One of the great gifts of the Enlightenment age was the centrality of reason and empiricism as instruments to unleash the astonishing potential of human capacity. Great Enlightenment thinkers recognized that human beings have the capacity to observe the universe and rely on logical thinking to solve problems.
Moreover, these were not just lofty ideals; Benjamin Franklin and Denis Diderot demonstrated that building our collective constitution of knowledge could greatly enhance human prosperity not only for the aristocratic class but for all participants in the social contract. Franklin’s “Poor Richard’s Almanac” and Diderot and d’Alembert’s “Encyclopédie” served as the Enlightenment’s machines de guerre, effectively providing broad access to practical knowledge, empowering individuals to build their own unique brand of prosperity.
It is hard to overstate what a radical departure this was from the prior millennium, where the birth lottery largely circumscribed the determinants of one’s prosperity. Due to this striking reorientation, many historians view the Enlightenment as laying the bedrock for what we consider a modern society.
Further, one cannot deny the titanic impact of this reorientation. Consider that in 1790, human life expectancy was around 30 years, one in five children didn’t survive to age 5, and 4/5 of the world lived in extreme poverty. Today, life expectancy is over 70 years across the globe; over 99% of children survive past the age of 5; and only one-fifth of the world lives in the same extreme level of poverty. Arguably, we have unleashed more human prosperity in the last 200 years than in the prior 2000.
It is with this perspective that we must consider the gravity of our current condition. What are the consequences of having abandoned our Enlightenment ideals? Today, the era’s gifts are adrift in our bitterly polarized landscape, where the demonization of tribal politics obscures civic problem-solving. In such an environment, our ability to construct effective policy solutions becomes impossible. As vital, constructive discussions of public policy are crowded out, the unfettered interests of crony capitalism prevail. By yielding to the alignment of political and economic power over recent decades, we the people have permitted the monied classes to advance their own interests at the expense of those of the majority of the republic.
Where does this leave us? Our political discourse has devolved into a game of scoring points and laying blame for our predicaments, while the unbridled “free market” wreaks havoc on today’s working classes. As we continue to amass an immense debt burden, it deprives future generations of their own prospects.
The absurdities that emerge from our predicament become increasingly disquieting. Here are two particularly noteworthy examples:
The quest for artificial intelligence and its consequent effects on energy prices and the environment.
Unsatisfied with the intelligence with which we are naturally endowed, we have surrendered to a market-driven quest to discover and deploy a supposedly superior “artificial” intelligence. The immense anticipated demand for this AI will require significantly more computer processing power than we currently possess. Consequently, today we are building the requisite data centers, which will consume a staggering amount of incremental energy.
At the same time, our MAGA retrograde energy policy, priding itself on climate change denial, is funneling resources into the rebuilding and redeployment of coal, oil, and gas infrastructure and cancelling or furloughing green energy projects. However, due to the skyrocketing cost of revitalizing coal, this traditional energy source is now more costly than solar and wind energy. So as the NYT recently reported, in West Virginia, where the coal revitalization is centered, consumer energy prices are rising more than double the national average.
The replacement of genuine human interaction with its virtual counterpart.
As a species, we have seemingly determined that building authentic human relationships is too difficult (or painful). Fortunately, the proliferating opportunities to build digital relationships provide ample replacement. Vast chunks of our society, notably young people, are increasingly forsaking real human interaction and replacing it with its virtual cousin. As Scott Galloway reminds us: Who needs to go out on dates, when Only Fans is just a click away?
Of a bygone era are the noisy college dining halls where vivacious conversations reverberated from the rafters; today, each student eats individually with scant interaction with their neighboring diners, all glued to their screens, and many with earbuds.
Can we not tap into our better angels and return to an era of crafting solutions to pressing concerns? Unfortunately, trapped by our technologies and their supporting business models, we find it increasingly difficult to distance ourselves from the pressures of our self-chosen “mobs.” This leaves me with a meager opportunity to constructively resolve genuine policy differences. Our Enlightenment forbears welcomed technology and market competition as leveling devices for the public good. For the sake of the next generation, it might be in our best interest to follow their model.
Seth David Radwell is the author of “American Schism: How the Two Enlightenments Hold the Secret to Healing our Nation” winner of last year’s International Book Award for Best General Nonfiction. He is a frequent contributor as a political analyst, and speaker within both the business community and on college campuses both in the U.S. and abroad.
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.