LaRue writes at Structure Matters. He is former deputy director of the Eisenhower Institute and of the American Society of International Law.
Looking for a good book to give or read over the holidays? Want one that can deliver hope and perspective before the primaries kick off election-year frenzy, if not depression? Here are a few that do just that, from offering reminders that the nation always digs itself out of the polarized holes it creates to charting viable possibilities for the future of our democratic republic.
Robert Putnam’s "The Upswing ” (2020) is a good place to start. He strengthens the cyclical frame many analysts use to explain political periods by describing the pattern as being an upward, diagonal spiral rather than a mere pendulum swaying from progress to retrogression and back. His is a compelling case that the U.S. cycle is nearing its next low point. (the prior one was just before The Progressive Era started what would become a half-century of notable progress)
Treating the symptoms of today’s political divisions is vital but ultimately incomplete; the causes also require attention and repair, the deepest of which are constitutional. The fact that amendments happen at all can inspire as well as discourage, which Jonathan Kowal and Wilfred Codrington reveal in "The People’s Constitution ” (2021). They entertainingly inform the full history of amendments and bring to light the conditions necessary to achieve or pursue such change. For example, the Constitution has commonly been called “impossible” to amend or “unamendable” as little as a decade and a half before it is amended, as occurred in the Gilded Age before amendments in 1913 gave us an income tax and direct election of senators.
For a fascinating thought experiment on amendments, Beau Breslin’s "A Constitution for the Living ” (2021) posits what American history may have looked like had constitutional conventions been scheduled as Thomas Jefferson preferred. Wisely, Breslin’s schedule (five in 230 years) is not as frequent as Jefferson suggested (one every generation), and his rich counterfactual offers retrospective insights on what big national change could look like.
And critical notions that are not constitutional can still be foundational. Richard Haass’s "The Bill of Obligations ” (2023) posits a Bill of Rights equivalent for the roles and duties of citizenship. The success of our democratic enterprise rests on public involvement in civic affairs, and Haass tightens our understanding of such needs by articulating 10 of them, from being informed and getting involved, to rejecting violence and valuing norms.
Voting is fundamental to democracy, and thus understandably central to many books and proposals related to electoral reform (disclosure: including my own). Election law expert Richard Hasen will publish "A Real Right To Vote ” early in 2024 (available by pre-order), arguing for an amendment guaranteeing the right to vote. Hasen has long advocated for an affirmative amendment, describing why it would be more effective than the hodgepodge of “negative” amendments we have now that assert that the right to vote cannot be denied on this or that basis. Daniel Ziblatt and Steven Levitsky also lead their recommendations in "Tyranny of the Minority ” (2023) with such a proposed amendment.
E.J. Dionne Jr. and Miles Rapoport take a different approach, advocating for universal civic duty voting (“ 100% Democracy,” 2022). They argue for adapting the mandatory voting successfully used in Australia, Belgium and elsewhere to increase turnout consequentially and thereby solidify the foundational base for the government erected above it. They do so while still preserving voters’ right not to vote (i.e., “none of the above”) or write in their own candidates.
There are plenty more books to recommend, such as Robert Alexander’s "Representation and the Electoral College ” (2019), which provides an informed critique of this antiquated, anti-democratic institution, and stands with those by George Edwards and Alexander Keyssar. And, for solutions to the corrosive problem of partisan primaries empowering political fringes, there is "The Politics Industry ” (2020) by Katherine Gehl and Michael Porter. Nick Troiano will build on their work in his forthcoming "The Primary Solution ” in 2024 (also available via pre-order).
The good news is that such forward thinking is happening now. The stage is being set. The meaningful through-lines from today’s democratic struggles to tomorrow’s democratic vision are not one-directional; they are only created through their interaction and need for each other.
Happy holidays, and happy reading.
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.