The System Is Rigged

"The system IS rigged. It's true." Elizabeth Warren at the Democratic National Convention.

In the election year of 2016 it was the outsiders who took America by storm. Bernie Sanders and his socialist ideals touched the hearts and minds of the youth, and on the other end of the spectrum Donald Trump--the unscripted and often times erratic celebrity "billionaire" phenomenon. The rise of these two political candidates was unprecedented in how quickly and thoroughly traditional candidates were pushed to the sidelines by a growing population of Americans who've had it with the establishment's bullshit that they would go with the alternatives no matter what message the elite's money and power could send.

And those messages were sent and continue to be sent, and as much as this new populist movement may have deflected them, the system is so rigged and the political machinations so wired into the grid of the elite, that the anointed candidate Hillary Clinton was magically levitated into the limelight of the Democratic Party. With Sanders bowing out, this new landscape is now left with a candidate who, for all intents and purposes, doesn't seem as serious about his campaign as we're used to seeing in a candidate. But as off-the-cuff as Trump has been, he has touched a deep nerve in a large and under-represented population in this country and this group, more-so than their opponents', seem determined to get their candidate elected.

If this Wikileaks Twitter poll is any measure, and it probably isn't by a long shot, then in this internet/Twitter reality Donald Trump has a 43 point lead ahead of Hillary Clinton. On the ground it seems the support for Trump is greater than the media polls would have us believe. Comparisons to Brexit and the silent minority give rise to even more doubts to mainstream figures.

But if the system is rigged as Elizabeth Warren stated at the DNC, then Donald Trump is going to lose. The voting machines, the people counting the votes, the hanging chads and all the money in the world is on their side, so much so that even if he received the majority of the poplar vote, the likelihood of Trump winning the presidency is slim. So the question for November 8th really is -- how rigged is the system? Rigged enough to sway 10% of the votes? How about 20%? How about 30%?

On November 8th we may have a better idea as to how rigged this system is but regardless of the outcome, politics in the United States is changing in a big way and a large part of that can be attributed to a greater awareness among its citizenry as to how and why our politicians do the things they do, and who stands to benefit and who always seems to lose. That being said I suspect technology will and should play a far greater role in how we perceive political candidates and how their rise to power is structured in future elections not only in this country but in every developed country in the world, and Steemit has the potential to be a part of that.


Images courtesy of Wikipedia - By Michael Vadon - https://www.flickr.com/photos/80038275@N00/, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=42609338 By United States Congress - http://sanders.senate.gov/, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1878652