America's real first family

I’m listening to Matt Groening, creator of America’s best-known fictional family, tell me that he thinks the Simpsons are probably Republicans, and I feel a twinge of real-life distress. “They’re pretty politically apathetic,” says Groening, “but they do go to church and they do pray, and I get the feeling that if they voted, they would probably vote for the, uh…for the wrong candidate.” He pauses before reiterating, “If they voted.”

Everyone wants the Simpsons to be on their side, because after 18 years The Simpsons remains TV’s most perceptive reflection of the American psyche. Producer and writer Al Jean says that many viewers think the Simpsons are them—a rough depiction of their own families. Groening likens watching The Simpsons to taking a peek at what’s going on “back home,” that place you fled years ago.

So hearing that Marge and Homer probably vote Republican naturally inspires dismay. It feels like a Gallup poll confirming the country’s drift into creepy conservativism. The worldview of this cartoon family somehow seems like an accurate barometer of America’s disposition: As go the Simpsons, so goes the nation.

Funny thing about that is, when they first appeared on television 20 years ago, this yellow-skinned, mildly dysfunctional nuclear family—seemingly lacking in luxury tastes or ideology—probably leaned Democratic: somewhat politically uninformed just like most of the electorate, voting for Clinton because he seemed like a good guy, more concerned about stability and budgets than divisive social issues that didn’t affect their lives. Today, post-9/11, you can see Marge sitting solidly in the “security mom” demo and dim-witted Homer easily manipulated by the specter of an illegal immigrant stealing his button-pushing job at the power plant.

Of course, there’s a difference between the Simpsons, the family, and The Simpsons, the program. The program has always embraced nonconformity, from its initial debut as a 30-second short on the iconoclastic Tracey Ullman Show in 1987, and later, as a half-hour animated sitcom on the fledgling Fox network in ’89. It’s hard to recall now, but social conservatives were initially enraged by The Simpsons—in that comical, television-obsessed way that conservatives were in the early ’90s, when they railed against Beavis and Butt-Head’s poor high-school attendance records and Murphy Brown’s fatherless baby. They felt that the show glamorized family maladies, that Bart encouraged insubordinate tendencies in children. Conservative school boards nationwide banned the "Underachiever and proud of it, man!" T-shirt. Former president George H.W. Bush explicitly encouraged families to be more like the Waltons and less like the Simpsons.

Despite the outcry, most of the country was flocking to Springfield, and the show’s instant popularity shielded its creators from feeling the political backlash. “I think Barbara Bush spoke out during the show’s fifth season about [The Simpsons as] the idea of what’s wrong with society,” remembers founding producer James L. Brooks. “I so didn’t take it seriously that I was later on a receiving line and she was there, and I made a joke about it to her. She just looked at me stonily.”

Unlike Barbara, most viewers recognized that whether they liked it or not, The Simpsons was telling the truth. Life hadn’t been like The Waltons for decades, if ever. Middle-class kids were underachieving. Their teachers were cynical and detached, their parents lazy and prone to hysteria. And Springfield itself, with its incongruous mix of “undesirable” minorities, polluted waterways, and soulless Kwik-E-Mart stores, looked like a real modern-day suburb, an American dream in decline.