This Year, Give Thanks for the Kindness of Strangers

Sometime over the past decade, American writers discovered a new and exciting way to mark the start of the holiday season: by penning roughly 72,000 variations of the “How to talk about politics with your relatives over the dinner table” essay in the week before Thanksgiving. (I will modestly submit that my entry from last year is one of the most accurate, if not the most kind, contributions to this still-developing genre.)

Our ancestors, of course, did not need these annual talking-points memos, pop-psychology monographs, and ego-building pep talks in order to sit down for a meal together. Many polite families banned politics at the table. And those who didn’t seem to have managed the matter without more than glancing assistance from the editorial page, because Americans had not yet become incurably embittered about their political opponents.