Yesterday I saw a fascinating video clip. A young Generation Z woman was shown an episode of All in the Family, the 1970s sitcom built around the deliberate clash between an older, blunt, working-class worldview and the emerging progressivism of the time. Her reaction was not amusement, discomfort, or even distaste. She was appalled. Not by the writing or the acting, but by the existence of Archie Bunker himself. She insisted his attitudes were unacceptable, dangerous, and that he should have been punished, in fact, imprisoned, for his thoughts.
I would religiously watch a show that is just a group of Gen Z kids watching All In The Family. Just mic them up and set up a few cameras and press play 😎 pic.twitter.com/RmtoF55roV
— CCP IS ASSHOE (@CCPISASSH0E) January 17, 2026
That reaction is striking because All in the Family is not morally ambiguous. Archie is not the hero. He is a foil. And yet Carroll O’Connor’s portrayal makes him unmistakably human: stubborn, flawed, often wrong, but also loyal, affectionate, and at times genuinely charming. The comedy depends on moral contrast without denying human complexity.
What was revealing was not that a young viewer disliked Archie. That is understandable, though kind of sad. What was revealing was the absence of interpretation altogether. There was no recognition of satire, no sense that a character might exist to be examined rather than endorsed, no allowance for moral tension or narrative distance. The response bypassed understanding and went straight to judgment, and from judgment to punishment.
The same loss of interpretive charity now shapes how we read our own moral history, at least for most people younger than Generation X.
Shortly before seeing that clip, I wrote an essay arguing that Martin Luther King Jr., judged by the standards and definitions dominant today on the modern progressive left, aligns more closely with conservatives than with contemporary progressivism. The response from liberals on X was not a substantive disagreement. There were a few counterarguments. Instead, there was confusion, derision, and dismissal, as if the claim itself were incoherent.
One response from a professional Martin Luther King, Jr. researcher particularly stood out. He knew the material, but he read King through a Marxist framework King himself did not use, treating moral language as a function of power and class rather than universal moral law.
King relied on load-bearing moral words — justice, violence, harm, law, peace, conscience. He did not stop to define them at length because he assumed a shared moral grammar beneath them. He was speaking a language shared by white Americans and black Americans alike.
Those words were culturally dense. Over time, new definitions and refinements accumulate and enrich, creating allusions and mood that enhance verbal meaning. But when new meanings are pasted onto old ones in ways that negate their original function, the result is not evolution but cancellation. The word remains. The moral work it once did does not.
Nowhere is this clearer than in the phrase civil disobedience.
Civil Disobedience, Properly Understood
Few phrases in American political life are invoked more casually or understood more poorly than civil disobedience. King did not coin the term, but he gave it its clearest moral articulation. That articulation depends on the meaning of both words, separately and together.
Civil did not mean polite or passive. It meant oriented toward the civil order, the shared moral and legal framework that makes a society possible. King’s appeals to natural law, Christian ethics, and the Constitution were foundational, not decorative. Civil action was pro-social even when disruptive. It sought reform, not nullification.
Disobedience was not refusal for its own sake. It was deliberate lawbreaking undertaken openly and conscientiously, and it carried a personal cost. It demanded responsibility and accountability of the person engaging in it.
“One who breaks an unjust law must do so openly, lovingly, and with a willingness to accept the penalty.”
Letter from Birmingham Jail, April 16, 1963
That willingness was the point. Accepting punishment demonstrated respect for the law as such while exposing the injustice of a particular law. The suffering of the protester was meant to awaken conscience, not overwhelm institutions. You can see this all over the world today when people quietly, peacefully disobey oppressive governments.
Taken together, civil disobedience was a tightly constrained moral act. It worked because it was persuasive rather than coercive. It relied on shared language and shared standards. It assumed that truth, plainly spoken and visibly borne, could still move a society.
That assumption no longer holds.
Today, enforcement itself is routinely described as violence. Punishment is framed as persecution. Immunity is demanded rather than refused. Institutions are treated as illegitimate by default, unless they are institutions endorsed by the protester. Legitimacy is no longer principled; it is selective. Responsibility is no longer accepted, though the claims of "oppressive government" are still stated as a rationale. The critical elements of civil disobedience, in fact, are neatly inverted. And justice is no longer blind; it depends on whether the speaker is aligned with the person being punished.
A recent exchange on X illustrated this starkly. A poster argued that neither Ashli Babbitt nor Renee Good deserved to die in their respective clashes with federal authority. That moral symmetry was rejected outright. The progressive he was debating insisted that Babbitt’s killing was justified, while Good’s was not. The dividing line was not restraint, proportionality, or the sanctity of life. It was alignment. One institution and one cause were condemned; the other excused.
When “civil” no longer refers to a shared moral order, and “disobedience” no longer includes the acceptance of consequence, civil disobedience becomes a slogan rather than a discipline. It pressures. It does not persuade. And it is not in any way righteous.
Civil disobedience, as King practiced it, was designed precisely to confront unjust laws, using personal dignity to shame authority into behaving justly. That is what happened during the civil rights era. But it worked only because language was still shared, law was still taken seriously, and conscience was still assumed to exist on the other side.
Where We Are Now
The deeper problem is not simply that King is misunderstood. It is that shared moral language itself has fractured. We still use the same load-bearing words — justice, violence, harm, safety, compassion, civil disobedience — but they no longer point to the same realities. In many cases, they point in opposite directions depending on whether you are progressive or conservative.
One side hears “violence” and understands physical force. The other uses the same word to describe disagreement, dissent, or lawful enforcement — and the word retains all the moral weight, urgency, and emotional charge the word violence originally carried in spite of the obviously much less weighty new meaning. The definition shifts, but the implications do not. What was once descriptive becomes accusatory. What was once reserved for physical harm is redeployed to shut down argument.
This is why conversations collapse before they begin. Satire becomes endorsement. Enforcement becomes violence. Persuasion becomes harm. Each side believes the other is acting in bad faith, when in fact they are often speaking different moral languages while assuming they share one.
A society can survive deep disagreement. It cannot survive the loss of shared meaning. When language fractures, persuasion gives way to power, not because people choose it, but because they have no other tool left. You cannot reason someone out of a position if the words you are using no longer refer to the same things.
King operated in a moral environment where language was still shared enough for conscience to be reached. Civil disobedience worked because persuasion was still possible. If that possibility is disappearing now, the lesson is not that King failed or that his method is obsolete.
The lesson is that something more basic has been lost.
And until we recover a common tongue, no amount of quoting King will bridge the gap between us.
Editor’s Note: PJ Media is here to help you understand what's going on with our language and why we keep talking past one another. Help us continue fighting the culture wars. Join PJ Media VIP and use the promo code FIGHT to get 60% off your VIP membership!
Join the conversation as a VIP Member