What's so terrible about saying "the system is rigged"? [View all]

[Ken Burch]

1) If we're talking about the economic system, it's the truth. The form of capitalism we have now IS rigged to grind down the many while elevating a tiny few. For most of us, this model is NOT our friend. We don't even have to be anti-capitalist to acknowledge the fact that some kind of massive rebalancing needs to be done.

2) It's not as though, if no one in our primary had said it, none of the voters would have felt it. There was a HUGE feeling out there in the electorate that those below the median(I'm phrasing it that way to avoid saying "those on the bottom"-since, for some reason, that is taken to be an insult rather than simply an observation of the conditions a lot of the country lives under).

3) We could have won, under ANY nominee, by championing the idea of resetting the scales, of giving everyone a fair shot and challenging the arrogance of those who have somehow ended up on the top(and I say "ended up", because in most cases their current social station has nothing whatsoever to do with their own "effort&quot .

4) We could have made the statement a pro-Obama statement. We could phrase it as "our president tried his best to unrig the game, but the establishment threw nothing but roadblocks in his way and gave him nothing but disrespect for his efforts".


I get it that Trump used rigged game rhetoric in a cynical way. But He would have done that anyway, with the exact same level of effectiveness, even if we had run on an "everything's coming up roses" message. Trump is an epic demagogue(with epic friends in other countries tipping the scales and rigging the game in HIS behalf). He was going to say something like that no matter what anyone in our primaries said.

The only way WE could counterract the message Trump was always going to use was to get ahead of it and take it away from him, by saying "yes, things ARE rigged...but WE'RE the ones who will actually unrig them".

That was how Barack Obama took the presidency with majority support in 2008.

Our party's strategic masterminds refused to do that.