Like most Americans, I can’t remember a Thanksgiving without a political argument. It’s a family ritual—after a substantial meal, some pie and an hour and a half to digest, the usual combatants enter the kitchen to begin. Then the rest of my family, the spectators, trickle in, waiting for the debate to start.
We start with small talk: “What a great meal!” “What recipe did you use?” And then comes the catalyst, always a deceptively innocent comment.
“Have you seen the news recently?”
The conversation lasts long into the night—hours and hours of buzzwords, anecdotes, statistics and all manner of arguments flying around the room. By the end of the night, we reach a fragile truce and fall asleep in our chairs. Come morning, the whole thing is forgotten– the turkey has made us all amnesiacs.
That’s the beauty of Thanksgiving debates. No one’s feelings are hurt, no one has a new grudge to hold; we simply expressed our thoughts to each other. Sure, there were disagreements, but we’re family, and we love each other enough to know that just because we disagree doesn’t mean we cannot get along.
Recently, I saw a statistic from a University of Munich study. It analyzed political quotes over the past 10 years and found something that all of us should find unnerving. Since 2016, the use of “conflict-based language”- words like “fight,” “war,” and “battle”- has skyrocketed in its use by politicians, reaching its highest point in American history in 2024. These are our own representatives, advertising themselves as warriors rather than leaders.
But who is there to battle against? Our fellow Americans? The people who live and work beside us every day?
Today’s politicians often paint their opponents as “others.” Republicans call Democrats the “enemies of America”, while Democrats call their opponents “fascists” driven by fear and ignorance. The results of this sort of dialogue come as no surprise–there were 51 incidents of political violence in the last year alone, the largest sustained surge since the ‘70s.
This is not how our country’s founders intended our society to function. They intended for an America built on compromise, an America capable of overcoming its differences. If they wished for anything different, we would not be living in the republic we do today. Sure, there has been and always will be controversy and toxicity, but these should not be such insurmountable problems that real people with children and families have to die. As a country, we have a problem.
And I think the best cure for that problem is to treat politics the way we do at home: like a good old-fashioned Thanksgiving dinner.
Because, in a way, America is just one big family, and our politics is one big never-ending post- Thanksgiving debate. There is no “other” group of people in our country–we’re all Americans, and we’re all part of the same huge chaotic clan we call the United States. And as such, we should treat each other like we’re family. We still can disagree with one another, but instead of treating the person we disagree with as an enemy, maybe we should try to understand their perspective instead.
This idea of seeing one another beneath all the different ideologies is such a powerful one, especially in the world we live in. It may seem naive to say, ‘why can’t we all just get along?,’ But really, why can’t we? Again, our country was founded on the idea that people are able to agree to disagree. In exchange for the privilege we get in being able to say what we please, we the people in exchange tolerate those who choose to exercise that right. The writers of the Constitution expected that of us when they enshrined our right to free speech.
I know that this essay might come off as preachy. “Why should I care about the other side if they don’t even try to understand me?” you may ask. But when we enter into political arguments, the point is not to argue for the sake of arguing but to create a resolution. Without any sort of common ground, or any attempt to find it, then inherently any argument is pointless. The choice here is not between winning and giving in– it is literally between logic and absurdity.
The road to a better, more tolerant America does not start with a grand political crusade but rather in the hearts of every citizen. That doesn’t mean we all have to give up our beliefs–we just need to recognize the fact that the people we oppose are also human beings, and they have a reason behind what they are saying. Seek to understand rather than beat, to tolerate rather than destroy, and to forgive rather than hate. If we can’t do that, are we even Americans?
