Editorial cartoonist Scott Stantis on politics at the Thanksgiving dinner table in 2024. | Scott Stantis/For the Chicago Tribune (Click on image to enlarge)
By THE EDITORIAL BOARD | Chicago Tribune
Vice President-elect JD Vance said a lot of things on the campaign trial, much of which understandably infuriated Democrats. Nonetheless, at one of his town halls during the election run-up, he said something that was not much noticed at the time but to which all Americans should pay attention.
“If you’re discarding a lifelong friendship because somebody votes for the other team, then you’ve made a terrible, terrible mistake and you should do something different,” Vance said. “I’ve got friends who like me personally … who aren’t necessarily going to vote for me. That doesn’t make them bad people. This is my important advice. Whether you vote for me, whether you vote for Donald Trump, whether you vote for Kamala Harris, don’t cast aside family members and lifelong friendships. Politics is not worth it. And if I think if we follow that principle, we will heal the divide in this country.”
With all due respect to Vance, and appreciation for one of the few gracious moments in the bitter electoral campaign, we don’t think it will be that simple. The rivalry between America’s two political parties has devolved from differences over economic principles or international policy into deep-seated oppositional stances — a consequence, perhaps, of the decline of religious faith that has acted historically as a restraining, rooting and unifying force, especially during holiday seasons.
Even now, some Democrats rail at the media “normalizing” or “platforming” Trump; his winning a small majority of the popular vote did not, in their minds, remotely change the validity of such lines of attack, even though the recent electoral results suggest that those shrill and demonizing arguments were singularly unsuccessful and merit retirement.
There is nothing wrong, of course, with preparing to be part of a determined, resourced and successful opposition to policies that many Americans oppose. Nothing whatsoever. And there is nothing wrong with articulating hope for the future Trump administration and supporting its successes. It’s coming, either way.
But the most immediate challenge that some Americans will face on Thursday is people around their Thanksgiving table from what Vance euphemistically called the “other team.”
One strategy is for the host to ban any and all political talk, to say that comments between bites of turkey will hereby be restricted to the weather, the endless construction on the expressways or sports, although that last named is not without its perils. That’s one way to go.
But we suspect that some of the more politically minded of the celebrants then will just fester in their own juices, even as they mop up those on their dinner plate. Better, we think, to impose rules around civility and empathy and the ability to finish a sentence rather than enforce political silence. That way, you might have real conversations.
Read on here.
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