviews were compiled the following day. The final data showed startling unanimity that the economy is rigged against most Americans.
It’s now easy to see that the far right, far left and virtually everybody in between agree overwhelmingly that the economy is rigged to screw the middle and working classes…
In the mainstream media, the 2016 election has been portrayed exclusively as a story of how deeply divided we all are. “Divided America,” a Wall St. Journal headline announced the morning after. A New York Times headline declared a “Starkly Divided Nation.”
There’s a lot of truth in those headlines, of course. The country is divided racially, geographically (big cities vs. small towns and rural areas) and in many other ways. Americans are most violently divided over Donald Trump himself, arguing heatedly over whether he’s fit to hold any public office, let alone the highest office in the nation.
But it also appears that division is not the whole truth. Virtually unnoticed, the Reuters/Ipsos polling data is being published, shared, liked, retweeted celebrated and analyzed across mainstream news, right-wing blogs, leftist journals and all kinds of folks on social media. It’s now easy to see that the far right, far left and virtually everybody in between agree overwhelmingly that the economy is rigged to screw the middle and working classes and nobody is doing a damned thing about it. This wide-ranging agreement emerges from tracing uses of the words “rigged economy” across all online media.
The phrase “rigged economy,” of course, was favored early and repeated often by Bernie Sanders in his losing quest for the Democrats’ nomination. A blog post on Sanders’ site titled “A Rigged Economy” was posted a year before the election. The top issue addressed on the site is “Income and Wealth Inequality,” which includes 13 specific steps aimed at making the economy fairer for ordinary people.
Trump came late to the rigged economy. As far as I can tell, it wasn’t until June 22 that Trump appropriated “rigged economy” into his speeches to pitch himself to Sanders’ defeated army of supporters. Unlike Sanders, Trump did not explain what he meant by “rigged economy” and didn’t spell out any comprehensive set of plans or policies to unrig it. Still, he embraced it and he proposed a number of ideas to “protect American workers,” including tearing up or not signing various international trade deals. He also said he would discourage U.S. corporations from sending jobs offshore. Following Sanders’ lead, Trump, too, endorsed $1 trillion of infrastructure spending.
Hillary Clinton picked up Sanders’ language about a rigged economy in February, months before Trump did. But she spent more time trying to sell Democrats’ economic accomplishments.
Then the election happened and the Reuters/Ipsos exit polls came out showing that the rigging of the economy got the nod from nearly 3 out of 4 voters.
It was 6 days later that I began to monitor the term “rigged economy” along with a few less important keywords, like “rich,” “fixed,” and “working class.”
It seems particularly revealing that the same data was used approvingly by both the liberal mainstream newspaper and the far-right blog that’s been called a haven for white supremacists.
The next day my tracking tool sent a routine daily email that listed “the most important mentions from today for your alert.” Of some 3,000 mentions that day (Nov. 14), the email listed 8 “important” ones, ranked in terms of reach and impact. Virtually all were related to mainstream media sources. Three were about the Reuters/Ipsos poll findings as used in a New York Times post-election story that was reliably liberal in its outlook.
The top return from a Google search of “Reuters/Ipsos early exit poll,” just as it was identified in the Times’ story, pointed to Breitbart.com. The blog site had run the Reuters story word-for-word on Election Day, illustrated with a photo of Trump supporters waving signs at a rally. At last count, that story had garnered 83,571 comments.
It seems particularly revealing that the same data was used approvingly by both the liberal mainstream newspaper and the far-right blog that’s been called a haven for white supremacists.
The tracking tool also listed the most important influencers on social media discussing the term “rigged economy.” The results told much the same story of universal approval for the polls’ results.
The top influencer on Twitter for several days was Margaret Heffernan (@M_Heffernan), the author and Huffington Post blogger, who found the Reuters poll results in a story posted on Medium by Sen. Elizabeth Warren.
Nikhil Goyal (@nikhilgoya_l), a left-of-center author and journalist who specializes in education, directed his followers a bit further left, to the intellectual socialist journal Jacobin.
Still another important influencer was retweeting a Twitter account currently called “No Apologies” (@LeahR77), which features the extreme-right views of someone who favors the Breitbart style of harsh confrontations and a scorched-earth approach to both political parties.
As if this weren’t a wide enough spectrum to drive home the point, one of the rich and powerful himself — Bill Gross, Wall St. trader, billionaire “bond king” and head of Janus Capital — cited the Reuters exit poll results, agreed with the idea of an economy rigged for the rich and added a warning to Trump voters that they had picked the wrong guy to fix things.
Gross also seemed to agree with the majority that neither of America’s major parties will be the force to un-rig the economy. “Both the Clinton Democrats and almost all Republicans represent the corporate status quo that favors markets versus wages; Wall Street versus Main Street,” Gross said. This was all reported and then tweeted by the financial news service Seeking Alpha (@seekingalpha.com).
None of this has been lost on either Trump’s circle or the Democrats’ new leaders. Chuck Schumer, just chosen to be Senate minority leader, has spoken several times with Trump and vows Democratic support in any effort to pass pro-worker laws like the ones Bernie Sanders first put forward and Trump later echoed — massive infrastructure spending, a higher minimum wage, repudiation of trade deals and so on.
The Times claimed that Stabenow was “co-opting Mr. Trump’s language.” But she was, of course, adopting Bernie Sanders’ language as co-opted by Trump and subsequently endorsed by 7 of 10 voters.
The New York Times reported all this on Nov. 16 in a story headlined, “Senate Democrats’ Surprising Strategy: Trying to Align with Trump.” But the strategy, of course, is anything but surprising if you follow the wide-ranging talk about the rigged economy, which began with the left before it wound up helping the right win the election.
As if to underscore this state of affairs, Debbie Stabenow, the Democratic Senator from Michigan, told the Times, “Every single person in our caucus agrees the system is rigged.” The Times claimed that Stabenow was “co-opting Mr. Trump’s language.” But she was, of course, adopting Bernie Sanders’ language as co-opted by Trump and subsequently endorsed by 7 of 10 voters.
None of this has weakened the fierce opposition among Democrats, some establishment Republicans and many others to Trump’s encouragement of fear and division, embrace of racist attitudes, suggested religious tests and discrimination, proposed U.S. assent to the spread of nuclear weapons, cozying up to the Russians and so on. But leveraging the broad support for leveling the economic playing field, Trump’s opposition, especially the Democrats, now appears ready to push more forcefully and on more fronts than Trump himself to dismantle the rigged economy. The strategy is to use issues of economic fairness, many of which have gotten no love at all from the old Republican Party, to separate Trump’s voters from Trump and the GOP by 2018.
One thing is clear. Despite all that divides us, much of the country is united around the potent and widely accepted idea of unrigging the rigged economy. The big question of the next few months and years is who, if anyone, will successfully organize around that unifying idea to deliver an economy that actually delivers for everyone. If anyone or any party can do that, they will command a sizable, durable majority coalition.
