Yes, talk about politics at Thanksgiving this year

Coming soon for many of us: A relaxing Thanksgiving dinner with family and friends. But it's almost a cliché now that for too many people, Thanksgiving dinners include uncomfortable conversations with Trump-supporting family members.

It's hard to dodge politics today — and that's as it should be. Politics is people's lives, and politics discussions are really discussions about values. Especially this year, it's important not to avoid those discussions. If we want to make the world better, it's important to own our own values and be proud of them.

Those conversations can be hard. But in this post there are some tools to talk productively about politics this Thanksgiving. No one ever made a better world without speaking up, without standing up for your own good values. The goal here is to give you the tools, the words, the poise, and the knowledge to articulate your values and do a little persuasion.

1. Center your discussions on your values, and don't be afraid to judge bad values

There's no need to start with getting personal. Start with your own values. Good people stand for equality, and fairness, and freedom from oppression. You might embrace FDR's four freedoms — freedom from fear, freedom of worship, freedom of speech, and freedom from want. You may choose to embrace the idea that government is the way we make decisions as a society, and some things can only be done by government. You might think that concentration of power is bad, and that corporations and billionaires are bad for democracy and for living in a fair and free society. You can embrace the Declaration of Independence: "that all people are created equal", and they deserve safety and the ability to pursue their own happiness. These values naturally undergird any discussions of police abuse, of oligarchs like Elon Musk and Donald Trump, of creeping far-right Christian nationalism, or of the Republican party that backs all of this.

The second half of owning your values is that you should be unafraid to judge other people's bad values. If your MAGA uncle starts talking about Trump, you can say Trump pardoned war criminals and child-killers, and that makes Trump a bad person. And so backing Trump makes MAGA Uncle a bad person too.

Social consequences and peer pressure are very powerful. The organized right in this country — think Elon Musk's false "speech" agenda — is working hard to prevent social consequences for having bad values. An important way to fight back is to merely stand up for our values. And that means judging some other values. It's not the kind of advice you often see. But judging bad values is an important step towards a better society.

2. Pivot to agenda, talk about billionaires

The second piece of advice for conversations with Republicans and Trumpers is: pivot to agenda, and talk about billionaires.

You'll never win by being dragged into a policy debate. Republican voters today are not persuaded by policy details. They use policy details as bludgeons to distract and derail political conversations. What really underlies their thinking are bigger-picture emotional ideas: of tribalism, and of certain types of people that they think hold them down or make them feel bad.

You can turn this all on its head by using a judo conversation move: pivot the conversation to agendas. Usually, the best way to do that is to talk about the billionaire agenda that drives Trump and his party.

The Republican party’s goals today are all about helping a small number of rightwing billionaires. Billionaire American oligarchs are focused on destroying the government to cut taxes on the rich. And privatizing public schools to cut taxes on the rich. Shrinking healthcare to cut taxes on the rich. Slowing climate policy to help rich fossil fuel CEOs make more money. And your MAGA relatives are not billionaires — no matter whether they are working class or more wealthy, they are being screwed by the truly wealthy: the billionaire class. So whenever they bring up some policy item, find a way to pivot to the forces behind it — highlight how Republican billionaires are using that issue to enrich themselves at our expense. 

Your young cousin who watches Youtube and loves Ben Shapiro and Prager U? Well, Dan and Farris Wilks, rightwing billionaires with bad values, funded Ben Shapiro. They fund Dennis Prager and his PragerU chopshop too, and they do it to fool people like your cousin into voting to give tax cuts to billionaires.

Your business-inclined aunt who reads the Wall Street Journal and has a $400k yearly income? Her company's CEO is walking away with ten times that, or more. The 2017 tax cut mostly enriched billionaires, while cutting government services, making the truly rich richer while giving her only a small benefit. Laugh at her for supporting Trump while Trump's billionaire friends, like Paul Singer and Rupert Murdoch, benefit — and laugh at people like her because they have tricked her into supporting the truly rich. This is an easy point to make today, because so many of Trump's cabinet picks are rapacious and selfish billionaires.

Almost every MAGA supporter can be moved by talking about how the Republican party is a party of billionaires.

3. Talk about rightwing media

Talk about media, and talk about the billionaires behind rightwing media.

There’s a reason why rightwingers in the US are always talking about "liberal media bias": because if you can change the way people view information, you can change their minds more easily. A study from 2022 showed that getting Fox viewers to watch other media for just a few weeks had a dramatic effect on their views, shifting them away from MAGA Republican positions.

So anytime you hear something come up that would be on Fox — Crime! Trans panic! Sky high egg prices! Harris giggle! — you can always go back to “Oh, my dear. Sounds like someone’s been watching Fox again. That channel run by Rupert Murdoch, a rightwing billionaire, who uses Fox to lie to you so you’ll vote for tax cuts for Murdoch. Sad, really.”

Or, try “Murdoch was one of the first people in the world vaccinated. More than 90% of Fox staff got the vaccine, and they knew Fox was lying about it. They don’t care if you die — Republican elites laugh in private about their voters being ‘useful fools’… Oh wait, you didn’t know they call their voters that? Oh, sorry for you. Well, pass the cranberry sauce, please!”  (There’s more below on this kind of “strength projection.”)

It's often useful here to feel out where people get their news. If it's TikTok and podcasts, you can talk about how two rightwingers were paid hundreds of thousands of dollars per month, which they were told was coming from rightwing billionaires. (It was from Putin. But DOJ indicated that the influencers thought their money was coming from rightwing billionaire donors — and they expected the high price that other billionaires pay them.) The whole information space is distorted by billionaires' money. Whatever news source they have, you can generally pivot to talking about how that news is being distorted by billionaires' money.

Your goal here is not to get them to admit they were wrong to your face, but to wonder who might be paying the next time they listen to Fox, or talk radio, or PragerU, or Ben Shapiro.

And try to connect this kind of discussion back to values, too. Drop some "billionaires are screwing you" information. Then come back to freedom and equality and fairness — values that are antithetical to the goals of billionaires. Bringing up the basic values you believe in, and linking them back to fundamental American values, will never steer you wrong.

Weave these in too: betrayal, and strength

As you work on the three things above — stand up for your values, pivot to agenda, talk about billionaires and media — there's two other angles that can add power to your message.

First, talking about class and betrayal works. Second, Trump and Republican support today is all about asserting dominance.

Race, class, and betrayal

One approach to explaining values, called the ‘race-class narrative,’ has demonstrated that messages about society and democracy can be persuasive if they emphasize billionaires, and don’t shy from mentioning race.

That means it's good to say things like “Billionaires like Rupert Murdoch [pay Sean Hannity] to divide us on race, so they can steal our tax dollars with tax cuts for billionaires.”

A second approach depends on emphasizing betrayal and corruption. Some recent research has shown that many voters (even MAGA voters, and older voters, and Fox-watching voters) can be persuaded by suggesting that Trump is betraying them. One kind of betrayal is just what is mentioned above: “Republican billionaires [or Fox, or Tucker Carlson, or rightwing talk radio] lie to you to get you to vote for tax cuts for billionaires.” Or "Trump's 2017 tax cut may have given you a some pennies, but most of it went to billionaires. Rupert Murdoch got $2 billion. And it was put on a credit card that we will pay for, one way or another."

The betrayal point underscores something else — that narrative is key. Persuasion is usually most effective if you tell a story, and if that story has a villain, with a name. You see that in many of the quotes above.

Charles Koch, Rupert Murdoch, Dick Uihlein, and other right-wing billionaires really are bad people — and it's effective to talk about them, and how they don’t care if we die penniless, or don't care if our kids get massacred in mass shootings. Don't worry if your Republican family members don't agree with you in the moment, since your goal is to get them thinking. They might even yell at you when you say the above. That's a victory for you as long as you...

Project dominance and strength

It may seem obvious that MAGA Republicans don’t care as much about policy as they do about strength. You won’t make progress discussing issues without conveying that their certainty about Trump is misplaced. Unstated body language and how you carry yourself are just as important as the facts you present.

Trump's daily behavior is an example of the kind of dominance or power projection rightwingers like. Another example can be seen on YouTube, where videos about “SCHOOLING” or "OWNING" liberals are common. John Dean of Watergate fame, an ex-Republican, with psychology professor Bob Altemeyer, wrote a book about this.

Showing strength is key to any conversation you have with a MAGA Republican. But projecting strength means different things for different people – you’ll have to see what works for you. Sometimes, perhaps you know the person well. Say it’s your old uncle and you can come on strong. Maybe you say “Don’t be an idiot. You are spouting a pack of lies because you watch Fox. They don’t tell you Trump and his billionaire pals are hurting the country and harming you.” (Another key there: you're adding a betrayal angle.)

On the other hand, sometimes it’s more subtle, just quiet confidence: you say “Oh, you’re just going on again” and wave your hand in a dismissive way. Whatever the situation brings, just stay calm and collected and show you’re the one who is confident and strong. Project the implication that they’re believing a pack of lies about their party, spoon-fed to them by billionaires and rightwing media.

Politics is people's lives. Try different ways to talk politics with your family and friends. But don't shrink from the conversations. There's never been a better time to stand up for your values.

Here’s to building a better America and better world. Happy Thanksgiving.

updated from original post, November 2022