Frazier is an assistant professor at the Crump College of Law at St. Thomas University. He previously clerked for the Montana Supreme Court.
When you’re stuck in the wilderness, Bear Grylls wouldn’t suggest you prioritize searching for Wi-Fi. Instead, survival experts would likely tell you to focus on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. In other words, you should be trying to address physiological needs before you start thinking about self-actualization. There’s also a hierarchy of democratic needs, but it’s been forgotten by modern advocates for a more participatory and responsive democracy.
Before explaining further, I should make clear that I wholly support efforts to improve our democracy through thoughtful changes, such as open primaries and campaign finance reform. I applaud and encourage those individuals and organizations working on such causes. But I’m increasingly concerned that we’re putting Wi-Fi before water. More specifically, I’m concerned about the 48 million adults (or 23 percent) who struggle to read and the 70 million people (or about 20 percent) who live in or may soon live in a news desert. Absent addressing literacy and access to “hard” news – the first two levels of the hierarchy of democratic needs – electoral reforms will not be as impactful as intended.
Let’s start with literacy and why it’s the first step toward democratic actualization. In a democracy, the people are the “depository of the ultimate powers of the society,” according to Thomas Jefferson. “If we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with wholesome discretion,” he continued, “the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education."
Jefferson wasn’t alone in tying education and, by extension, literacy to the capacity of “we, the people” to fulfill our democratic responsibilities. According to historian Alan Talor, the Founders viewed education as "a collective, social benefit essential for free government to endure."
In short, democratic governance places power in the people, but to fully exercise that power individuals must have the requisite skills and knowledge. The alternative – failing to empower individuals to make informed choices about how to wield their power – is akin to giving someone a tennis racket without telling them the rules of the game and teaching them how to serve.
How to exercise that discretion is also contingent on knowing what choices are available – that’s where access to “hard” news comes in. Hard news conveys information important to citizens’ ability to vote, evaluate policies and identify issues in their communities. The Founders addressed this democratic need by creating an expansive postal system and subsidizing the production and dissemination of newspapers that contained more hard news than advertisements.
Today, in contrast, nearly a fifth of Americans live in a news desert, “a community, either rural or urban, with limited access to the sort of credible and comprehensive news and information that feeds democracy at the grassroots level.” To make matters worse, the creation and spread of AI-generated content has the potential to pollute our information ecosystem – making it harder to find democratically salient information. That's why I've called for a "right to reality" that requires subsidies for local and reliable news institutions. This financial boost would make quality journalism more available in every part of the country and, as a result, would dilute the effect of content meant to distract rather than inform.
How best to fully address these needs is a topic for another article. The key takeaway for now is that literacy and access to hard news must be at the top of our reform agenda because they’re at the foundation of the hierarchy of democratic needs. The sooner we focus our resources and attention on these foundational issues, the sooner we can build larger and more inclusive coalitions and movements.
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.