Frazier is an assistant professor at the Crump College of Law at St. Thomas University. Starting this summer, he will serve as a Tarbell fellow.
With the supposed goal of diversifying the electorate and achieving more representative results, State Y introduces “VoteGPT.” This artificial intelligence agent studies your social media profiles, your tax returns and your streaming accounts to develop a “CivicU.” This artificial clone would use that information to serve as your democratic proxy.
When an election rolls around, State Y grants you the option of having your CivicU fill in the ballot on your behalf — there’s no need to study the issues, learn about the candidates or even pick up a pencil. Surely CivicU will vote in your best interest. In fact, it may even vote “better” than you would, based on its objective consideration of which candidates and ballot measures would improve your well-being.
In the first election with CivicU, there’s nearly 90 percent “voter” turnout with AI agents casting about a third of all votes. Soon after Election Day, a losing candidate for a seat in the House of Representatives challenges the constitutionality of votes cast by CivicU.
A robust legal debate ensues. State Y points to its constitutional authority to decide the manner of elections and notes the absence of any federal law banning AI agents in an electoral context. What’s more, State Y reviews historical records that make clear that proxy voting — appointing someone to vote on your behalf — was a relatively common practice in colonial America. The candidate counters that surely the Founders could not have anticipated and would not have tolerated a vote cast without active involvement by the voter in question. They also note that proxy voting, while permissible in some countries like the United Kingdom, has not been adopted by the United States. The developers of VoteGPT file an amicus brief arguing that a voter’s CivicU is indistinguishable from the voter — they are one and the same, so this is more akin to someone Googling how they should vote than someone delegating their voting power.
Who wins and why?
This may seem like an implausible scenario, but the rapid development of AI as well as its use in electoral contexts suggests otherwise. In fact, current trends indicate that AI will only come to play a larger role in whether and how people participate in democracy. In short, it is a matter of when and not if certain partisan interests will leverage AI agents to bolster the odds of their electoral success.
Though proponents of AI agents might claim such efforts reflect democratic ideals such as a more representative electorate, excessive use of such agents (like allowing them to cast votes on behalf of users) may actually cause the opposite result — decreasing the legitimacy of our elections and sowing distrust in our institutions.
Before CivicU or something like it becomes a reality, we need to proactively clarify what limits exist in the Constitution with respect to agentic voting. My own interpretation is that the Constitution prohibits the tallying of any vote not explicitly cast by a human. Though such a finding may seem obvious to some, it is important to stress that a human must always be “in the loop” when it comes to formal democratic activities. The development of any alternative norm — i.e. allowing AI agents to serve as our proxies in government affairs — promises to undermine our democratic autonomy and stability.
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.