"The "scandal" of the Wiki papers, if you can call it that, is that it captured how at ease Clinton was talking to bankers and industrialists about the options

"The "scandal" of the Wiki papers, if you can call it that, is that it captured how at ease Clinton was talking to bankers and industrialists about the options for the organization of a global society. Even in transcript form, it's hard not to realize that the people in these rooms are all stakeholders in this vast historical transformation. Left out of the discussion over the years have been people like Trump's voters, who coincidentally took the first hit along the way in the form of lowered middle-class wages and benefits. They were also never told that things they cared about, like their national identity as Americans, were to have diluted meaning in the more borderless future. This is why the "basket of deplorables" comment rankled so badly. It's not like it was anywhere near as demeaning or vicious as any of 10,000 Trump insults. But it spoke to a factual disconnnect. It isn't just that the likely next president feels alienated from people in places like Wilkes-Barre, so close to her ancestral home. It's that, plus the fact that she feels comfortable admitting this to the likes of Goldman's Lloyd Blankfein, to whom she complained about the "bias against people who have led successful and/or complicated lives." All of which is interesting, and maybe a problem we Americans can have a sober discussion about once we finish bayoneting each other over "pussy" or Miss Universe's weight or the Central Park Five (only Trump could go back in time and revictimize the survivors of one of the most infamous law-enforcement mistakes of all time), or whatever other lunacies we'll be culture-warring over in the last weeks of this mercifully soon-to-end campaign." and "These are the rules of the Campaign Reality Show as it has evolved over the years. The program is designed to reduce political thought to a simple binary choice and force more than 100 million adults to commit to one or the other. Like every TV contest, it discourages subtlety, reflection and reconciliation, and encourages belligerence, action and conflict. Trump was the ultimate contestant in this show. It's no accident that his first debate with Hillary Clinton turned into the Ali-Frazier of political events, with a breathtaking 84 million people tuning in, making it the most watched political program in American history. Anyone who takes a close-enough look at how we run elections in this country will conclude that the process is designed to be regressive. It distracts us with trivialities and drives us apart during two years of furious arguments. It's a divide-and-conquer mechanism that keeps us from communicating with one another, and prevents us from examining the broader, systemic problems we all face together. In the good old days, when elections were merely stupid and not also violent and terrifying, we argued over which candidate we'd rather have a beer with, instead of wondering why both parties were getting hundreds of millions of dollars from the same people."