Klug served in the House of Representatives from 1991 to 1999. He hosts the political podcast “ Lost in the Middle: America’s Political Orphans.”
As we head into election season, the potential for misinformation is enormous and the ability of election officials to respond to artificial intelligence is limited.
The new technology arrives at a time when we still haven’t gotten our arms around social media threats.
“The ability to react at the pace that's being developed is almost impossible,” worries Idaho Secretary of State Phil McGrane, a Republican. “By design, our system is meant to be slow and methodical.”
While deep fakes get all the attention, the truth is the threat arrives at a time when election administration itself is shaky. Election officials caught the brunt of the mistrust. In some states more than half of them have quit.
“I have a little PTSD, as do my coworkers,” said Nick Lima, who heads up elections in Cranston, R.I., and who — with some reservations — decided to keep the job he loves. “During election season, you know, you really feel the pressure, you feel your heartbeat increasing a bit.”
Today everyone who works in the campaign infrastructure faces unending scrutiny. If you thought it was easier in a red state, you are mistaken.
“Just the act of standing behind you watching you work just puts you on edge,” said McGrane. “Now you start second-guessing yourself, even if you know you're doing it right. The poll workers don't know about cyber security on voting equipment, but your poll watcher is getting asked these questions. “
Deep fakes are one level of concern, but Edward Perez, who had been director of civic integrity at Twitter and is now a board member at the OSET Institute (whose mission is to re-build public confidence in our voting system), worries about the misuse of AI to disrupt the backroom of every American precinct.
“One of the most important things to understand about election administration is, it’s very, very process oriented. And there’s a tremendous number of layers,” he said. “Are we talking about voter registration? About the security of election administration? All of this technology is never deployed just in a vacuum.”
The fact that the election system is a conglomeration of different rules and regulations from 50 different states with 50 different voting rules adds to the complexity. The challenge is serious as election officials scramble in this election-denying climate to staff 132,000 polling places with 775,000 volunteers. The clock is ticking to deploy the necessary defenses against threats that aren’t fully understood.
From hanging chads to deep fake videos, American democracy wobbles by Scott Klug
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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.