R Street at the Thanksgiving table
Every year, various publications wish their readership a happy and healthy Thanksgiving. Some go further. They provide their readership with advice about how to navigate political conversations around the Thanksgiving table.
Many of those columns focus on maintaining a serene path into the holiday season, while others focus on the best pithy ways to evangelize. Or, failing that, to “shame/destroy/eviscerate” those at the table with whom they disagree.
This piece, unlike those, is simply a collection of gifs designed to do no more than capture the feelings of a libertarian-minded guest when various political topics arise.
In the name of the Thanksgiving spirit, I give you: “R Street at the Thanksgiving table.”
Things will start off pleasant. Everybody can find a way to get along for at least 15 minutes while waiting for dinner. Invariably, at some point, the presidential election will come up. The always important “polls” will be discussed. At which point, your hitherto irrelevant knowledge of the RealClearPolitics average and fivethirtyeight.com tracking will be of some use:
Regardless which candidate is discussed, the libertarian position will be well outside the table’s mainstream and you’ll end up disappointed:
Still, in that process, someone might ask you what libertarianism is really about. You’ll do your best to explain:
…and the table won’t like it:
You may have a chance to discuss specifics, like cutting government funding for both “Obamacare” and Medicare. Others will disagree. But some of your ideas might catch on. Like, maybe we can have a free and open Internet and security at the same time?
If they don’t, you can always change the topic to something everybody agrees upon:
From everybody at the R Street Institute, we wish you and your friends and family a happy Thanksgiving.
