From Archie Bunker to Donald Trump
Plus, Georgia on the post-Soviet periphery
I started watching All in the Family. All nine seasons from 1971 are streaming on Amazon Prime Video. It’s still hilarious and feels surprisingly relevant. Archie Bunker – the racist and sexist blowhard who incessantly argues with his wife, daughter, and son-in-law – serves as a caricature of what some liberals may now imagine to be a typical Trump voter. Archie was preposterously ignorant, uninformed, and sincerely patriotic. He was shamelessly open about his ideas in ways that most people nowadays would be afraid to broadcast – or so it seemed before the Age of Trump.
All in the Family was supposed to be satire. Arguably the most influential sitcom in TV history, it was produced and written by the legendary Norman Lear with the purpose of making the audience think about the weightiest issues of the day: religious intolerance, civil rights, gender roles, Vietnam, pollution, etc., etc.
If Archie Bunker personified the wrong ideas and attitudes, Lear expected the millions of Americans watching All in the Family to see the light. Just read the disclaimer that appeared on TV screens before the opening credits: “The program you are about to see is called ‘All in the Family.’ It seeks to throw a humorous spotlight on frailties, prejudices, and concerns. By making them a source of laughter we hope to show — in mature fashion — just how absurd they are.”
The religious left
Was Norman Lear a religious figure? A religious leader? I’d never thought of him this way until reading historian Louis Benjamin Rolsky’s concise, fascinating study The Rise and Fall of the Religious Left: Politics, Television, and Popular Culture in the 1970s and Beyond. Rolsky was my guest on Friday’s episode of History As It Happens.
Lear’s liberal advocacy group People for the American Way, established in 1981, wasn’t interested in theological debates. Its purpose was to defend the separation of church and state, and promote diversity, learning, and civility – although Lear’s enemies in the Moral Majority would not buy this description. Jerry Falwell once named People for the American Way among the myriad evil secularists who provoked his god’s punishment in the form of the terrorist attacks on 9/11/2001. Naturally, fellow Bible-thumping charlatan Pat Robertson agreed with Falwell.
Was Lear guilty of condescension? Was Lear being “neutral” when depicting the Nixon-loving, god-fearing Archie Bunker as an ignorant buffoon while the liberal son-in-law Mike Stivic was educated and enlightened? Are liberals now repeating this mistake? Rolsky is among some online (Twitter) liberal historians who vent frustration with how people on the left discuss and study the right – in dismissive, condescending, or simply inaccurate renderings.
“Not only religion but in ideas of politics, of progress, of culture. Liberals can make the most compelling television about politics, but doing politics in the actual real world has been a tremendous challenge. It’s ironic… we have this wellspring and reservoir of vision, public life, and civic imagination [in pop culture]. But it falls flat” once it reaches politics, Rolsky said.
“We have to think a bit more broadly,” Rolsky continued. “Typically we assume the religious right to be this monolithic Christian entity that’s imagined into this catastrophic force in the public square… A lot of that is constructed. So Norman Lear is someone I wanted to focus on,” because of his social influence.
Since All in the Family’s heyday, the political terrain has shifted in ways Lear may have seen coming. Evangelical voters helped send Jimmy Carter, a deeply religious man, to the White House. In 1980, five million evangelicals switched to Ronald Reagan.
Among the subjects Louis Benjamin Rolsky and I discuss are: network television as the battlefield for 1970s culture wars; who determines the public interest; early influences on Norman Lear; how the Moral Majority fought back against Lear’s “pornography” and “anti-family” programming; and the invisibility of the religious left today.
Georgia on the post-Soviet periphery
Georgia’s quest for nationhood since emerging as an independent state in 1991 rarely makes headlines in the mainstream U.S. press. It is a small country of fewer than 4 million people tucked underneath Russia on the eastern coast of the Black Sea. It fought an unsuccessful five-day-long war in 2008 to wrest the breakaway regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia from Russia, whose soldiers continue to occupy both areas in defiance of the international community.
Like Ukraine, Georgia has turned from a seemingly insignificant country in Washington’s eyes into a geopolitical front line. In a superb essay for Jacobin, historian Bryan Gigantino explains why this country on the post-Soviet periphery now finds itself uncomfortably squeezed between “the West” (Washington and the EU) and Moscow.
Gigantino, who is based in Tbilisi, was my guest on Tuesday’s episode of History As It Happens. He discussed the fascinating role of anti-Soviet memory politics in crafting a national independence narrative by successive Georgian governments. Today, the ruling Georgian Dream party is dealing with thousands of protesters outraged by its decision to suspend EU accession talks until 2028.
“Anti-Soviet memory politics came back to Georgia when the Soviet Union collapsed. In a sense, it had been kept incubated by the Georgian emigres during the Cold War, this anti-Soviet idea of Georgia divorced from the national consolidation and development of the Soviet period... In 2003, after the Rose Revolution, Mikheil Saakashvili’s government tried to rebrand Georgia as a historically European state, eternally struggling for freedom against Russo-Soviet occupation because the Sovietization of Georgia was done by Georgian Bolsheviks with the help of the Red Army in 1921 after a small period of pseudo-independence,” said Gigantino, who cohosts the Reimagining Soviet Georgia podcast.
He continued: “The narratives about ‘Soviet occupation’ became part of the state-led national narrative under Saakashvili. You saw things like the banning of Communist symbols, the creation of the Museum of Soviet Occupation, an attempt to reorganize the Stalin Museum in Gori, and the destruction of Soviet monuments. Part of this has to do with the fact that the Russian Federation would instrumentalize Soviet history – cherrypick Soviet history – for its own geopolitical ends. And in 2008 when Georgia and Russia fought a war over Abkhazia and South Ossetia, it reanimated and reinvigorated the anti-Soviet memory politics as a metaphor for Georgia’s national opposition to the Russian Federation, saying it is occupying us just like the Soviets did in 1921. And it wasn’t simply a metaphor for the Russian Federation. There was also an ideological commitment to undermining socialism and Marxism in service of this period called the ‘end of history,’ the historical victory of liberal democracy and capitalism over the socialist bloc, and this was naturalized into a state ideology in the Saakashvili era.”
“When Georgian Dream comes to power, they don’t question that state ideology. The only difference is they don’t want to have as aggressive a posture toward the Russian Federation without sacrificing sovereignty. So Georgian Dream reduces the amount of anti-Soviet memory politics as a core feature of statecraft, but they did not reject it,” said Gigantino, who questions the notion that the current government is tilting toward Russia by passing controversial laws and suspending the EU talks. Rather, in his view, Georgia Dream is practicing “strategic patience” to avoid antagonizing its powerful neighbor with whom it shares important economic ties.
What’s next?
Coming up on Tuesday’s episode – on Christmas Eve – historian Terri Blom Crocker will talk about the Christmas truces on the Western Front in 1914. By this point, the First World War in the West was bogged down in trench warfare – a stalemate that would not be broken until 1918. Crocker is the author of The Christmas Truce: Myth, Memory, and the First World War.
Next Friday, I will speak to Maria Lipman, a Russian émigré who left her Moscow home in 2022 after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. She now works at the Institute for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies at George Washington University where she is the editor of Russia.Post.
We will discuss life in the USSR (Lipman was born near the end of the Stalin era), the hopes raised by Gorbachev, and the terrible realities brought on by his failed reforms and the collapse of the USSR on Christmas Day 1991.
The 1990s traumatized Russia. By the decade’s end, few were celebrating the ‘end of history.’ Cold War triumphalism found a more welcoming home in the U.S.
Did you ever see the British sitcom on which it was based, “Till Death Do Us Part”? In Britain the satire was definitely missed by many, with the main character, Alf Garnet, being very popular.