How to Keep Politics From Colonizing Your Soul...

This holiday season, it is not your duty to educate Aunt Susan.​

We didn’t used to think of the holiday dinner table as a flashpoint for heated family disagreements about health care, abortion, and Donald Trump. But somewhere along the way, we began to…or maybe we were taught to. In 2022, the Biden White House released talking points for correcting your wayward relatives over the holidays. A decade earlier an ad with a young man clad in a plaid onesie who came to be known as “Pajama Boy” was part of a “Healthcare for the Holidays” campaign by Organizing for Action, which was intended to encourage young adults to leverage family gatherings to talk Obamacare with their relatives. The implicit message was this: someone’s humanity now hinges on whether they are on the correct side of the all-seeing eye of History. And, conveniently, that eye always looks out from the side you already occupy.

The holiday that once signaled the beginning of a season of gratitude now signals the time to air our grievances with all of the very wrong things those people across the table from you represent. After the 2024 election and right before holiday gatherings last year, Jimmy Kimmel’s wife, Molly McNearney, spoke on the ‘We Can Do Hard Things’ podcast about how she struggles to deal with her conservative family. “I’m in constant conflict. I’m angry all the time, which isn’t healthy at all,” she admitted. “When I see these terrible stories every day, I’m immediately mad at certain aunts, uncles, and cousins that put him in power. I wish I could deprogram myself in some way.” Sadly, she says she is now estranged from a number of relatives.

McNearney suggests her relatives have been deliberately misinformed even as she says they truly believe what they believe. Yet the broader truth is universal: in a highly polarized environment most everyone is usually adamant that it’s the other side that’s deceived, never themselves, making self-examination a perpetual challenge.

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