Archie Bunker’s Place
A good guy with bad ideas is infinitely preferable to a bad guy with good ideas.

By Michael Long, a director of the White House Writers Group
June 23-24, 2001

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n the early 1970s, it was not an uncommon sight to see a bumper sticker or button that read "Archie Bunker for President." This, one can be sure, was not the sort of public acclaim that political activist and Hollywood producer Norman Lear had in mind for this particular member of the "Greatest Generation." Archie Bunker was supposed to be the model for the fellow on his way out the cultural door, the bumbling suburban dinosaur, one of the last pillars standing stupidly before the wrecking ball of 1960s enlightenment.

Instead, Archie Bunker became a hero; the everyman who showed that prejudice is most often habit and not hatred. Instead of the resilient foil off whom the Left would bounce lessons about the way we ought to change our thinking RIGHT THIS VERY MINUTE, Archie became the embodiment of how men can be wrong and not evil, kind and not correct, lovable and not always loving. And in this, the character — perhaps inadvertently — illustrated clearly for the first time that the youth rebellion of the 1960s had made a terrible mistake in demonizing those who would oppose it: because the opposition wasn't a demon, it was simply the lifetime habits of the otherwise decent fellow next door.

The show seems brittle now, and not as funny as it was back then — today's humor is almost exclusively ironic and self-aware, and not purely situational. But it provided an accurate (if archetypal) portrayal of the conflicts of the day. (And it must be said that in its day, it was terribly funny, which was the point, after all.) Archie Bunker held some destructive but common beliefs. Yet he didn't cling to them out of intellectual fidelity or, heaven forbid, out of hate. It was all he knew; it was how he was raised.

And that was Archie's salvation: People could see themselves in him. Viewers saw played out what they knew instinctually — that we often hold mistaken beliefs not out of malice but simply because that's just the way human beings are. Most of what we believe comes to us honestly and without much consideration — through parents and through exposure to life itself. The Arab world is mostly Moslem and the U.S. mostly Christian not because of the outcome of an intellectual debate over religion in a billion individual homes. We come to our most sacred, core beliefs most often because of what we see around us. If we had to examine and defend every aspect of our interior lives, we wouldn't have time for anything beyond conversations better suited to dorm rooms, among college sophomores with heads full of Schlitz.

And the fact that so much of our behavior depends on what comes to us without explicit consideration is the strongest argument one can muster for the priority of character over just about any other human quality you can name.

Archie Bunker showed that a person with bad ideas — in this case, bigotry — could also be human, three-dimensional, and fundamentally decent. Archie was a neighbor, Archie was dad, Archie was the viewer himself. People saw in Archie Bunker someone who shared their own confusion at the way the world was changing, and who refused to change his beliefs simply because it seemed to be in fashion to now think something else. He was a perfect demonstration of the political fact that logic is rarely the best tool for changing someone's opinion — and the perfect demonstration of why the rule among authors of fiction is that people with difficult, even destructive ideas, most often see themselves as good.

Archie wasn't bad, he was just wrong — but people latched on primarily as fans of his character instead of as judges of his ignorance. His success was a victory for conservatives, but not in the ugly way the Left would have the world believe. Archie Bunker demonstrated a victory of the fundamentally conservative idea that character is more important than ideology. In the end, people most want a good person, not a person who does good things.

May Carroll O'Connor rest in peace; he passed away Thursday at the age of 76. Though he was a private man, he seemed to conduct himself as a good and kind person; he suffered unimaginable loss with the drug-driven suicide of his son; and he seemed to share a greater respect for the opinions of others than did his louder friends on the Hollywood left. Maybe he was kind that way because he had played on TV for more than a decade a misunderstood and maligned man who, at heart, was good.

Or maybe he was just brought up to be that way.