Politics & Power Quote by Norman Lear

Norman Lear’s compliment lands with a backhanded edge, the kind you can only deliver if you’ve spent a lifetime translating America to itself in prime time. “May not be the best-educated” nods to a familiar coastal sneer and then pivots: the punchline is faith. Lear isn’t defending ignorance; he’s reframing the measure of intelligence away from credentials and toward moral instinct, the gut-level decency he banked on when he put race, religion, sexism, and class conflict into living rooms that supposedly “weren’t ready.”

The intent is strategic. Lear was a producer, not a lecturer; his job was to keep audiences watching long enough for the discomfort to do its work. Calling people “wise at heart” flatters, but it also recruits. It tells viewers: you don’t need the right vocabulary to recognize hypocrisy, cruelty, or injustice when you see it. That’s an invitation to trust your own reactions against the official story.

The subtext is also a defense of mass culture. Lear’s whole career argues that sitcoms can be civic technology: a place where working-class families argue, revise themselves, and absorb change without being talked down to. The line pushes back against a popular narrative that democracy is failing because voters are too unschooled. Lear suggests the deeper problem is elites mistaking education for wisdom, then acting shocked when people resent the condescension.

Context matters: Lear came up in an era when TV was both a national hearth and a national battleground. This quote keeps his trademark optimism, but it’s an optimism sharpened by knowing how easily “uneducated” becomes a pretext for writing people off.