While it is nonsensical to try to prescribe a diagnosis to America's current state of civic discourse — from dumping manure on the White House lawn in the name of climate action or attending the Met Gala to demand we "tax the rich" — we often blame partisan politics. But what if part of the problem is that we literally cannot understand one another? And, perhaps worse than that, the institutions we trust to lead the public have stopped trying to communicate to be understood.
Let's get the figures out of the way. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development found that 50 percent of U.S. adults cannot read a book written at an eighth-grade level. The National Institute of Literacy estimates that the average American reads at a seventh- to eighth-grade level. Despite these concerns, an analysis of 21 major media outlets found that consumers require a 10th grade reading level to comprehend any of them. Most notably, Fox News and NPR ranked at an 11th grade level, while outlets like MSNBC and Politico exceeded a 12th grade level. This is not an isolated issue. Both the government and media fail to meet Americans where they are in terms of knowledge and vocabulary on critical subjects, such as the Covid-19 pandemic or climate change.
In 2010, President Barack Obama signed the U.S. Plain Writing Act, requiring "federal agencies use clear government communication that the public can understand and use." While the intention was to ensure government institutions communicated with national literacy and comprehension rates in mind, the Covid-19 pandemic has illuminated that some issues cannot be merely legislated away. A fall 2020 analysis of federal and state websites related to Covid-19 failed to meet the standards for communicating with the public identified by leading institutions such as the American Medical Association and National Institute for Health.
These concerns can also be applied to how we talk about climate change. Climate change is a scientific concept at its core, which means it's spoken about in scientific terms. When vital information about climate change is being communicated to the public through words like "mitigation," "adaptation," "carbon neutra," or, even worse, "carbon negative," Americans are lost.
This was especially clear when a Twitter user recently pointed out that his milk boasted being "carbon positive" by 2045. Unsurprisingly, the replies were full of confusion and differing dictionaries of climate jargon. The general consensus was that Horizon Organic really meant "carbon negative," or that the company will capture more carbon than it emits, but didn't want negative language on its branding materials. Other users also mentioned that the terms "carbon negative" and "carbon positive" actually mean the same thing, which, of course, is problematic for the average citizen just trying to make sense of it all.
When the words we use to discuss one of the biggest problems of our life do more to confuse than inform, it's not a mystery as to why climate action has stalled for decades. From 3D data segmentation to workforce solutions and now climate action, I have spent the past five years creating accessible digital media on behalf of organizations. No matter the complexity or mundanity behind policy or scientific information, one thing remains the same — language that requires highly specialized knowledge is found everywhere, and it is intentionally alienating people.
To be clear, the goal is not to make every American an epidemiologist or climate scientist. Instead, communicators in the space need to be more deliberate with the language they use and its readability. At the pandemic's beginning, media outlets came under fire for hiding their Covid reporting behind a paywall. Similarly, if we as science and policy communicators do not work to deliver our information in a way that is accessible to the public, our words are also hidden away, just in plain sight.
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.