Molineaux is co-publisher of The Fulcrum and president/CEO of the Bridge Alliance Education Fund.
We are S T R E S S E D out by our lives today. The rapid pace of change has left us vulnerable to exploitation. We are witnessing trauma, experiencing loss and asked to pull ourselves together, somehow. Add to that a political and media climate which all too often reports on politics like a sportscaster calls games and the result is many people wanting to disconnect from everything. Our diversity of ideas and opinions should help us share a common reality. But by disconnecting from each other, we risk delusion.
There is a lot of delusion in our world today. Individually we share varying degrees of it. Some of it has been intentionally inflicted and some is the result of an unwillingness to dig beyond the headlines. The level of psychological perversion is unlike any I have ever seen. And I also wonder if an earlier version of our current story/reality/divisions was present in the 1930s?
In the 1930s, the “new technology” was radio and people were so ready to believe it was all real, that when a fictional story, "War of the Worlds," was broadcast, a large segment of the listeners believed it was real — we were being invaded by aliens. World War II was starting “over there” while in the States, our predecessors were arguing over our involvement, rejecting war refugees, fearing communism and being willfully blind to the atrocities of war. Fear causes our selfish concerns to the surface and few people can remain generous in this atmosphere.
Still, the worst thing for me/us to do is to give into the fear and join the fight for power. What is missing is our ability to imagine a new future where we might all live with our collective human dignity intact. I find the denigration that accompanies the psychological war, the physical war and the intentional trauma must be met with dignity, compassion and resolve. This is the type of community I wish to co-create with you. This is the fight for humanity, not power.
I spent the weekend with some of the brightest people working on political reforms. Our solutions seemed disconnected from each other and a little disconnected from reality. They revolved around a domination model of “if we can just win, then everything will be OK.” Somehow, we keep missing the human dignity component that allows us to weave our collective work together effectively and in partnership. In a win/lose paradigm, everyone loses.
The Ukrainians have shown us resolve in the face of bullying, cruelty and trauma. The Poles have demonstrated dignity and compassion toward their neighbors. Together, they are embodying the “never again” declaration that followed WWII.
Can we do any less for our nation, when facing a less physical, but just as real, information war? How might we start an embodiment of who we need to be for a better future?
I’m scared too. Yet I keep moving forward with a pulse on the future I hope we all want. And hope we want a better, more equitable future more than we want to dominate others because we are afraid. I’m tracking the collective stories of our time, which has dystopian futures dominating our mindsets.
We need to imagine a better future. One where partnership is the norm instead of domination.
A deep look at how "All in the Family" remains a striking mirror of American politics, class tensions, and cultural manipulation—proving its relevance decades later.
All in This American Family
There are a few shows that have aged as eerily well as All in the Family.
It’s not just that it’s still funny and has the feel not of a sit-com, but of unpretentious, working-class theatre. It’s that, decades later, it remains one of the clearest windows into the American psyche. Archie Bunker’s living room has been, as it were, a small stage on which the country has been working through the same contradictions, anxieties, and unresolved traumas that still shape our politics today. The manipulation of the working class, the pitting of neighbor against neighbor, the scapegoating of the vulnerable, the quiet cruelties baked into everyday life—all of it is still here with us. We like to reassure ourselves that we’ve progressed since the early 1970s, but watching the show now forces an unsettling recognition: The structural forces that shaped Archie’s world have barely budged. The same tactics of distraction and division deployed by elites back then are still deployed now, except more efficiently, more sleekly.
Archie himself is the perfect vessel for this continuity. He is bigoted, blustery, reactive, but he is also wounded, anxious, and constantly misled by forces above and beyond him. Norman Lear created Archie not as a monster to be hated (Lear’s genius was to make Archie lovable despite his loathsome stands), but as a man trapped by the political economy of his era: A union worker who feels his country slipping away, yet cannot see the hands that are actually moving it. His anger leaks sideways, onto immigrants, women, “hippies,” and anyone with less power than he has. The real villains—the wealthy, the connected, the manufacturers of grievance—remain safely and comfortably offscreen. That’s part of the show’s key insight: It reveals how elites thrive by making sure working people turn their frustrations against each other rather than upward.
Edith, often dismissed as naive or scatterbrained, functions as the show’s quiet moral center. Her compassion exposes the emotional void in Archie’s worldview and, in doing so, highlights the costs of the divisions that powerful interests cultivate. Meanwhile, Mike the “Meathead” represents a generation trying to break free from those divisions but often trapped in its own loud self-righteousness. Their clashes are not just family arguments but collisions between competing visions of America’s future. And those visions, tellingly, have yet to resolve themselves.
The political context of the show only sharpens its relevance. Premiering in 1971, All in the Family emerged during the Nixon years, when the “Silent Majority” strategy was weaponizing racial resentment, cultural panic, and working-class anxiety to cement power. Archie was a fictional embodiment of the very demographic Nixon sought to mobilize and manipulate. The show exposed, often bluntly, how economic insecurity was being rerouted into cultural hostility. Watching the show today, it’s impossible to miss how closely that logic mirrors the present, from right-wing media ecosystems to politicians who openly rely on stoking grievances rather than addressing root causes.
What makes the show unsettling today is that its satire feels less like a relic and more like a mirror. The demagogic impulses it spotlighted have simply found new platforms. The working-class anger it dramatized has been harvested by political operatives who, like their 1970s predecessors, depend on division to maintain power. The very cultural debates that fueled Archie’s tirades — about immigration, gender roles, race, and national identity—are still being used as tools to distract from wealth concentration and political manipulation.
If anything, the divisions are sharper now because the mechanisms of manipulation are more sophisticated, for much has been learned by The Machine. The same emotional raw material Lear mined for comedy is now algorithmically optimized for outrage. The same social fractures that played out around Archie’s kitchen table now play out on a scale he couldn’t have imagined. But the underlying dynamics haven’t changed at all.
That is why All in the Family feels so contemporary. The country Lear dissected never healed or meaningfully evolved: It simply changed wardrobe. The tensions, prejudices, and insecurities remain, not because individuals failed to grow but because the economic and political forces that thrive on division have only become more entrenched. Until we confront the political economy that kept Archie and Michael locked in an endless loop of circular bickering, the show will remain painfully relevant for another fifty years.
Ahmed Bouzid is the co-founder of The True Representation Movement.