Radwell is the author of “American Schism: How the Two Enlightenments Hold the Secret to Healing our Nation ” and serves on the Business Council at Business for America. This is the sixth entry in a 10-part series on the American schism in 2024.
In last week’s article, I expounded upon the fall of American journalism and explained why the media industry, as currently incentivized, is provoking and exacerbating a healthy chunk of the American schism by intensifying polarization. Within the predominant business model, today’s media industry has relegated the pursuit of truth to the back burner. In its place, a significant portion of the industry today relentlessly deploys sensationalism as its principal tactic to attract clicks and eyeballs.
Moreover, this “journalistic approach” is intermingled with the dissemination of carefully tailored yet quite distorted narratives to best coddle consumers within the shelter of their own information bubbles.
In accordance with this line of thinking, the solution space to the “media problem” can best be demarcated by the necessity to create better incentives for profitable media business models that once again put the pursuit of truth at the center of the value hierarchy. This is undoubtedly a challenge given a stubborn reality, namely that the lion’s share of the media industry has become reliant on advertising as the sole profit engine. Further, with the command of artificial intelligence and advanced advertising targeting capabilities, consumers have been relegated to pushing buttons while entrapped in our individual Skinner boxes, an enclosure in which an animal pushes a lever to get its reward. How many of us today get our anticipated adrenaline reward when mouse clicks or phone taps become our lever? Digital advertising has effectively become a mechanistic behavior modification tool.
But this perspective represents at best half the overall problem – the share of the pie related to the supply side of the media industry. What about the demand side? Why don’t enough American consumers insist on more accountable journalism? Shouldn’t a larger portion of viewership or readership demand more factual information? With the exception of a few national print newspapers, why do we as consumers tolerate sensational entertainment masquerading as news today, particularly after transcending centuries of yellow journalism via the curation of an ethical profession in more recent history?
And herein lies the other half of the problem – the slow decline of critical thinking in a population where too many consumers get lost in a sea of noise, and abandon the pursuit of truth altogether. With waning ability to evaluate sources of information, consumers too often today fail to seek out alternative viewpoints; instead they swallow hook, line and sinker what their favorite political hack or elected official spouts out.
Simply stated, critical thinking is sound thinking built on top of our fundamental human capacities of observation and reason. But rigorous thinking requires making choices about what sources to pursue for information and using reason and judgment to weigh the invariably conflicting data coming from different fronts. Today, ironically perhaps, we have turned this type of thinking on its proverbial head: As opposed to using facts and reason to arrive at a point of view, the opinion comes first, followed by a quest for whatever alternative facts might support it.
In previous generations, critical thinking was the very foundation of education. In more recent decades, STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) education has effectively crowded out not only civics classes but the pursuit of inquiry in the gamut of social sciences where students of yesteryear learned to grapple with complex issues relating to the body populace and society. In previous times, high school debate clubs were common and classes specifically designed around critical thinking were the norm. In these contexts, a typical assignment entailed students developing an argument for one side of an issue, complete with supporting data within a logical framework, and then subsequently making the case for the counter argument, with the same meticulousness. These types of learning environments fostered the assiduous development of empirical and rational skills which were not only nice to have but which in fact provide the foundation for a democratic republic.
Lest we forget that it was the French Enlighteners, like Diderot and Condorcet, who outlined the explicit educational needs upon which a representative democracy rests. These requirements were unambiguously developed in response to the domination of the church-mandated educational curriculum of previous centuries. Within the framework of the day, the ecclesiastics who provided instruction had scant ability or desire to cultivate the empirical and rational skills of the secular realm, core values of the Enlightenment. In writing the 1792 French Constitution (before the Reign of Terror in which he gave up his life), Condorcet delineated an entire set of educational programs that were to be mandated for provision by the state to all citizens of all classes. Abandoning such may provide the fuel for firebrands and manipulators, and usually proceeds down the path toward autocracy.
Once again, history can act as a salve for our wounds, if only we would apply it.
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.