re: #425 freetoken

Lear made Archie into the bigot that (old time) liberals used to believe about bigots - that bigotry stemmed from ignorance. Once the bigot learned, their bigotry would fade away, supposedly.

With Trump we have straight up superior race fascism. Trump is intentionally malicious - it’s his strategy for “winning”.

Archie was fictional, though based probably on people Lear and the writers knew. Archie was surrounded by family who did not think like he did, and throughout the course of the show’s run, they mellowed him out some. MAGAts don’t have that tempering influence, because everything they believe is constantly reinforced by the RW echo machine, which has convinced them that “libs” are empty-headed heathens not worth their time to listen to. Worse yet, we’ve got a President who is openly a racist, who encourages racist and violent behavior by his followers. Add the MAGAt tendency to be authoritarian and to blindly imitate whatever their chosen leader does. and we’ve got Archie Bunker on steroids.

I’m not sure Lear if he were alive today [EDITED: Sorry, Mr Lear!] could have written All in the Family set in the present day. (OK, technically he adapted it from the British version, but my point stands.)

As I recall, my dad, a staunch Republican and a conservative kinda guy (though not racist), loved All in the Family. It was a show we could watch and enjoy together.