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On Tuesday, long before the final votes were counted in the wee hours, a Reuters-Ipsos poll of 10,000 Americans who had just cast their ballots found that 76 per cent of respondents agreed with the proposition that “the mainstream media is more interested in making money than telling the truth,” and 72 per cent agreed that “the American economy is rigged to advantage the rich and powerful.”

It is all very well for Democrats to console themselves with the might-have-been that the mildly socialist contender Bernie Sanders could have turned things around and beaten Trump at his own game. But it can’t be denied that Clinton was far and away the best candidate available to persuade and cajole voters into sticking with the neoliberal global system overseen by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. This brings us to the hardest thing of all for any of us to admit.

The system is rigged. It is rigged, and it is rigged particularly against American working people.

From Hollywood to the Upper West Side, Barack Obama’s legions of sycophants and acolytes swaggered and boasted, all for nought, that the Trumpist rallying cry to Drain the Swamp and to Make America Great Again was an occluded inducement to bigotry and white supremacy, and that America has never been so great.

But that is not how a great many Americans see things.

The median average income of Americans last year, adjusted for inflation, was 2.4 per cent less than it was in 1999, 17 years ago. On Obama’s watch, a weird complex of consultants, lobbyists, cable-show commenters, think-tankers and professional insiders of one stripe or another around Washington, D.C., has ballooned. Factory workers – once the driving force of the American economy – are now outnumbered by government employees.