I'll guess mockery of white Conservatives.
Norman Lear (Executive Producer) and Carroll O'Connor (Archie Bunker) were hard line Socialists in real life.
Archie Bunker, the character, was supposed to be a typical middle class Conservative.
Not so much middle class, but a skewering of White blue-collar types (Archie, after all, worked at a loading dock to begin with before moving up to being a bar & grill owner at the end of the series). I did think it odd Archie was supposed to be playing White Protestant of British heritage when it was pretty clear he looked like an ethnic Irish Catholic (which, of course, CO’C was).
My grandfather loved the character, though he was a generation older than Archie (born in 1897 while Archie/O’Connor was born in 1924). He was an ethnic Scot immigrant Protestant who lived both in Brooklyn and Queens, not very far from where the Bunkers were supposed to live.