Bowe writes about politics in the digital age for Democracy Through the Looking Glass.
A closer look at the 2022 midterm results offers solid evidence that democratic reform efforts are a moderating political force, in a time when both the media pundits and the electorate are exhausted by the pugilistic style of politics today. This creates a powerful narrative that election reforms can fix the pain voters are feeling about hyper-partisanship today. But will the media even care?
First, the fate of the 10 Republican House members who voted to impeach Donald Trump after the events of Jan. 6, 2021, makes an interesting case study comparing the outcome between a partisan primary election system and a nonpartisan primary system. Seven of those lawmakers campaigned within a partisan primary system. The other three ran in nonpartisan primaries – advocated by democracy reformers – where the top two finishers in a single nonpartisan primary advanced to the general election.
All seven GOP House members representing places with partisan primaries will not be returning in January. Four retired (instead of facing certain defeat) and three lost — two annihilated — in their primaries. But two of the three who ran in nonpartisan “jungle” primaries were reelected, and the third fell just 68 votes short of the second-place finish needed to advance to the general election.
The data is clear. Depending on how the election rules are designed, results can have a more or less polarizing outcome. These 10 members showed a great deal of political independence — country over party — but only three were rewarded for demonstrating independence over blind partisan loyalty.
Then there is what happened in Alaska, with a new system of four candidates advancing from a nonpartisan primary to the general election — and using ranked-choice voting to determine which candidate has a majority of voter support. Again, the results gravitated toward the middle rather than the extreme.
In Alaska’s general election for Senate, moderate Republican incumbent Lisa Murkowski initially finished less than 1 point ahead of conservative GOP challenger Kelly Tshibaka (43.4 percent to 42.6 percent), but well short of the required 50 percent majority under RCV rules. In the final RCV tabulation — after the ranked votes from the two eliminated candidates were redistributed — Murkowski won with 54 percent. The moderate Murkowski captured 90 percent of the ranked vote from the two eliminated candidates, the bulk of which came from voters who initially voted for the Democratic candidate.
In Alaska’s House race, the dynamics were different, but the moderate outcome was the same. Most impressive, the dynamics of this House election were tested twice, less than four months apart, and achieved the same results.
Moderate GOP scion Nick Begich ran against GOP conservative icon Sarah Palin and moderate Democrat Mary Peltola in August to fill the remaining term of the late Rep. Don Young, and again in November. In both elections, Peltola won the initial vote, but fell short of a majority, with Palin finishing second and Begich third. After the ballots for Begich were redistributed to voters’ second choices, Peltola had more than the necessary majority of votes required to win.
Voters backing a Democratic candidate helped elect a moderate Republican to the Senate, and voters supporting a Republican candidate helped elect a moderate Democrat to the House.
So, the good news is the reform community has demonstrated how relatively minor reforms in election rules can elect more consensus-oriented politicians and can alleviate the political fatigue from which we all suffer. But, like the proverbial tree falling in the forest, if the media doesn’t give saturated coverage to the success of these reforms, did they even happen?
Historically, major media coverage of reform issues and successes has been nearly non-existent. This creates a major hurdle that must be cleared before reform advocates can win the hearts and minds of Americans and make major strides to achieve reform.
The challenge for democracy reform advocates is how to capture the attention (and imagination) of the mainstream media so they will tell these stories about how voters — when given the opportunity — will vote for moderation over extremism.
It certainly is a story worth telling.
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.