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Politics
Symposium: Daniel Patrick Moynihan's America: The Legacies of a Professor-Politician
In a 2015 interview with the legendary television producer Norman Lear, comedian Larry Wilmore asked him if he felt responsible for having Archie Bunker running for president, alluding to the controversial candidacy of Donald Trump. During the election, Lear compared Trump to Archie several times. "He IS Archie Bunker," he proclaimed in 2016 calling the Republican nominee "the middle finger of the American right hand (McCaskill 2016)." But Lear is not the only one making the association; in fact, the comparison has become something of a cliché of the 2016 election. On the face of it, comparisons between the Republican nominee and the main character of the seventies sitcom All in the Family (CBS, 1971-1979) may seem odd. But the character Lear created to represent, and ridicule, a "rancid, lights-out conservatism," became a lasting political icon unlike any other sitcom character (Lear 2014, 248). This article traces the history of the political uses of, and reactions to, this icon.
Archie Bunker (played by Carroll O'Connor) was the blue-collar blowhard who together with his long-suffering and naïve wife Edith (Jean Stapleton), housed their newly- married daughter Gloria (Sally Struthers) and her husband Mike (Rob Reiner) as he gets his degree in sociology. The set up guaranteed much of the political humor as the reactionary and bigoted Archie clashed with the new liberalism of the younger generation. Indeed, the show presented political content in a way previously unseen in television entertainment. Within a year, the show became the most watched program on television, a spot it would hold for a record-breaking five years.
Due to the political nature and popularity of the show, the character of Archie Bunker soon became a powerful and contested political icon. Politically, Archie Bunker represented the urban, blue-collar whites who turned their back on the Democratic Party during the 1960s and 1970s, instead embracing the populist conservatism of George Wallace, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan.1But while the protests of his neighboring hardhats were dismissively labeled Canarsieism in the press, Archie was a beloved character in tens of millions of households (Rieder 1985, 2). Archie was, however, controversial. At...