A full dinner table is the cure for angry politics

A Thanksgiving with four generations under one roof left me more convinced that only leaders rooted in family, faith, and place can pull us out of this angry era.

For two wonderful days last week, our house held four generations of my family under one roof. My 7-month-old niece, my 91-year-old grandmother, and so many loved ones in between all made the trek to Charlotte for Thanksgiving.

That’s not a small thing, and I was deeply grateful to have them all there together.

We didn’t do anything dramatic, and that was exactly what made it so good. We talked about the best way to give a baby medicine and watched her absolutely demolish a sweet potato. We put up a Christmas village. We played bingo. We ate pie. I tried to spend as much time holding the baby, and as little time scrolling the news, as I possibly could.

Politics never came up. Not once.

Before the meal, my children led a blessing over the food we had prepared. It wasn’t long or elaborate, just a simple prayer of thanks for the people around the table and the chance to be together.

I can’t help but think that if more of us could anchor ourselves that way, in gratitude and in faith and in the faces around a dinner table, the state and the country would be in better shape.

A new low point

It’s fashionable to bemoan the state of our political discourse, and it’s not wrong to do so. I’ve made versions of that argument plenty of times. We are at the low point of the old cycle where weak men make hard times.

But it is a cycle. This has come before and will come again. Vicious politics is closer to the historical norm than the exception, here and around the world.

My wife and I just finished the Death by Lightning miniseries on Netflix, about President James Garfield. If you think intraparty squabbling is rough now, go look at the factional warfare and backstabbing in that era.

The difference between Garfield’s era and ours is not the existence of ugliness. It is that the ugliness permeates everything now, and fewer people have the anchors of faith and family to fill out the rest of their identity.

Politics is supposed to sit on top of thicker loyalties: your church, your family, your neighborhood, the people you see every week. When those thin out, politics rushes in to fill the space. It becomes not just what you believe, but who you are.

That is how you end up with entire content factories built around how to “handle” your relatives at Thanksgiving, or how to “win” the holiday rather than just enjoy it.

Breaking the cycle

I think a lot about what it will take to break us out of the cycle we are in. I do not have a neat answer.

In a recent National Review essay, Yuval Levin described the current moment as an era where neither political party can build a stable majority on what it is for, so it leans on what the other side is against. He puts it this way:

“The era of partisan consolidation has been an era of electoral failure for both parties. Republicans and Democrats have effectively both been minority parties for a generation. When one of them wins, it wins narrowly and negatively — that is, by persuading just a hair more than half of the electorate that the other party would be even worse. Because our constitutional system restrains narrow majorities, winning by a hair means never really being able to govern effectively.”

We are at a point where I am not sure even a 9/11-scale event would pull the country together. The instinct would be to retreat to our corners, log on, and start assigning blame.

Part of the answer really is simple. If everybody actually did what the internet now calls “touch grass” — spent less time on X and cable news and more time around dinner tables, in churches, at ballfields and school events — we would be a healthier country. Those are the places where you remember that politics is not the sum total of a person.

But I do not see that shift happening on its own. The incentives all run the other way. We like to say that politics is downstream of culture, and there is some truth to that, but culture is also downstream of politics. The laws we pass, the budgets we write, and the way leaders talk about their opponents all set boundaries for what feels normal. What we tolerate and reward in politics eventually shows up in our culture and in our homes.

It will take better leadership to change the tone and reset those incentives.

Leadership in demand

In his 1983 book Statecraft as Soulcraft, George Will argues that “the most important task confronting Americans as a polity is, in part, a philosopher’s task. The task is to reclaim for politics a properly great and stately jurisdiction.”

We have seen, as he warned, a withering of concern for the intangible prerequisites of free government, the habits and character that make self-government possible.

At our best, conservatives have something to offer here. In the same essay, Yuval sketches what the right should be bringing to the table: a politics that puts family, religion, and culture at the center; that sees government as properly constrained but still energetic; that cares about the Constitution, about institutions, about stability and solidarity.

In other words, to bring the dispositions a party most needs if it wants to govern, not just rage.

What we need is to bring back the happy warrior

A happy warrior can see clearly what is broken and still refuses to act like everything is already lost. His identity is anchored in faith, family, and place first, and he brings that steadiness into public life. He can fight hard, tell the truth, and draw real lines, but he does not need to hate everyone on the other side to get through the day.

That does not mean going soft or pretending disagreements do not matter. But if you are not grounded in something deeper than the daily fight — in faith, in family, in a place you actually love — then it’s easy for partisanship to curdle into bitterness.

That is what I tried to sketch out in a new column for the paper. Read it here, free with gift link: The dangerous decline of North Carolina’s “Happy Warriors”

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Question of the week

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