The Moral Heart of The Simpsons

The Atlantic

a day ago

In 1992, The Simpsons was one of the most beloved sitcoms on television. Critics adored it; the ratings were climbing higher and higher; the show had entered what fans would eventually come to regard as its funniest period, roughly Seasons 3 through 8.
But the animated series still scared some adults. There had never been a boy on network TV as openly irreverent as Bart Simpson, who said 'hell' and 'damn' and talked back to his teacher. Mere months after the show debuted, in December 1989, schools across the United States started banning a T-shirt declaring, 'Bart Simpson 'Underachiever': And Proud of It, Man!' James Dobson, the founder of the evangelical organization Focus on the Family, weighed in on that particular piece of merch, writing that it made the 'pervasive problem of underachievement' even worse.
As quaint as Bart's antics might seem now, he and The Simpsons as a whole represented youth in revolt. The moral panic was misplaced, but not unusual—part of a long national tradition of culture wars waged under the pretense of politics.
But what critics of the prime-time cartoon either fundamentally misunderstood (or conveniently overlooked) was its core truths. Bart loved his parents. He went to church with them. The Simpsons sometimes struggled to make ends meet, and they didn't always get along, but they stuck together. They were a typical middle-American family—and, despite Bart's rude language, not the symbol of societal rot that culture-war targets are often imagined to be.
There are numerous early-season examples of the family's underlying integrity. Marge's bowling instructor, Jacques, woos her, but she resists and dramatically reconciles with Homer, whom she'd been arguing with. Homer decides to steal cable, but eventually stops when Lisa, the show's voice of reason, convinces him it's wrong. Lisa exposes a corrupt congressman at the expense of personal glory. Homer gives up religion only to realize that his faith is important to him. Sure, there's a scene in the series premiere in which Bart gets a real tattoo—but the story ends sweetly, with the family adopting a greyhound track reject named Santa's Little Helper.
'Look, this show's good,' the Simpsons writer Jeff Martin once told me. 'It's essentially moral. It's for everybody.'
In its early days, The Simpsons was everywhere: on TV, on merch, on magazine covers (back when that still moved the needle), in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. The show's ubiquity is likely what put it on the radar of George H. W. Bush's administration. In May 1990, a news story mentioned that the White House's drug czar, William Bennett, had noticed a Bart Simpson poster at a rehabilitation center. 'That's not going to help you any,' Bennett reportedly said to the residents. (He later claimed that he was kidding.) In a People interview later that year, first lady Barbara Bush called The Simpsons 'the dumbest thing I've ever seen.'
In the first case, the show's producers responded with a snarky statement: 'If our drug czar thinks he can sit down and talk with a cartoon character, he must be on something.' In the second, they decided to take a kill-'em-with-kindness approach, sending the first lady a letter written in the voice of Marge, who politely defended her family. 'Ma'am, if we're the dumbest thing you ever saw,' Marge wrote, 'Washington must be a good deal different than what they teach me at the current events group at the church.' Barbara Bush sent an apologetic reply: 'Clearly,' she wrote, 'you are setting a good example for the rest of the country.'
At that point, the Bush-Bart beef was dead. Then, early in his reelection campaign, the president brought it back to life. On January 27, 1992, he spoke at the National Religious Broadcasters convention. His speech wasn't terribly memorable, except for one section. 'The next value I speak of must be forever cast in stone,' Bush said. 'I speak of decency, the moral courage to say what is right and condemn what is wrong. And we need a nation closer to The Waltons than The Simpsons —an America that rejects the incivility, the tide of incivility, and the tide of intolerance.'
The Waltons was a Great Depression–set drama about a good-natured blue-collar Virginia family that aired on CBS for most of the 1970s. The smash-hit show was a temporary antidote to the tumult of the time, and Bush's speechwriter Curt Smith was a big fan. He thought that The Waltons embodied a kind of propriety that appealed to Middle America. To him, The Simpsons did not. When I interviewed him in 2022, Smith told me he felt that the sarcastic animated series looked down on the heartland. 'You had two cultures at war in this country. And I say that sadly,' he said. ' The Waltons with red America and The Simpsons with blue America.'
To play up that divide, Smith added the Waltons/Simpsons comparison into Bush's address. According to Smith, his boss approved. As soon as the president said the line, it became a sound bite, which satisfied Smith. 'I felt deeply that the line was germane,' he told me. 'I thought it was true. And it would help us politically.'
He turned out to be wrong about that last part. Bush's broadside pushed the creators of The Simpsons to fire back by tacking on a scene to the opening of that week's episode, a rerun. The family is gathered around the TV, which is playing footage of the president's insult. As soon as it's over, Bart perks up and says, 'Hey, we're just like the Waltons. We're praying for an end to the Depression, too.' The mainstream media also pointed out the irony of the president waxing poetic about an old TV show that took place during a terrible economy. 'Yes, ma and pa,' the syndicated columnist Ellen Goodman wrote on January 31, 1992, 'George-boy is leading us back through the haze of nostalgia to those wonderful yesteryears of the 1930s.'
It was an example of how out of touch the sexagenarian incumbent was in the eyes of many voters—at least compared with his opponent, a saxophone-playing Baby Boomer. As Bush's campaign progressed, he doubled down, bringing back the Waltons/Simpsons line for his arrival speech at the Republican National Convention. In the end, Bill Clinton won fairly easily in '92—with the help of the independent Ross Perot, who yanked some votes away from Bush—taking chunks of Middle America with him.
It would be a stretch to say that Bush's decision to poke at The Simpsons cost him a second term. But it did demonstrate how silly politicians can look when they try to use pop culture to score easy points with their base. People in the heartland watched the show, too—partly because the Simpsons had the same issues as millions of Americans. The second-season premiere of the show, for example, focuses on Bart's academic troubles. The anxiety he and his parents have over whether he might have to repeat the fourth grade feels real. ''Bart Gets an F' is not only funny, it's touching,' the Washington Post critic Tom Shales wrote in his review. 'You really find yourself rooting for this bratty little drawing.'
When it came to family life, The Simpsons certainly felt realistic. There are episodes centering on Lisa's feeling unseen and unappreciated by her parents and turning to a substitute teacher for guidance, the stress caused by the cost of Homer's looming triple-bypass surgery, Marge's breaking down when the pressure of motherhood becomes too much to bear. But every week, they all manage to work through their problems and regroup. That basic blueprint helped The Simpsons become an institution. The show was at its core wholesome, even if the president at the time didn't acknowledge as much.
It wasn't the first time, and wouldn't be the last time, a politician who claimed that a pop-culture icon was threatening American values left out key information about his target. Just last month, after Bruce Springsteen criticized him onstage in England, President Donald Trump responded by going after the musician on social media. 'I see that Highly Overrated Bruce Springsteen goes to a Foreign Country to speak badly about President of the United States,' he posted on Truth Social. 'Never liked him, never liked his music, or his Radical Left Politics and, importantly, he's not a talented guy.'
Springsteen has never made his music just for the 'radical' or the 'left'; he's piled up millions of fans by speaking directly about the everyday anxieties of small-town life. His music has reflected America, in other words. And even in the face of threats made by the president, the rock star hasn't backed down. He included his remarks against Trump as an intro on his new live EP, Land of Hope & Dreams —the kind of burn that The Simpsons might have come up with. Back then, it wasn't just defiance that made the counterattack so effective—the show understood itself better than the president did.