It’s quite likely Donald Trump got many of his values, and was influenced heavily by Archie Bunker. If Trump wasn’t, many of his supporters absolutely were. It was a simpler time in the 1970’s.
New York was full of men and women descended from German, Irish, Italian, Polish, Greek and Jewish immigrants who were civil servants, union members and similar. They were “middle class” only in so much as they were neither working class, nor formerly slaves.
Archie Bunker soon became the countries favorite TV character whe he appeared on TV in 1970. He is by todays standards, a man from another era. Watching episodes of All in the Family now, it’s easy to see that even back then the liberal media laughing at Archie, making fun of his customs and behavior. Archie was at heart though a democrat. Satire only really works, if it’s based on real life.
Archie and his generation had grown tired of the 1960’s liberal experiment and they blamed it for tearing apart “their” America. It was where the disenchantment about the welfare system came from and how welfare had become permanently associated with the African American, and exploded out of control.
The problem was, welfare never did anything to address the problems of ghetto life, racism, and endemic poverty. The white middle and working class saw the increasing lack of personal control of what happened to them.
You can trace many of the values held by Trump and his supporters back to this time, and Archie Bunker is their poster boy. Peter Hamill wrote in his April 1969 feature in the New York Magazine “The Revolt of the White Middle Class” .
The working-class white man is actually in revolt against taxes, joyless work, the double standards and short memories of professional politicians, hypocrisy and what he considers the debasement of the American dream.
If the stereotyped black man is becoming the working-class white man’s enemy, the eventual enemy might be the democratic process itself. Any politician who leaves that white man out of the political equation, does so at very large risk. The next round of race riots might not be between people and property, but between people and people. And that could be the end of us.
And that is, as much as anything, how we arrived where we are today. As an Englishman, I never really understood the use of term “middle class” in America, it seemed so at odds with the British middle class. Hamill put that in context, but Bunker represents the values, and thinking that has developed in the rancorous mob we see today, and that includes whatever Trump and Cruz think are “values”.