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.
Artificial intelligence has rightfully caused a lot of folks to become concerned about our marketplace of ideas. In an information ecosystem already flooded with fake news, harmful content and hot takes, the last thing we needed was new tools to make creating and sharing that content even easier. Our lack of preparedness for this glut of generated trash was made clear this month when deceptive and sexually explicit AI-generated content claiming to depict Taylor Swift went viral. Platforms tried to stop the spread but policing the internet for bad content is like playing whack-a-mole across the solar system – you’re going to lose.
Still the fight to preserve our information ecosystem is one we can’t surrender. And thankfully a lot of smart folks are thinking through ways to reduce the virality of certain content, give users more control over their feeds, increase the supply of verified news, or some combination of all three. I applaud and appreciate these efforts. Count me among those who think we can and must take drastic action.
My own proposal is a “Right to Reality” — in exchange for creating a platform with a specific feed reserved for verified news institutions that would help shore up our information ecosystem and sustain local and nonprofit news organizations, companies could receive a government subsidy. Is it a complete fix? No. Is it a step toward making it easier for more people to access more reliable and actionable news? Yes, and that’s not nothing at a time when it’s becoming harder and harder for folks to trust and understand what they read and see.
But we also need to wake up to a much more basic reality: “reliable and actionable” news isn’t in high demand. You can label content. You can fact-check articles. You can verify users. All of that won’t necessarily change the fact that many people prioritize content that makes them feel understood or part of a larger community than news that covers the local city council, the state budget, or the ins and outs of the economy.
The upshot is that our information ecosystem won’t improve until our democracy improves. People will only seek out “good” news if they think it’s worth reading. For a lot of folks, reading about democracy’s slow, deliberate processes is even worse than eating vegetables — at least those do something good for you. Why stay up on news that seems entirely out of your control? Why track bills that reflect the controls of special interests more so than Main Street concerns?
I get it. There are certainly days I’d rather not dig into the weeds of the latest debates in D.C. or my state legislature. And there are definitely times I opt for Netflix over watching hearings. But, in the same way you don’t need to exclusively eat veggies to be healthy, reading “good” news and participating in our democracy doesn’t have to consume you to still lead to positive outcomes.
The point is that we have to make democratic reform a part of the larger conversation about our marketplace of ideas. We can’t expect people to read about candidates who don’t listen to them. Nor can we anticipate people will read NPR’s breakdown of legislation that is likely to fail. If we want a more engaged and informed public, we need a more responsive and participatory democracy.
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.