By Something happened to Thanksgiving a few years ago and it hasn’t fully recovered.
I don’t mean this in a way that’s specific to one family or one political moment. It’s a pattern that shows up in surveys, in therapists’ offices, in the stories people tell when they’re asked about their relationships. The dinner table got harder. The family group chat got quieter. The friendships where politics was always somewhere in the background started moving it to the foreground.
And some of those friendships ended. Some of those families divided. That’s not nothing.
What the Research Actually Shows
There’s a term researchers use — “affective polarization” — that describes something specific and important. It’s not just that people disagree politically. They always have. It’s that people on opposite sides of the divide have developed deep, personal dislike and distrust for each other as human beings. The numbers on this are genuinely striking. Large percentages of both Democratic and Republican voters describe members of the other party as dishonest, closed-minded, and immoral. Significant shares say they’d be bothered if their child married someone from the opposing party. These numbers have risen sharply over the past decade and show few signs of plateauing. What this means practically is that politics has moved from being a topic of disagreement into being a lens through which people evaluate each other’s basic character. And when you’re judging someone’s character, ordinary social tolerance gets much harder.
How It Actually Shows Up in Real Life
The pattern that comes up most often is something like this: a political post on social media. A pushback comment from someone you know in real life. An exchange that escalates faster online than it would have in person. Something said that couldn’t easily be unsaid. A relationship that comes out of the interaction subtly changed.
Social media doesn’t cause polarization, but it accelerates it in specific ways. It removes the social friction that in-person interaction provides — the cues that tell you when to soften, when to pull back, when the person in front of you is genuinely hurting. It surfaces the most extreme version of the other side. And because platforms are designed to maximize engagement, the content that provokes emotional reaction — usually outrage — gets amplified.
Outside social media, there’s a longer-term physical sorting happening. Americans increasingly live near people who vote like them, go to church with people who think like them, and consume media that confirms what they already believe. The spaces where people with different political orientations had to encounter each other as whole, complicated humans — local civic organizations, neighborhood schools with genuine economic diversity, mixed-community churches — have contracted.
The Family Version Is Particularly Complicated
You can unfriend someone on Facebook. You can’t unfriend your dad.
Family polarization is where this issue gets most emotionally loaded, because the relationships are both deeper and less voluntary than friendships. Adult children who’ve moved away from their hometowns and shifted politically find themselves navigating visits where the values gap feels enormous. Parents who don’t understand their adult kids’ political positions sometimes experience it as personal rejection. Grandparents and grandchildren who love each other are finding that they inhabit what feel like different moral universes.
The generational dimension is specifically acute right now because the values gap between older and younger voters on several key issues — climate, gender, racial justice — is as wide as it’s been in polling history. Families are living inside that gap in real time, without much guidance on how to navigate it.
Is There Actually a Way Through?
The research on couples — who often have more sustained practice navigating disagreement than friends or family members — offers some useful data. Political differences don’t necessarily damage long-term relationships. What tends to matter more is how the differences are handled: whether couples approach them with curiosity or contempt.
That distinction — curiosity versus contempt — shows up in the friendship and family data too. Relationships that survive significant political differences tend to be ones where the people involved are genuinely interested in understanding each other’s perspective, even when they deeply disagree with it.
This requires something that’s genuinely hard to do in the current environment: engaging with the actual person in front of you instead of the political category you’ve placed them in. People are not the sum of their votes. Most people, if you talk to them long enough, hold views that don’t fit neatly into either partisan box. The categories flatten that complexity, and the relationships suffer for it.
None of this is a fix. It’s more like a practice. And it’s easier to describe than to do when you’re actually at the table and someone says the thing they know will set you off.