The kids call it doomscrolling—that endless, glazed-eyed spin through terrible headline after terrible headline. And let’s be honest: content from today’s political circus is built for it. It’s so absurd, so extreme, that you find yourself muttering, “This can’t be real.”
But that’s the trap. The worse it gets, the harder it is to look away. And somewhere along the way, outrage starts to replace action. I know—because I caught myself doing it.
The Guardian. Axios. CNN. Social media. I’d bounce between them like I was looking for an emergency exit. Twenty minutes later, I’d be furious and discouraged—but no more informed, and no closer to doing anything about it. Just more adrenaline. And a little less hope.
And I came of age when activism mattered—when organizing, speaking up, marching, and writing letters could actually change things. I still believe that. But somewhere along the way, the energy that used to go into action started going into…scrolling.
That’s when I realized I needed a new focus. I needed to do something.
So I built something that could help me focus on what really matters—and tune out the rest.
For me, that meant building a small project called Idiots & Charlatans, not as a reaction website or think piece factory but as a tool to help me stay anchored in a few big values: democracy, truth, equity, climate, justice, and free speech. I call them my non-negotiables.
At first, I didn’t know where to start. Every headline felt catastrophic, and every issue felt urgent. But then I asked myself: which battles, if lost, will be the hardest to undo? That question helped me cut through the noise.
I made a short list—my non-negotiables:
🗳️ Democracy, because once it slips, getting it back is nearly impossible.
🌍 Climate, because the clock doesn’t reset.
🧑🏽🤝🧑🏼 Equity and justice, because the rollback is real and the pain is personal.
📢 Free speech and truth, because without them, we lose the ability to fight for anything else.
When a headline touches one of those, I pay attention. When it doesn’t, I don’t. And that shift alone has made all the difference.
That’s what helped me, but the bigger question is:
What will help you?
Because this isn’t just about how we cope with the news.
It’s about how we respond to it.
Reclaim that time—the time you’d normally spend doomscrolling—and do something. Anything.
- Call your representative.
- Volunteer at a voter registration event.
- Donate $10 to a trusted cause or candidate.
- Talk to a friend who’s tuned out.
Because let’s be honest: we’re not going to doomscroll our way out of this mess.
And as older Americans—people who’ve lived through enough to know what’s at stake—we can still show others what serious civic responsibility looks like.
We don’t need more commentary. We need more courage.
We don’t need more dread. We need more doing.
So if you find yourself scrolling tonight, just ask:
What else could I be doing instead?
Brent McKenzie is a writer and educator based in the United States. He is the creator of Idiots & Charlatans, a watchdog-style website focused on democratic values and climate change. He previously taught in Brussels and has spent the majority of his professional career in educational publishing.
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.