I may have written about this before, but it’s worth bringing up again because we are approaching the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays, a time of year that should bring families and friends together, not tear them apart.
Inevitably, when these holidays roll around, we get a generous helping of articles discussing the wisdom (or lack thereof) of bringing up politics at the dinner table in families where people sitting on opposite sides of the political aisle from one another.
Based on what I can recall of those pieces, the consensus on the left has typically been to bring up political differences over the holiday meal, even if it makes some at the table uncomfortable or resentful. Conservative writers, on the other hand, seem to share the mindset that it’s best not to bring up politics on these occasions.
If you’re in a family that traditionally has been able to discuss politics without it devolving into a shouting match or an escalating game of one-upmanship, then maybe it’s not a bad idea.
But if you’re in a family where the opinions on each side are particularly strong and each side is prone to dig in, get more animated and maybe a little louder as the debate goes on, then it’s probably not a good idea to broach certain topics, especially considering there are sharp objects at the table, like forks and the carving knife.
It’s been my experience over the years that family members and friends who have political disagreements with each other do well, as a general rule, at keeping the politicking to a minimum, choosing instead to focus on what they have in common, especially in situations where the differences in opinion are particularly pronounced.
Relatedly, these differences shouldn’t keep family and friends from being there for each other when need be.
Unfortunately for some families, that doesn’t seem to be possible.
Last week, late-night talk show host Jimmy Kimmel and his wife, Molly McNearney, did a podcast interview where McNearney revealed that disagreements in her extended family over Donald Trump over the years had caused her to distance themselves from some of them.
McNearney, who is also the co-head writer for Kimmel’s show and its executive producer, shared that she grew up in a conservative household where it was automatic that they vote for Republicans. But once she grew up and moved away from home, she got a different perspective and started trying to talk her family out of voting for Trump.
“I’ve sent many emails to my family, like right before the election, saying, ‘I’m begging you. Here’s the 10 reasons not to vote for this guy. Please don’t.’ And I either got ignored by 90% of them or got truly insane responses from a few,” she explained.
“It hurts me so much because of the personal relationships I now have, where my husband is out there fighting this man,” she noted. “Them voting for Trump is them not voting for my husband and me and our family. And I unfortunately have kind of lost relationships with people in my family because of it.”
Reading between the lines, it sounds like McNearney was the aggressive one who couldn’t let things go when family members chose not to take her advice, which she admits has left her “angry all the time,” believing it is her relatives and not her who have been “deliberately misinformed.”
To each their own, but if McNearney truly is “angry” at anyone, it should be at herself over her inability to understand that good and decent people, especially family members, can have differences in political opinions and still love, respect, care for and be there for each other at the end of the day.
North Carolina native Stacey Matthews has also written under the pseudonym Sister Toldjah and is a media analyst and regular contributor to RedState and Legal Insurrection.
