I didn't watch many episodes of All In he Family, I didn't think it was funny and I think I'd noticed, even back then, that as Norman Lear and the writers and actors involved in the program were yucking it up over ignorant, blue-collar, schlub, Archie Bunker, that such people didn't interpret the program the way its liberal producers intended. Archie Bunker was considered heroic by a large part of the audience.
One of the ones I do remember had the high-lar-i-ous plot of Archie deciding to do his "equal time" (remember the Equal Time provision?) on TV to unintentionally expose his ignorance. When he first encountered the programming director of the station and started spouting to him, the director got on the phone and said something like, "I want you to come in here to hear something before it becomes extinct". As I recall, the studio audience yucked it up over the joke. Only, look at the 20-somethings who were marching with torches last weekend and the comment threads where their like abound. Archie's generation is dead, they're not today's American Nazis.
That joke encompassed the bet I talked about yesterday. The contemporary, quasi-official, real right way to be a liberal back then, including the deregulation of broadcasting (I think the plot was meant as satire of the Equal Time provision, too) free speech, free press absolutism, the smarmily pious declaration that "we must allow the Nazis their free speech lest our free speech right be taken away from us". But that bet, largely made by middle-class, aspiring to be upper class and rich white lawyers, TV and movie writers, journalists,.... was a bet that Nazis and fascists and white supremacists would never win.
The "free speech absolutist" bet only ever made any sense at all if the racists, petty and otherwise, became extinct, if the fascists and the Nazis would never win, if the white supremacists, the opponents of equality and democracy never got the upper hand in American politics, THAT IS THE BET THAT I SAID THAT SUCH LIBERALS LOST AND HAVE BEEN LOSING EVER SINCE THAT BET WAS MADE BY THE WARREN COURT AND THOSE WHO FAVORED THAT GAME. It wasn't a game of poker, it was more like a game of faro, notoriously prone to being rigged and gaffed by whoever was in control of the mechanisms of the game. And if there was something that was obvious at the time, it was that the most powerful media, broadcast TV and radio were there to do the bidding of the wealthy owners and the advertisers. It was a monumentally stupid bet for liberals of my young adulthood to have made, especially those who worked in the very media that they had every reason to know would gaff the game.
It didn't take long after 1964 when that bet was placed for it to become obvious what a terrible idea it was, as someone who worked hard to defeat Nixon in 1968, I saw the media obviously favoring him over Hubert Humphrey, I saw them even more obviously favoring Nixon over George McGovern in 1972, while All In The Family was just going into its second season. Nixon lost under a regulated media and the old libel laws in 1960, he won as the courts scrapped the later and were on their way to loosening the former. The joke was already out of date by the time it was made. And the stupidity of the idea is still the ruling ideology of liberals and pseudo-liberals, today, after we've seen how bad an idea it was for a half a century and counting.
It was a bet to allow the media to lie with impunity, a bet which has gotten steadily worse results, producing a country propagandized and corrupted by the free media into a place that even a Democratic president doesn't dare to govern to the left of where President Eisenhower did. And now it has gotten us a Trump.
Now that we have a president who has put Nazis in the White House, a white supremacist in charge of the Justice Department, who has been doing his best to normalize and defend NAZIS TERRORIZING AND KILLING AND MARCHING WITH TORCHES IN AN AMERICAN CITY IN 2017! it's time to admit that that bet was a stupid idea and that the bet that "they" would never win was wrong. Egalitarian democracy can't exist in a population in which an effective electoral majority believes lies such as the ones being sold in the media about Hillary Clinton and the other lies told about Donald Trump, it can't survive if an effective margin of voters are sold those lies and the history of the last half century proves that, with modern methods of salesmanship and propaganda, those lies can be sold and they can prevail and put people like Donald Trump, George W. Bush, Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon in power. They can put Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell in charge of the Congress, they can get the likes of Rehnquist and Roberts and their voter suppressing, gun nut favoring, neo-Jim Crow, federalist fascists in charge of the Supreme Court.
We got here through the power of the media to lie with impunity, through free speech absolutism and the deregulation of the mass media. If that isn't changed, if we don't bet on a different idea, egalitarian democracy in the United States is doomed if not already finished. That was an idea of mid-20th century, secular liberalism. Liberals need to make even more basic changes to their thinking, one that admits that half-century of mounting disaster.
Update: Well, I checked and, what do you know, there's a transcript of that episode online.
- Okay, so how do you propose to stop people killing people? That's easy.
- Bring back the death penalty.
- Excuse me.
- Go ahead.
- Susan, will you have Johnson step in here for a minute? There's something I want him to see before it's extinct.
Reading it, it's even more clueless about the subsequent history of the next forty-five years than I'd remembered when I wrote this post.
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