Thiele Strong is a sociology professor at San José State University a public voices fellow at the The OpEd Project.
The United States is quickly approaching a presidential election that no one is jazzed about. The incumbent’s approval rating is substantially lower than his disapproval rating. And the biggest contender for his opposition, who just won the Iowa caucuses, is a habitual liar facing 91 felony charges and who will be remembered for inciting an insurrection, introducing alternative facts and calling social activists public enemies. Both are elite, cishet white men who would be president in their eighties if they were to win the election.
Even in a deeply polarized society, many can agree that the candidates are abysmal. This lackluster slate does not reflect who we are as a nation. We are full of accomplishments, innovation, creativity and development. Aren’t we worthy of a leader who reflects the magnitude of our potential?
Let’s allow TikTok to provide democracy to a nation that deeply deserves it and has not tasted it in some time. As social media content creators delve into New Year's resolutions, intentions and directions, I urge us to vision board and act now to find a politically viable presidential candidate.
We do not want 2024 to follow the current political path. We are the so-called leaders of the developed world, so we should be thrilled with our political candidates.
There’s someone who is burning for the chance to be heard and taken seriously as a presidential candidate. Someone who does not have massive campaign financing, who does not have the support of the mega donors, who is not a D.C. staple and yet who feels the time is right for them to listen and lead.
This is not only a pipedream. As a sociologist who teaches and researches social class and stratification, I know that we have more to gain from solidarity than from division. Solidarity is a sustainability resource. Sociologists have long forecasted that capitalism run amok would enter the next stage of its evolution when the masses were given the means and the tools to unite on their political behalf. Through social media we have a non-violent, cost-effective solution to tap into our collective wealth to provide a sustainable political future.
We have always had the numbers. There have always been more members of the working classes than there have been of the corporate, economic and political elites. But the socio-economically and politically powerful corporate elites work together. They meet and party together. And sometimes, they are incredibly irresponsible.
We, with social media as our tool, can do better.
It is important that we work to take control of our government for the people, by the people, before the billionaires get more deeply entrenched into our politics. Our political system has long been a bastion of power for people who have money. We have had millionaires in politics, now we have billionaires with unmatched resources. In the 2016 election, “ The Great Hack ” showed, those who supported Trump used their money to target so-called “persuadables” – swing voters in swing counties of swing states – with psychological warfare in order to shape politics. Their candidate, the political nihilist, won.
For decades, the media has bonded and shaped us. For example, in the early 2000s we saw Madonna and Britney kiss. During the pandemic, it was Nathan Apodaca, Fleetwood Mac and cranberry juice on Tiktok.
We love our TikTok, an opiate of the masses by the masses. They want to take it. Let’s give those in power another reason to be wary of the power of TikTok. Let’s use it to find a 2024 presidential candidate worthy of the powerful position.
This will not work if we promote someone who is not capable of the job. As a reminder, the Constitution requires that a presidential candidate: be 35 years or older, be a natural born citizen and have lived in the United States for at least 14 years. Based on these criteria, many people qualify.
Recently, there have been calls for humanities and artists to get into politics. We also need social scientists to get into politics. We need people who are capable of integrity, organization, mediation and de-escalation. Scan your screens and your consciousness and come up with someone in your networks who you think can go viral for a presidential candidacy.
It’s the 2024 TikTok challenge: #swaythepresidentialplay
To be sure, TikTok challenges are not known for their promotion of social well-being. Instead, they have been linked to teenage endangerment and risky behavior. Elites will say that we cannot elect a candidate from TikTok. But this is not the first time TikTok has entered politics. Remember t when TikTok teens and K-pop stans falsely registered for Donald Trump’s campaign event? We can use TikTok to find eligible people who can rule a nation.
America has the potential to be great, and greatness is never achieved by electing government officials through a classist, racist, sexist and outdated system. Amazing things have come from Tiktok – let’s add another tick to that list.
In past years, celebrities have called for us to rock the vote. Now, let us TikTok the vote.
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.