(Photo: AP/Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call)
Among the charges that have electrified the 2016 election, two strike at the foundations of democracy. The first, coming from Donald Trump, is the charge that the "election is rigged." And the second, coming most vocally from such Democrats as Bernie Sanders, is the charge that the "system is rigged." They sound almost the same, but one degrades democracy, while the other has the potential to enhance it.
"Rigged system" is crude shorthand for the fact that, as social science confirms, our distribution of wealth and opportunity is tilted to heap more advantages on the few who already possess them. As political scientists Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page have shown, "Economic elites and interest groups can shape U.S. government policy-but Americans who are less well off have essentially no influence over what their government does."
Denunciations of "the system," "the establishment," "elites," "the 1 percent," or "special interests" conform to real social facts and real experience: Inequalities of money, opportunity, and power have increased in recent decades. Trump has appealed to resentments fueled by these facts, as did Bernie Sanders, which is why the Republican nominee's attempt to win support from those who voted for a democratic socialist in the primary has a certain logic.
A "rigged system" demands political change. It generates movements for reform in such arenas as civil rights, feminism, Black Lives Matter, and from Tea Party supporters who say they want their country back.
The "system is rigged" slogan is pro-democracy in that it mobilizes social consciousness and political participation.
By contrast, "the election is rigged" is a conspiratorial claim: Covert forces are controlling the outcome of what we are supposedly duped into thinking is a fair process. The concern is not a lived experience of disproportionate power and diminishing opportunity, but of criminality-organized fraud.
Two things are new in this conspiracist charge coming from Trump and other Republicans. First, their "rigging" is not the work of subversives or foreign powers but of ordinary partisans-the Democratic political opposition (in collusion with faithless Republicans). Second, this is lazy conspiracism, conspiracy without the theory. Insinuation and innuendo, "People are saying," and "Something is going on here," is the evidence offered to support assertions of organized manipulation of voting on a scale capable of foreordaining the outcome of a presidential election. The same GOP Texas Governor Greg Abbott who last year called out the Texas state guard to monitor U.S. army exercises, claiming that the federal government was threatening to take over the state, pronounced-no reasons given-that voter fraud was "rampant" in his state. (The takeover concerns Abbott cited were investigated and disproved, and a pile of empirical evidence demonstrates that GOP voter fraud claims are essentially made up.)
This "election is rigged" charge is vastly more destructive of democracy than the usual partisan allegation that the opposition is self-interested, ideologically tainted, or even corrupt. Its goal is not to refute the opposition, but to delegitimize it.
The peaceful democratic transfer of power-something the United States introduced to the world in the election of 1800-was an enormous historical advance over revolutions and coups. Indeed, democracy is defined by competitive parties and elections. The idea of a "legitimate opposition"-that the other side can be a rightful governing authority when it wins an election, and can be a loyal opposition when it loses-is an idea democracy cannot exist without.
The immediate effect of warnings that dead people are voting on a massive scale, that hackers are tampering with technology, or that vote-counters are throwing out ballots is to depress, suppress, and intimidate voters, especially minority voters singled out for their part in this supposed "fraud."
But the destructiveness goes deeper.
Delegitimization casts the opposition outside the bounds of lawful authority. It is an invitation to neutralize, disenfranchise, investigate, impeach, and criminalize the opposition-to "lock her up," as Trump's backers chant of Hillary Clinton. It produces hyperbolic partisan obstruction that threatens to make governing impossible-as Senate Republicans will if they follow through on GOP plans to block any Democratic Supreme Court appointments.
As for ordinary citizens, "rigged" charges may not overtly encourage armed insurrection, but their logic suggests resistance and disobedience. The only voter arrested for casting multiple ballots so far in this election has been a Trump supporter, who argued that she had to vote twice because her first vote would be discarded by a conspiracy of poll workers.
Democrats and Republicans express anxiety that the "system is rigged." But only Republicans have argued that the "election is rigged." Democrats could justifiably make that claim themselves in the face of Russian hacking of the DNC, Julian Assange's weighted Wikileaks dumps, Trump's encouragement of espionage against them, and his own and his advisers' financial connections to Russia. But they don't.
For one thing, as a coalition of organized groups, Democrats are less likely to cohere around a single, simple conspiracy narrative. For another, "rigged election" suggests that democracy is fragile. Democrats, who affirm that government can succeed at serving common purposes, see democracy as robust and resilient.
Republicans once joined Democrats in speaking truth to conspiracy-for example, in bipartisan reports that debunked the myths that swirled around the JFK's assassination or the World Trade Center attack. Today, however, only one party is intent on delegitimizing the other, and with it the foundations of democracy.
This article was posted in conjunction with the Scholars Strategy Network.
