Frazier is an assistant professor at the Crump College of Law at St. Thomas University. He previously clerked for the Montana Supreme Court.
Patience is a virtue. It’s a simple refrain I learned well in Mrs. Campbell’s class — rather than read the instructions on a pop quiz, I rushed to start answering the questions. Turns out I missed three bonus points for simply writing my name on the back of the page rather than the front. Speed, though, has become the dominant social, political and economic norm.
We need our food delivered in minutes — you can even pay to have your UberEats order prioritized over others. We need real-time updates on our social media feeds — news and nonsense from friends and foes alike, full of instantaneous “hot takes” rather than reasoned analysis. We demand our politicians deliver progress on our ideological aims now — candidates jockey to be viewed as the one most likely to succeed on short-term policy goals and partisan preferences. And, we expect and encourage companies to compete to be the “first mover” instead of the “steady and responsible actor.”
It’s time to slow things down. We need to resist our urge to act with haste. So here are a few suggestions for how we can exercise more patience — and, by doing so, save some lives, improve our politics and enhance our discourse.
First, let’s lower the speed limit just about everywhere and let’s enhance the use of automated ways to ticket those who prioritize their speed over the safety of others. It’s not rocket science that fewer bad things can happen when cars move slower — but don’t take my word for it. Instead, consider that officials in Edmonton, Canada, saw a 50 percent drop in fatal and injurious crashes following a 6 mph drop in the speed limit. These benefits can come at relatively low cost, too. The European Union mandated the use of intelligent speed assistance systems in all new cars to increase driver awareness of excessive speeds and to ease enforcement. We can and should do the same in the United States.
Next, let’s consider granting our elected officials a single, longer term. Imagine if senators only served a single, eight-year term. Do you think they might reevaluate how they spend their time in office? I sure do. Rather than waste a third or half of their day calling donors, they could spend more time talking with their colleagues about substantive reforms. And, in place of prioritizing bills they know will please their “base,” they can more thoroughly consider legislation that may not score political points but will nevertheless further the public interest.
Finally, let’s turn to social media. This may be the most obvious place where our addiction to speed has caused poor social outcomes. Speaking from unfortunate personal experience, I know that it can feel impossible to pull away from the drama and debates that endlessly populated my apps. And you may be able to relate to my temptation to post hot takes just to see how folks respond. Those urges are understandable because that’s what the apps are built to do. We can and should advocate for more responsible platform design. The Prosocial Design Network, a community of behavioral science and design experts, has a menu of proven strategies that platforms can incorporate to make their respective feeds more aligned with quality deliberation – ideally platforms would voluntarily adopt these straightforward approaches for a better social media experience.
Realizing a slower society won’t be easy. The steps mentioned above, though, can help create space for safer streets, a more responsive democracy and a more deliberative social media ecosystem. Here’s to moving slowly and thinking about things.
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.