Davies is a podcast consultant, host and solutions journalist at daviescontent.com.
On the dramatic day the wall came down — Nov. 9, 1989 — I got a call from my boss at ABC News Radio. “Get on tonight’s flight to Berlin," he said.
For a young network news reporter, it was a dream assignment. Over the next two weeks, armed with a portable cassette recorder, notepad and microphone, I covered many stories of joyous family reunions and discoveries of newly won freedoms.
We alI knew at once that the abrupt decision by Communist authorities in East Germany to remove rigid travel restrictions and allow travel to the West was much more than a big news story: It was history in the making. The Cold War was coming to an end. Nothing would be quite the same again.
Twice since then, our world changed in a single day: the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and then one month ago on Thursday, Feb. 24, with Vladimir Putin’s malevolent, bloody invasion of Ukraine.
These sudden events should force us to alter glib perceptions about the world, and they are reminders that confident predictions made by economic forecasters, stock pickers and political pundits are often hopelessly wrong.
“ History throws its curves,” Peggy Noonan wrote in her Wall Street Journal column earlier this month. “You watch stunning new factors emerge and at some point you feel grateful to be humble. This ol’ world can still surprise. It can confound every expectation.”
Perhaps we need a greater sense of modesty and a deeper faith in democracy. The deep flaws of our system are well-advertised, and rightly so. Racism, inequality, environmental destruction and rigid partisan polarization are the focus of daily news coverage. But the quiet quotidian protections offered by the rule of law, separation of powers and our constitutional system of governance also deserve greater attention and vigilance.
The people of Ukraine, and their president, Volodymyr Zelensky, know what they’re fighting for. Brave reporters in Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities are risking their lives to tell the remarkable stories of resistance, defiance and national pride. “No matter what happens in Ukraine, Putin will be a loser with no moral stature and Zelensky will have towering moral stature,” wrote Maureen Dowd in The New York Times.
That’s a provocative statement, and I would argue that we need greater context for the ideas behind it.
While urgent news headlines give us a sense of what happened in the past 24 hours, they usually lack context about the history and unique challenges faced by a people at war. Perhaps we need to change our media consumption habits.
As a podcaster, I believe that our medium is uniquely positioned to help listeners gain a richer, deeper understanding of the world.
At their best, podcasts are intimate, intelligent and informal. Unlike social media, they develop a set of ideas over time — often half an hour or longer. Podcasts come without the often weird distractions of video ("does that news anchor’s tie look strange, huh?”) and pop-up messages on computer screens. We usually listen to them alone — while commuting, exercising or walking the dog. Unlike broadcast media, where the audience often tunes in halfway through a story, podcast listeners always start at the beginning.
“The Daily” from The New York Times and “The Economist Asks” are good places to look for context. Unlike some of their competitors, both of these podcasts usually tackle a single subject per episode and often go deep.
“ How Do We Fix It? ” — the show that I co-host and publish — has put out two recent primers in response to the war. One, with Yale University historian Marci Shore, looks at the recent changes in Ukraine and growing support for democracy and civic pride in the years immediately before the Putin invasion. The second episode considers whether the cause of global democracy has been strengthened by the alarming events of recent weeks.
While expressing solidarity and sympathy for those who are fighting for their lives in Ukraine, we can all gain a deeper understanding and respect for the universal principles that we share together.
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.