You Are Not Required To Make Nice at Thanksgiving Dinner

Your obligation to MAGA-loving family members is only as big as the one they have towards you.

It has been an issue for eight years now. Eight long years of how to deal with politics at Thanksgiving because politics has grown increasingly toxic. The pundit classes in the media have told us, year after year, to either avoid politics or make nice with your MAGA relatives. Well, I’m not ready to make nice, and neither should you.

Being a sane, rational, progressive person in America has been a miserable experience in the Age of Trump. We’ve been bombarded with a culture that has rapidly grown coarser and less intelligent. Far too many friends, family, and coworkers have become unrecognizable, going down conspiracy rabbit holes, believing in things that would’ve gotten them committed in another age. Empathy and decency and tolerance are not virtues in this America, but cause for scorn. Believe that mass deportation of twenty million people without any regard to circumstances is bad? You snowflake, don’t you care about our border security? Think that we should treat all human beings with dignity and not discriminate against them for employment or civil rights because we don’t like how they look, or dress, or what gender they identify as? You liberal cuck, those child molesting, Satan worshipping perverts are destroying our society. You want men to play sports with little girls? Are you a pedophile too? Advocate for our government spending more on a social safety net and less on a world-destroying arsenal of weapons? You commie, you want China to dominate the world! You don’t love freedom. Why don’t you just leave?

This has been the tenor of “discussion” in this country the past eight years, fueled by a billionaire-bankrolled right-wing media apparatus that is constantly available, from YouTube to the diner down the road that makes a mean breakfast platter to the gym you go to lift weights at. It’s playing on multiple AM radio stations, on Sirius XM, a half-dozen cable TV channels, and is given equal treatment as serious “policy stances” by legacy media outlets that have been cowed into submission by decades of browbeating, threats, and gaslighting. This is what we’re told every year we have to be okay with, that we shouldn’t “let politics divide us,” even though politics is in many cases a conduit for showing what your moral values are. We’re told to be the better people once again, and be kind to those who regularly deride us—be a punching bag, basically.

I saw this shift happening a decade ago with my in-laws, many of whom started becoming more confrontational, more racist, more angry. They were reading Breitbart and watching InfoWars. They kept picking arguments with me out of the clear blue sky because I’ve always been outwardly progressive, and inventing things that didn’t happen, and creating grievance where none existed. When I responded, I was gaslit and told I started the fights. One of the worst offenders is married to a woman who has always been extremely sweet, and whose kids are adorable. Their eldest son was in our wedding party. As he got worse, and went further into the MAGAsphere, she apparently sank into the morass with him. In spring of last year, out of the blue, I received a very nasty email from her that brought up a ton of old arguments he’d started, blamed me for them, and in the same breath said how angry she was that I had blocked him on social media. “All he wanted to do was discuss things with you.”

Despite that awful email, and her subsequent refusal to speak with me or my wife about it, when they were in desperate financial trouble weeks later, we pitched in a substantial amount of help. I was that bigger person, again. I hoped it would mend the fence somehow. I was wrong. They still won’t talk to us. I can intellectually point to the causes of extremism and how people turn to it, but in my heart, I still don’t know how two good, decent cousins turned into monsters towards me because I did not join their descent into the black hole of MAGA hate.

In a way that the first two campaigns of Donald Trump had not, this year’s campaign was very directly, overtly, terrifyingly hateful. The repeated threats of violence being used to carry out the mass deportation program. The use of historically Nazi and KKK rhetoric in speeches—claiming immigrants are poisoning the bloodstream of America, that legal immigrants (black, from Haiti) were eating dogs and cats, that Venezuelans were running roughshod over Aurora, Colorado. The final rally at Madison Square Garden in New York City, echoes of the 1939 American Nazi gathering, where a racist set of jokes by a comedian got the media attention, but Stephen Miller’s direct use of lines from a 1920 KKK speech went ignored, was the cherry on top of this sundae of pure, unbridled hate.

The willful, active denial that Trump voters engaged in—denial of his criminality, denial of his attempted coup, denial of his hatred, denial of his very loudly stated plans—is so blatant that it cannot be excused or forgiven. We are not required to go to Thanksgiving or Christmas with these people. We are not required to ignore them when they say hateful, bigoted things. We are not required to check our morals at the door and stay silent.

It’s their turn to reach out. It’s their turn to be decent. It’s their turn to decide whether their MAGA beliefs are more important than their everyday relationships with family. Be as nice as you want to be, but remember that you are not obligated to do so.

Good luck, and Happy Thanksgiving.