“That’s how a rigged system works,” she said.

It was a curious vision coming from a person whose life story, like that of tens millions of Americans who have risen far above their small beginnings, refutes her own thesis. It was curious, also, coming from someone who presumably believes that various forms of rigging are required to un-rig past rigging. Affirmative action in college admissions and aggressive minority recruitment in corporations are also forms of “rigging.”

But however one feels about various types of rigging, the echo of Trump was unmistakable. “It’s being proven we have a rigged system,” the president said at one of his rallies last year. “Doesn’t happen so easy. But this system — gonna be a lot of changes. This is a rigged system.”

Trump’s claim that the system is rigged represents yet another instance of his ideological pickpocketing of progressives. From C. Wright Mills (“The Power Elite”) to Noam Chomsky (“Manufacturing Consent”), the animating belief of the far left has been, as Tom Hayden put it, that we live in a “false democracy,” controlled by an unaccountable, deceitful and shadowy elite. Trump has names for it: the globalists; the deep state; the fake news. Orange, it turns out, is the new red.

Of course, Warren and Trump have very different ideas as to just who the malefactors of great wealth really are. Is it Sheldon Adelson or George Soros? The Koch brothers or the Ford Foundation? Posterity will be forgiven if it loses track of which alleged conspiracy to rig the system was of the far-right and which was of the far left.

What it will remember is that here was another era in which a president and one of his leading opponents abandoned the prouder traditions of American politics in favor of paranoid ones. Compare Warren’s grim message to Bill Clinton’s sunny one from his first inaugural: “There is nothing wrong with America that cannot be cured by what is right with America.”

At some point, it will be worth asking Senator Warren: Rigged compared to when? A generation ago a black president would have been unthinkable. Two generations ago, a woman on the Supreme Court. And rigged compared to what? Electoral politics in Japan, which have been dominated by a single party for decades? The class system in Brazil, dominated by a single race for centuries?

For now, Democratic voters might think twice about embracing a candidate whose dark, distorting ideas about America bear such an uncomfortable resemblance to those of the president they detest. Wouldn’t it be nice to have an optimist in the White House once again?

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