Two people discuss why Thanksgiving feels harder when families disagree sharply on politics. They point to specific divides: immigration policy, systemic racism, transgender medical care for minors, and Israel-Hamas equivalence. Unlike past bipartisan friendships like Reagan and Tip O'Neill's, these disagreements feel existential and unbridgeable.
It'll be very interesting for me to get reports from you on how your Thanksgiving went with relatives and/or friends with whom you differ. Because to differ today, you see, it's not like differences of the, let's say, more than 25 years ago. You know the old story, what is it, Ronald Reagan would go to have a drink with the Speaker of the House who was a Republican? Tip O'Neill. Tip O'Neill. It was well known.
Democrat. He was a Democrat.
He was a Democrat.
Yeah. I think you said Republican.
Oh, if I said Republican, I blew it. Yeah, he was a Democrat and Reagan was a Republican. The differences today are, to use one of the most preferred words of folks on the left, is existential. If you actually think that it is okay to open the borders, there's not much you have in common. If you think that America is systemically racist and that the primary problem of American blacks or black Americans is racism, white racism. I mean, that's— these are pretty unbridgeable gulfs. If you believe men give birth and children should have life-changing, body-changing hormone blockers at a prepubescent age and then be allowed to have their genitalia surgically changed or their breasts removed if they're girls, What exactly is the middle ground on that? If you think that Israel and Hamas are both committing genocide, that they're somehow moral equivalents, it's not going to be a very pleasant conversation. So it's, it's tough today. The differences are unbridgeable and enormous. So that's, uh, that is the story of what Thanksgiving might be or might not be.
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