Family Feuds and The Democratic Value of Political Division

Why staying connected to your MAGA family members might be the key to saving the republic.

The same uncle who taught you to throw a curveball now lectures about border security over Thanksgiving turkey. Your brilliant cousin, fresh from graduate school, counters with statistics about asylum seekers that make the room go quiet. These moments, when politics invade the sanctuary of family, feel like symptoms of our broken age. We tell ourselves that families didn't use to fracture this way, that something essential has been lost in our rush toward polarization.

We're wrong. Political divisions have shattered American families since before there was an America to divide over, and this long history suggests something unsettling: the arguments that make our holiday dinners unbearable may actually be democracy working as intended.

During the Civil War, families didn't merely argue about slavery; they lined up on opposite sides of battlefields, sometimes recognizing a brother's face in enemy ranks before the charge began. The war's aftermath left not just a divided nation but countless families permanently broken, their Sunday dinners forever marked by empty chairs and unspoken grievances.

Colourized picture of two brothers together, one a Confederate and the other a Union soldier, 1860s

Yet even this ultimate family catastrophe had precedent. The Revolutionary War produced its own intimate casualties, none more poignant than the destruction of Benjamin Franklin's relationship with his only son. William Franklin had grown up as his father's closest companion. In fact, Ben Franklin mentioned that at 22 years old, his son was out in the storm alongside him during the famous kite and key experiment that captured lightning. They faced death and danger together. William’s father shared some of his most daring ideas with his son and his son alone. But when revolution came, their bond proved more fragile than silk and key.

William and Benjamin portrayed in “Franklin’s Experiment” by Currier and Ives, 1876

Benjamin threw himself into the independence movement with characteristic intensity, while William, serving as royal governor of New Jersey, remained unshakably loyal to King George III. The elder Franklin's letters to his son reveal a man watching his family disintegrate in real time. Each plea for William to abandon the crown met with polite but firm refusal. Each refusal felt like betrayal compounded.

William's imprisonment as a Loyalist spy marked the end of their relationship. Upon his release in 1778, he sailed for England, choosing permanent exile over reconciliation. Father and son would never speak again, casualties not of battlefield violence but of irreconcilable conviction.

These stories matter because they reveal political family conflict as something deeper than contemporary dysfunction. From colonial drawing rooms to suburban dining rooms, American families have always served as proving grounds for the nation's competing visions of itself. The content changes, independence versus loyalty, union versus states' rights, progress versus tradition, but the underlying dynamic remains constant.

This persistence isn't accidental. A democracy built on pluralism virtually guarantees that families will fracture along ideological lines. The very principles that make America work, the right to dissent, the celebration of individual conscience, the belief that ordinary citizens should shape their government, create citizens who sometimes shape themselves into opposition to those they love most.

We romanticize family unity, imagining that blood should transcend politics. But the Founders designed a system that makes such transcendence nearly impossible. They expected conflict, welcomed it even, as the price of freedom. Family political tensions simply represent this larger democratic principle operating at its most intimate scale.

Strange as it sounds, these painful family dynamics may actually strengthen democratic culture. Unlike our carefully curated social media feeds, families force genuine ideological encounters. You cannot block your uncle or unfriend your cousin without consequence. This compelled engagement maintains what political scientists call "cross-cutting exposure," contact with opposing viewpoints that prevents complete tribal isolation.

Family debates also impose a unique form of accountability. Abstract political positions become harder to maintain when someone you love challenges them over dessert. Your cousin knows your contradictions, remembers your past positions, and won't let you retreat into talking points. This intimacy forces a kind of intellectual honesty that public political discourse rarely achieves.

Perhaps most importantly, families teach democratic endurance. Learning to disagree passionately with people you cannot abandon develops crucial civic muscles. If you can survive arguing about healthcare policy with your sister and still help her move apartments the following weekend, you've mastered something essential: the art of maintaining relationships across unbridgeable differences.

The stakes feel higher in family political conflict precisely because they are higher. When your grandfather expresses views you find abhorrent, the pain is immediate and personal. But this emotional intensity often catalyzes political engagement in ways that abstract policy debates cannot.

Love makes politics matter. It reminds us of the weight of the moment we’re facing and the decisions we are making.

None of this makes family political conflict pleasant. Democracy was never meant to be comfortable. The same passionate engagement that fuels our arguments also animates our entire system of government. The messiness isn't a bug, it's a feature that keeps democracy alive.

The next time politics explode around your family table, remember that you're participating in something both ancient and essential. From Benjamin and William Franklin onward, American families have been laboratories for working out the fundamental tensions of democratic life. The arguments hurt because they matter. The relationships survive because they must.

This is what it means to live in a democracy: to love people whose political convictions sometimes make your blood boil, and to keep loving them anyway. The alternative, perfect familial harmony, would require either perfect political consensus or the death of genuine political engagement. Neither would serve democracy well.