Frazier is an assistant professor at the Crump College of Law at St. Thomas University. He previously clerked for the Montana Supreme Court.
March 4, 1847, should be covered in every American history textbook. On that day, Congress assessed the profitability of the telegraph line it helped Samuel Morse build between Washington, D.C., and Baltimore. The ledger was bleak: Looking back at a recent year of messages, Congress had spent $3,925.14 to maintain the line and received just $413.44 in revenue from message fees.
So on that fateful day in 1847, the postmaster general, "confronted by a depressing condition of the postal finances and despairing of legislative support in prosecuting the [telegraph] enterprise as a part of the Postal Service, effected the sale of the Government line," as summarized by a postal commission in 1913.
A few decades later, the short-sightedness of that decision was as obvious as an elephant in a kindergarten classroom. By 1866, Western Union had managed to squeeze out all competition in the telegraph industry, form what would soon be a nationwide monopoly and limit the use of the telegraph to the elite. More importantly, Congress had failed in its mandate to “establish Post Office and Post Roads,” as set forth by Article I, Section 8, Clause 7 of the U.S. Constitution.
That oft-neglected power – the Postal Power – mandates that Congress provide Americans with a marketplace of ideas via the primary channel of information exchange. Let’s break that down. As of 1790, upon ratification of the Constitution, the postal network was the only means of distributing information. It carried the newspaper, magazines, pamphlets, letters, information on Congress, and on and on.
Under British rule, the government exploited the people’s reliance on the postal system by operating it in a way as to make revenue from their search for knowledge. In a major break with the past, the Founders pledged to run the network to encourage the spread of reliable news and to foster democratic discourse. With the passage of the Post Office Act of 1792, the Founders codified their radical vision of a democracy of informed citizens.
That act subsidized the distribution of newspapers and allowed publishers to exchange copies of their papers at no cost so that they could reprint the latest and most informative stories. Importantly, newspapers in that age had a reputation for being nonpartisan. Historian John Nerone suggests that though many of the Founding era papers had a partisan bent, many more avoided such skewed coverage.
In addition to increasing the supply of democratic information, the act also expanded the market itself. In 1788, the United States had just 69 post offices. Thanks to the decision by the Second Congress to directly build a larger market for ideas, that number rapidly expanded – 903 offices had been built by 1800; 4,500 by 1820, and more than 13,000 by 1840.
On the whole, the Post Office Act demonstrated Congress’ recognition of maintaining, expanding and improving the marketplace of ideas. Yet, in 1847, Congress forgot the importance of fulfilling that duty regardless of technological shifts.
In the years since, the marketplace of ideas has moved further and further away from government control. Many folks celebrate that independence as a good thing; yet, those same folks often fail to realize that we’ve simply shifted government control to corporate control. The latter, in my opinion, is far scarier for two main reasons. First, corporations will always be governed by a profit mandate. And, second, corporations are unaccountable to Average Joes and Janes via the ballot box.
As we enter a new technological paradigm in the Age of AI, we need to ask who should operate the marketplace of ideas. If this marketplace fails, then our democracy will be imperiled. That’s an outcome we cannot tolerate. Maintaining a marketplace of ideas isn't cheap (we learned that in 1847), but a deliberative democracy is worth every penny (a daily lesson).
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.