Roseanne Barr’s second act began because she represented the real working-class Donald Trump voter; it ended because it got too real.
So tweeted MSNBC’s Chris Hayes after Barr’s rebooted TV show was canceled following her own unhinged, racist tweet. (Twitter is simply how one communicates in President Trump’s America.)
Roseanne’s problem turned out to be that she far too authentically represented the actual worldview of a significant chunk of the Trump base.
— Chris Hayes (@chrislhayes) May 30, 2018
Barr was given to bizarre conspiracy theorizing and angry rants long before Trump became an important political figure. She was likely fortunate social media did not exist during the first run of her show, limiting our exposure to her incendiary views.
In fact, Barr’s political trajectory took her from running against President Barack Obama from the Left on a ticket with antiwar activist Cindy Sheehan in 2012 to Trump supporter in just four years. Voters who journeyed from Obama to Trump were more important in 2016 than those who migrated from the left-wing Peace and Freedom Party to the GOP.
Barr’s ideological incoherence didn’t stop people from arguing that if “Roseanne” was a sympathetic portrayal of blue-collar Trump country, the actress’ real-life tweets laid bare the truth: These Americans are, if not deplorable, racist, angry, and more than a little crazy.
This is not just a popular view on the Left. The anti-Trump conservatives who have been most radically alienated from the broader conservative movement have come to the conclusion that a lot of Republican base voters are simply not very nice or rational.
Contrast this approach with that taken by a show others have suggested deserves a Trump-era reboot: “All in the Family.” Archie Bunker, the patriarch of that groundbreaking 1970s sitcom, was undeniably a bigot. He was nevertheless an intelligently written, layered character, often crass and buffoonish but not a Nazi cartoon character.
The show was produced by Norman Lear and starred Rob Reiner, both of whom became liberal activists. It was written by smart liberals. To my knowledge, not a single regular cast member was a conservative.
Still, Bunker was presented as a product of his time. He could be ignorant and misguided, but he was not evil. He was basically well-meaning, loved his family, and gradually evolved over the course of the show into someone who grappled with some of his prejudices. He even occasionally got to be right in an episode where his liberal son-in-law — Reiner’s Michael Stivic, or “Meathead,” often the target of the show’s barbs himself — is wrong.
It’s this last part that makes “All in the Family” unthinkable today. The nuanced and humane way Bunker was written would be even more problematic to the woke than the problematic Roseanne Conner. Many fans agreed with and rooted for Bunker instead of viewing him as the heel. Samantha Bee-style ridicule provides more clarity.
The show was also flawed in that it did not consistently present a non-bigoted conservatism or Republicanism, although that is certainly something that would still be acceptable in 2018.
Except the Republicans of that era got recent George Wallace voters to cast their ballots for President Richard Nixon, even as he desegregated Southern schools, and President Ronald Reagan as he signed into law a 25-year extension of the Voting Rights Act. Advanced liberals thought Nixon and Reagan were little different from Wallace and that their talk about crime and welfare were inherently racist — that’s why they lost to them in 49-state landslides.
And that, in a common refrain of our times, is how they got Trump: the casual dismissal of millions Americans of goodwill as racists and fools, sometimes voiced in tones as hateful as those used by racists themselves. But there has also undeniably been an upsurge in Roseanne-style conspiratorial thinking in some corners of the Right, as well as a tribalism that can lead to obliviousness to racism — such as defenses of Barr’s Valerie Jarrett comments — at best and trafficking in racism at worst.
As was the case with Barr, social media has exposed an ugliness and emboldened those who would manifest it in real life.
It is understandable why liberals would prefer to see these sentiments crushed and suppressed rather than explained and understood. But the liberals who gave us Archie Bunker presided over the marginalization of racism in American life, while today’s are at least coinciding with a resurgence of it.
Some introspection about that fact might not be such a meatheaded thing.
