CLII. Archie Bunker and The Wrong Enemy

"The cheapest sort of pride is national pride; for if a man is proud of his own nation, it argues that he has no qualities of his own of which he can be proud; otherwise he would not have recourse to those which he shares with so many millions of his fellowmen."

Arthur Schopenhauer, 1851

Editor's Note: For the four issues left before the midterms, I’m going to offer some thoughts on different aspects of how we got here.

I watched a couple of episodes of All in the Family recently. I remember it being funny when I was a kid, but it wasn’t necessarily at the top of my must-see TV. It was more on my parents’ level of a show, in the style of humor and the types of issues it wasn’t afraid to tackle. I didn’t really appreciate or understand it then as much as I do now. It was so far ahead of its time that the merit of what the show accomplished has been forgotten. It really understood the American experience and reflected it back to viewers.

In an episode I recently viewed, there is a scene where Archie and Edith are in a bus station waiting to go out of town. They are the two older Americans sitting on a bench while everyone around them is diverse and different in age and look, with all kinds of issues that are typically hidden away. Everything is foreign to them. Edith is oblivious, but for Archie, it is everything he hates in life. He doesn’t have his own chair, his own space. There are more non-white people around and up close. Nothing works the way he believes it is supposed to, and people are showing affection and individuality in public.

This scenario was probably around 1973, and watching it, I realized Norman Lear was an incredible visionary. He took everything the country was saying in their homes about the President, the Vietnam War, being gay, sex before marriage, or racism, and he put it on the screen. People laughed at the discomfort. They saw some things familiar and heard some things that probably made them cringe, but the show did more to move us toward accepting one another than most of us will ever credit. It refused to let people sleepwalk through their lives when America had problems to address.

I didn’t understand at the time how Lear built Archie to be the joke, the warning about ourselves. Half a century later, it is the Archie Bunkers of the U.S. who gave a free pass to our predicament today. But before we dismiss them, we ought to think about where their actual anger comes from.

In those days, there was a culture of mutual obligation. You did your job without complaint. Everyone pulled their weight. The government stayed out of your way, and you trusted it to do right by you. I think that worked for a time, until it didn’t.

Opportunities for lifetime employment slowed down. Some plants even left with the approval of the government. Wages stopped climbing. Healthcare became a tradable commodity, not a right. Vietnam and Nixon damaged the government's reputation. The rules of mutual obligation broke, and poor Archie and millions like him were left holding the bag. He was not wrong to be angry, to have a bone to pick, but he was wrong about whom to be angry at.

Lear perceived this and created Mike, the son-in-law and rep of the younger generation, as a regular character to be the instigator. It was these interactions between “Meathead” and Archie that really did a lot of the education masked as comedy.

Watch an episode. If you understand what makes Archie Bunker tick, then you will see a mindset that can be both a committed American and prone to the use of scapegoats, whether immigrants, cross-dressers, or commies.

Scapegoating is the current flavor in charge. It keeps frightened people looking sideways for the culprit instead of up. Up is where the disposable worker, the denied patient, and inequality came from. The company Archie believed in was never going to save Archie alone. The enemy was never Edith's son-in-law or the black neighbors or the gay friend.

It was always structural.

Human beings built this arrangement. Human beings can take it apart. Nothing about it is natural or permanent or ordained. We made it, so we can change it, and no one else is going to. That was Lear’s brilliance and it is still true today.

Keep your eye on the economics. It’s a hard lesson to learn, but that’s where the answers always are.

Wear It Loud: I Survived the '26 Midterms

Election Day is coming whether we are ready or not, and some of us are going to need proof we made it through. This is the shirt for the people who stayed informed, stayed angry in the productive way, and showed up anyway. Wear it to the polls, wear it to the watch party, wear it the morning after no matter how it goes.

The Treasury scrapped the plan to put Harriet Tubman on the twenty It’s shortsighted and racist. Tubman was everything the word American is supposed to mean; courage, skill, and the willingness to risk life for other people's freedom. Don’t even try to explain this one.

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Native Americans serve at five times the national rate, the highest of any group in the country and in every war since the Revolution, which ought to end any lecture about who the real Americans are.

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Sometimes the sharpest civics lesson of the week is not an op-ed. It is a clip somebody posted to Reddit. This is the real America. Strong and diverse.

Trump's wind-energy war and the jobs it's killing

Once the blinders fall off, the public loss from these years is going to be staggering. Washington has spent around 2.6 billion dollars NOT to build wind power, paying companies to abandon turbines already rising out of the Atlantic. This Guardian piece counts the cost in men, not just money. Hundreds of tradesmen, union electricians and ironworkers, told to drop their tools three-quarters of the way through a job that was working. Drive across Europe and you will see turbines on every ridgeline. Even China is way ahead of us.

How China is already living in an EV future

The wind story is the setup for this one. This is “the enemy” and how China represents a country already living in a future we keep postponing. Electric cars that would be luxury items anywhere else are standard issue there. Charging is not a scavenger hunt, it is routine infrastructure like water and roads. Two decades ago, Beijing decided it wanted to own this industry. No reversal with a new administration. No stupid wars on the last guy's policy. Meanwhile I would like to buy an electric car and cannot get hardly any Made in America and affordable.

Margaret Hamilton

Director of software engineering, MIT Instrumentation Lab, Apollo program (1936 to 2026)

Look at this small but mighty woman. Margaret Hamilton died on September 30 at 90, and the Times obituary ran this week. She joined the MIT lab building Apollo's flight software in 1965 as its first woman programmer, and by 1968 she was leading the command module team inside an effort of more than 400 people.

Then came July 1969. With the lunar module minutes from the surface, the computer started throwing alarms because it was being asked to do too much. Her team had built software that knew what mattered. It restarted, shed the unimportant tasks, and guided the astronauts to a safe landing. Houston trusted it and let the landing go ahead.

My favorite part is she wanted a safeguard against an astronaut running the wrong program in flight, and was told astronauts do not make that mistake. On Apollo 8, Jim Lovell made exactly that mistake, and her changes went in. She also pushed until software engineering was treated as real engineering. Obama gave her the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2016.

Schopenhauer called national pride the cheapest kind. This is the other kind of pride: years of careful, unglamorous work that got people to the moon and home again.

Know a public servant who deserves this space? Reply to this email and tell me about them. The clerk, the inspector, the caseworker. Especially the ones nobody thanks.

Marc J. Yacht

Too much trouble sleeping
A lot of time weeping
Sleep too little
Feeling so brittle.

A need for more motion
Maybe there's a potion
To stir my get up and go
What it takes I hardly know.

One day at a time
Ah, to feel in my prime
Stop my body from achin'
And my hands from shaken.

So much I've seen
Lots of places I've been
Finally got smart
But soon I'll depart.

No one to blame
Surely life's but a game
A roll of the dice
Whatever the price.

I am an optimist and a pretty happy guy, but it does not keep me from being aware of the reality around us. Pick up a book this week, an old one if you can. Read about how Americans have been protesting for change forever, and be ready to do it.

Always strive to be a good human.