Sitcoms: A Defense

When walking to an American Political Science Association (APSA) panel in 2022, I remarked to a colleague that the subject of discussion was “liberalism in crisis.” Their response was “when isn’t it?” Although it was said in a joking voice as we traversed the conference center halls, the sentiment identified something true. This was not the first time such a panel appeared at this conference, nor would it be the last.   

The precarious state of liberalism today is at once unprecedented and yet deeply familiar to historians of political thought. The European age of revolutions, from the mid-eighteenth to mid-nineteenth centuries, presented a time when values like human freedom and equality were getting a public hearing, and were in need of defense. The twentieth century saw the rise of totalitarianism and the worst excesses of cruelty. Democratic backsliding today suggests that individuals would rather support authoritarian governments than defend political rights for those with whom they disagree. It makes a person want to hide away at home and watch sitcoms.

One might do worse.

Liberalism, of course, is more than just a set of principles, or formal, institutional, or legal rules. It is a habit of character, and it requires cultivating an orientation toward those values which form the basis of liberal institutions. From this perspective, liberalism can be understood as a practice. It is not enough that we merely believe in the principles of freedom, fairness, and equality—we have to enact them in our personal lives. Rather than being merely an abstract theory, liberalism as an ideology informs who we are as members of a political community—indeed, the survival of liberal institutions requires that at least some of us adopt and adhere to this outlook. 

One way to cultivate these values is through an engagement with works of popular culture. Even sitcoms—or so I hope to convince you. I take popular culture to be a set of cultural artifacts that are known and understood by a significant group of a culture’s individuals. What even shows like The Brady Bunch and Bewitched can offer that John Rawls or NPR on their own cannot is a creative and affective way to engage with political questions and concerns, on terms that are immediately understood by the general public, but without the risks and emotional hardship that so often accompany serious discussions of current events. They also ground our reflections in the ordinary lives of individuals. As Judith Shklar reminds readers in considering Orwell’s 1984, the novel’s themes “are surely matters that have always been important to political theory, and by recapturing them imaginatively, we may avert theory’s worst fault: that is, to talk in a vacuum and about nothing at all, to heap words upon words that have no bearing on anything or anyone who has ever lived and spoken in the actual world.” 

By taking their audiences out of themselves, these works can more effectively ground them in the real world. Even if all that we want from them is an escape, they still reflect on the tangible concerns, thoughts, and feelings, which, by virtue of merely being a human, one can relate to and understand. This expands our capacity to relate to others. For any art to be popular, it has to appeal to aspects of life that are already shared. It can then produce and reproduce a shared discursive sphere of references that enable us to engage with political problems from a safe ground, one where we can walk away and disconnect at any time.

A Brief and Selective History of Pop-Culture Liberalism

The relationship between liberal values and popular culture isn’t new; it’s an essential feature of the history of the liberal tradition. This link has been especially pronounced in satirical writings, which offer a way to playfully but seriously criticize politics. Baron de Montesquieu, the acclaimed Enlightenment author best known for his philosophical treatise The Spirit of the Laws, in fact began his career as a popular novelist. In his Persian Letters, Usbek and Rica find themselves immersed in Paris’s distinctive cultural and political milieu. Their status as outsiders lets them critically view and assess the customs and traditions of the country, and they are not impressed. Reflecting on Parisian coffee shops, Usbek muses: “But what shocks me about these wits is that they give no service to their country, but fritter away their talents on childish things.” When viewed through their eyes, these “wits,” or the self-professed intellectual elite, are wasting their time with vapid conversations rather than actually contributing to society. Through his vivid descriptions, Montesquieu transports readers into the beautiful, lush, and ultimately shallow state that he takes Parisian intellectual culture to be. 

At first, French authorities banned The Persian Letters, proving its success in not only poking fun at the French, but more seriously in exposing the flaws of the French state under Louis XIV. Montesquieu had touched on a sensitive topic. The fictional nature of the work allowed Montesquieu an avenue in which to explore his ideological commitments in a different conceptual space; the value of such a space is that it can connect with readers on an emotional level. The ways in which laws, customs, and mores are intrinsic to the public sphere, and serve as the foundation of a political community (a foundation deeper than and essential to its formal rules), are found in the biting portrayals of the Parisian salons just as much as in the formal diagnosis of the French situation in The Spirit of the Laws. Although the form of writing and the nature of appeal differ, the principles are the same. One scholar observes this continuity directly, and notes of Montesquieu that “the principles, the forms, and the assumptions remained the same in his mind from the beginning to the end of his life.” 

The tradition of satirical novels continued into the twentieth century, perhaps best exemplified by texts like George Orwell’s admittedly bleak 1984. Here, government surveillance appears in its most extreme form. Every neighbor is a potential agent of the Party, watching and observing one another’s actions. “Thoughtcrime”  is a serious offense, and individuals are forced to convince themselves of a false version of the truth or risk state punishment. Readers of The Persian Letters and 1984 encounter imaginative environments where a healthy skepticism government is not only well-founded but appropriate. Although these forms are fictional, their function is not. There is an ideology, as well as a moral, to the story. 

But it is not only within novels that liberal principles have been put forward and explored. The literary critic Paul Cantor, writing about the popularity of television shows in the twentieth century, discusses how The Simpsons serves to simultaneously mock fundamental American institutions whilst recognizing their importance; The X-Files’s depiction of the government as secretive and worthy of suspicion raises awareness of what the state fails to disclose; and Star Trek portrays the end of history, the universality of liberal values, and a profound appreciation for humanism. Children’s films also capture these ideals, with Monsters, Inc. providing another instance where there is a glorification of the liberal consensus, with the film’s happy ending being achieved when “individual ingenuity advanced energy production, increased profits, and adhered to an ethical code of conduct.”

Alexandre Lefebvre has continued in Cantor’s tradition of writing about liberal values within popular culture, with his recent book Liberalism as a Way of Life. In it, he notes how Parks and Recreation’s Leslie Knope is “the most vibrant, relevant, relatable, and just generally awesome—representative of the spirit of early liberalism.” The principles at the heart of Parks and Recreation are “the need to keep public land, resources, and institutions free,” a political value harkening to the seventeenth century and liberal author John Locke. Or consider The Good Place, where Lefebvre finds a meditation on how liberals, and indeed all people, ought to focus on the way we treat one another, rather than the comprehensive, conflicting, and incommensurable beliefs that we hold. By setting things aside, we create the opportunity to bond with individuals we otherwise might never have spoken to. Consider, for instance, the close relationship that forms between Jacksonville Jaguars fan and petty criminal Jason, and the wealthy, excessive, party-planning Tahani. Of particular importance here is that Lefebvre uses these examples to advance his idea of what it means to be a liberal; their function lies in their capacity to tap into these values and explore them in a novel way. 

How Popular Culture Functions

Popular culture draws on a background imaginative capacity, one that the members of a community can find intuitive and use as a vehicle for making sense of liberal values and principles. Popular culture can simultaneously create and reinforce our identity as individuals, reflecting on our values and principles, and can orient us outward, toward other members of a political community. Watching films or television shows can provide a resource for personal inspiration, delivering a value that matters to us in an entirely different context that we would not or could not typically experience directly. In this way, even sitcoms are akin to a thousand small philosophical thought experiments. They encourage viewers to discuss scenarios in ways that we might like philosophers to do, but they’re without the analytic jargon that typically accompanies such discussions. They bring ordinary people to talk to one another about imagined but accessible scenarios—most of which rather crucially focus on other ordinary people.

The historian Benedict Anderson has argued that artifacts like the novel are an essential mechanism for nation-building. These works provide a way to conceive of oneself as part of the “imagined community” of strangers—the co-nationals whom we cannot possibly meet, but with whom we share a common identity. The Simpsons was the quintessential American television show precisely because there is a character for every individual to sympathize with and relate to—even if they are cast in an absurd and hyperbolic form. City dwellers and small-town folk alike are familiar with staples like the local bar and convenience store, and the inept city hall that fails to finish municipal projects. Popular culture thus deepens our collective and individual self-understanding, provides a medium for connecting with others, and extends our capacity to recognize similarities with a broader group of individuals.  

But it is not enough to show that there exist liberal forms of popular culture, or that pop culture and liberalism are compatible. Any ideology will have popular works and genres that are especially its own—conservatives, for example, are particularly fond of spy novels. Nor is it enough to discuss the value that popular culture has in general for a political community. What is the distinct value of popular culture for liberal viewers? One illustrative example, foreshadowed in the introduction, is the way that these works facilitate an appreciation for diversity, essential to the liberal belief in pluralism. Sitcoms provide a helpful illustration of this point, in the way they engage our sense of humor, remind us to laugh at ourselves, and provide new perspectives for us to think about. 

Consider for instance popular sitcoms from the 60s, like The Brady Bunch and Bewitched, both of which pushed against traditional conceptions of the family. The Brady family came together at a time when both divorce and remarriage were socially and legally stigmatized in the United States. It was the nuclear family, of one wife and one husband married eternally, that was deemed the ideal form, toward which all of humanity was aspiring. The idea of kids from different parental backgrounds, coming together and forming a new family, might have been a strange thought to the American viewer. This is what the Brady bunch is, though—a blended family that redefines and questions what society thought at the time. The stereotypical struggles of the siblings, and the other difficulties that both parents and children have, these are the common and identifiable elements that relate the show to a broader audience who is able to see the constitutive elements of family life in the Bradys’ dynamics. The new styles of family formation then arising pushed against older norms, and as they did, popular art, like sitcoms, encouraged social acceptance across differences.     

Bewitched particularly challenged and took to task the traditional role of the housewife. Samantha, raised by witches, never learned the required etiquette for the home life that she and Darrin set out to pursue in their marriage. She cannot cook or clean, and she is terrible at charming Darrin’s boss. She has none of the traits that a proper wife at the time ought to have. In fact, she actively resists those traits, with her strong sense of independence and a willingness to speak frankly and openly. Yet the show does not tell a narrative of how she learned her proper place in the world; rather, it tells how the world changes around her. Darrin is frustrated and irritated at times, but the episodes end consistently on a note of two people coming together and accepting one another. He does not force her to change, nor does she want to. Rather, their home is a different kind of home from the others they know. This again pushes against an established idealized version of society, to offer a different narrative about what it is possible for individuals to be. 

Judith Shklar reminds us that it is not enough to note the fact of pluralism; we must celebrate it. Watching sitcoms is one way of doing so. They can broaden our horizons and challenge the way that we think about the world. Exposure to new ideas fosters a sense of epistemic humility, reminding us of how little we know about the lives of others. The familiarity of sitcoms additionally provides a resource for bonding and relating to others. Although we may not know much, there are things we all share in common. If the people matter, so does what they are watching. We should therefore not relinquish our pop culture references for discourse about endless news cycles or constant and intractable philosophical debates about the meaning of freedom. Being a liberal in practice requires living a life in the real world with others, and this, in turn, involves taking time to watch sitcoms.