"All In the Family" premiered
in 1971, right in the middle of the George Wallace
phenomenon.
The reason that Lear was so upset
with working class white people in 1971 was because
liberals had completely tamed the Republican Party,
but they were terrified of Governor George Wallace
of Alabama. Wallace got ten million votes for president
in the 1968 election, and he very nearly took the
Democratic nomination for president in 1972.
The year after "All In the Family"
premiered in 1971, Wallace won the MICHIGAN Democratic
presidential primary with a solid majority. He was
far ahead, and leading in the Maryland primary.
If he had not been shot, there would have been no
left wing McGovern candidacy in 1972.
Republicans were happy in 1971 because
the military was enormous and Nixon was defending
the interests of business, and those are the only
two things Republicans really care about. Working
people's kids were being bused and ethnic neighborhoods
were being broken up, but that didn't matter any
more to Republicans than it did to Norman Lear.
The only people who were upset at
liberal policy were Southerners and Northern ethnics.
Lear had always hated white Southerners, but a Northern
white person who deserted the liberal Democrats
was even more Evil in media eyes. The Archie Bunkers
had been obedient little leftists under union supervision,
but now that the unions were betraying them, they
were leaving the Democrats and going to Wallace.
And their names were not like "Archie
Bunker."
I met hundreds of them, and they were
Sullivans and Kowalskis and everything else that
was white but not Anglo-Saxon. They actually represented
diversity. Lear had to rewrite that, so he had Archie
hating Poles and Italians and all the other groups
he actually represented. No liberal can ever allow
reality to intrude too much.
For example, Archie as always hating
"pollacks."
A man represented as a Polish-American
leader was talking to him and spoke of "We
Polish people."
In 1968, I lived in a campaign headquarters
in the Polish steelworker section of Chicago. Almost
everybody voted for Wallace. Not once in all those
months did I hear a single person there refer to
himself as a "Polish person." They were
Pollacks and proud of it.
No, they did not tremble at the idea
that someone was calling them "Micks"
or "Wops" or "Pollacks." What
they were afraid of were things like this:
1) that soon there would be hardened
minority quotas in hiring that would exclude white
working people from jobs,
2) that, as a matter of public policy,
the government would enforce the breakup of white
ethnic communities,
3) that busing white working people's
children into ghettoes would become routine nationwide
and no one would seriously object but the parents.
4) they knew a lot more was coming,
but they couldn't have guessed, as one example,
that anyone who objected to giving welfare benefits
to known illegal aliens would be portrayed as anaziwhowantstokillsixmillionjews
by the media in the future.
In fact, the only people who really
saw the future in 1971 were those who were fans
of Archie Bunker.
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