If the means justify the ends, we’d still be operating under the Articles of Confederation. The Founders understood that the means—the governmental structure itself—must always serve the ends of liberty and prosperity. When the means no longer served those ends, they experimented with yet another design for their government—they did expect it to be the last.
The age of AI warrants asking if the means still further the ends—specifically, individual liberty and collective prosperity. Both of those goals were top of mind for early Americans. They demanded the Bill of Rights to protect the former, and they identified the latter—namely, the general welfare—as the animating purpose for the government. Both of those goals are being challenged by constitutional doctrines that do not align with AI development or even undermine it. A full review of those doctrines could fill a book (and perhaps one day it will). For now, however, I’m just going to raise two.
The first is the extraterritoriality principle. You’ve likely never heard of it, but it’s a core part of our federal system: one state can’t govern another; its legal authority ends at its borders. States across the ideological spectrum are weighing laws that would significantly alter the behaviors and capabilities of frontier models. While well-intentioned, many of these laws threaten to project legislation (and values) from one state into another. Muddled Supreme Court case law on this topic means that we’re unsure how exactly extraterritoriality concerns map on to the rush to regulate AI—that uncertainty is a problem.
Unclear laws hinder innovation, which is a driver of the general welfare. As things stand, the absence of a bright line as to when state authority to regulate AI begins and ends has invited state legislatures around the country to seemingly compete on which can devise the most comprehensive bill. If and when these bills find their way into law, you can bet your bottom dollar that litigation will follow.
Courts are unlikely to identify the aforementioned line. In the short run, as indicated by conflicting judicial decisions around the fair use doctrine and AI training data, they will likely develop distinct and perhaps even contradictory tests. The long run isn’t even worth considering. The regulatory uncertainty that results from even a few laws with extraterritorial effects may keep that would-be innovator from going all-in on their new idea or give pause to an investor thinking about doubling down on a startup. Those small decisions add up. The aggregate is lost innovation and, by extension, lost prosperity.
What’s more, one state effectively imposing its views on others runs afoul of individual liberty concerns. Extraterritoriality is one part of the Constitution’s call for horizontal federalism, which demands equality among the states and prohibits them from discriminating against non-residents, in most cases. When this key structural element is eroded, it diminishes one of the main ways the Founders sought to protect Americans from once again living under the thumb of a foreign power.
The second is the right to privacy. While you won’t find such a right in the Constitution. It has instead been discovered in the “penumbra” of other provisions. This general, vague right has given rise to a broader set of privacy laws and norms that generally equate privacy with restraints on data sharing. At a high-level, this approach to privacy results in siloed datasets that may contain data in different forms and at various levels of detail. In many contexts, this furthers individual liberty by reducing the odds of bad actors gaining access to sensitive information. Now, however, the aggregation of vast troves of high-quality data carries the potential to develop incredibly sophisticated AI tools. Without such data, then some of the most promising uses of AI, such as in medicine and education, may never come about. Concern for the general welfare, then, puts significant strain on an approach to privacy that decreases access to data.
Reexamining and clarifying these doctrines is overdue. It’s also just a fraction of the work that needs to be done to ensure that individual liberty and the general welfare are pursued and realized in this turbulent period.
Kevin Frazier is an AI Innovation and Law Fellow at Texas Law and Author of the Appleseed AI substack.
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.