In keeping with that nerdiness, I started doing research to see who else has written about the show, and one of the pieces, "The American Family on Television: From Molly Goldberg to Bill Cosby" from the Journal of Comparative Family Studies includes this passage:
In Family Ties, one of the few shows in which politics was even
mentioned, political preference is much like having an occupation.
The characters, especially Alex, talk about politics but hardly ever
participate in the political process. Characters do not battle for
social change.
Muriel G. Cantor does overlook the season one episode where the parents, Steven and Elyse, go to jail for protesting nuclear weapons, but I concede that there's a lack of engagement in subsequent episodes.
There is some engagement: Elyse leads a group fighting a re-zoning law at the end of season one, and in season two Alex pretends to support the Equal Rights Amendment in order to get a girl to like him and goes to jail in the process, but in season five when Steven has the opportunity to be part of the revival of a political magazine named Scavenger that he and a friend started at UC Berkeley, he finds that he's no longer radical enough for his old friend Matt.
There are fascinating details that emerge in this episode. For one, Steven expresses an aversion to being arrested, stating that "getting arrested is way down on my list now. Right below being shipwrecked." He does have a young child at home and more bills to pay - with two children in college and one in preschool - none of which he had in season one when he and Elyse were arrested, but it's still a telling shift. He's thinking ahead to the election in 1988 and which Democrats might run, an interest and investment in the two-party-dominated U.S. political system that his friend disdains; Matt is far more interested in anarchy.
Scavenger seems like a misnomer for their venture; a scavenger feasts on the dead, but Matt and the other contributors clearly think that the two-party system is still in need of killing. One of them criticizes Steven in a meeting by saying, "you're suggesting that people actually go out and vote for one of the two prevailing political parties…the only vote that counts is a vote against the system." But Steven wants to be neither a vulture nor a hawk - not only in the political sense of being to the right, but also not in the general sense of wanting to hunt, to be an activist. He's in all ways a dove.
Does this turn away from the Scavenger represent an actual shift in values for the character or the show, or a continuation? After all, we know from earlier episodes that Steven voted for McGovern in 1972, so the guy who wrote "The Two-Party System: Tweedledum and Tweedledee" for the original iteration of the Scavenger hasn't been around for awhile. While it may be a continuation that the character himself is only just now noticing, it does seem like a shift for the show, signaling that we won't have any repeat prison performances, or if we do, they'll be a joke, like Alex's, not a sincere extension of ideals. Steven may still voice his concern for nuclear disarmament and hang an old Ban the Bomb sign above the fireplace to welcome Matt, but it looks like Steven won't be going to jail for this cause, or any other, again.
There's a moment when it seems like the character and the show itself may be aware of this: when Steven asks Elyse if he's changed, she replies, "I think your social conscience has held up pretty well," and he laughs shortly and says, "Right. And the tax credit from Amnesty International proves it." Writing a check is different from other kinds of activism, the show observes. But then Elyse continues:
You do make a statement, Steven. You make a statement by the way
you live your life, by the way you raise your children, by choosing
a job that doesn't compromise your principles. Those are political
acts, as strong as anything you ever did back at Berkeley.
Here we see a character endorsing an argument that politics can be lived primarily through the family. It's not quite a disavowal of the public sphere, but it does argue that raising kids and going to work are enough, and in that regard it seems to join other works that seek to placate the idealistic young people of the '60s who have become the comfortably middle class parents of the '80s. It's OK, the show says through the character of Elyse. You're still a good person.
And in case that message wasn't clear enough or the messenger was suspect for being a fellow member of that generation, after Elyse leaves the room, Alex walks in to reassure his father as well. "Listen, Dad," Alex begins. "Over the years, you and I have searched for some common political ground. We searched…and searched…and searched" (studio audience laughs). "And even though we haven't agreed on anything yet, I really respect your ideals, you know? And the fact that you respect mine. You set a good example." The child absolves the parent.
To be fair, raising children to be respectful, independent thinkers is no small thing; nor is having a job that reflects your values. There's also a point here to how people can change, how different we can be at 40 from 20, and research from Pew shows that many older adults are more conservative than they used to be. But it's impossible not to feel like the show is withdrawing politically at this point in the series, the protesting and getting arrested of 1982 replaced with the benign Reagan jokes of 1986. I'll write more about this is in a later post; in the meantime, I leave you with this great poster and some relevant Ohio ERA history...because I'm guessing if you've read this far, you're a nerd, too:
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| He cares about the First Amendment, but, sadly, not this one. |
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