What's It With All Of This Thanksgiving Family Fight Crap?

Being Irish from New England, my family is VERY political, all with one or two exceptions, moderate to liberal but, as liberals are wont to be, far from unanimous in our very strongly held opinions on various issues.   There are Republicans in our family but they are mostly among cousins we don't see much of and uncles and aunts now dead, and a few in-laws, now mostly divorced.  

I don't remember there ever being a fight over politics at a Thanksgiving table in my family and some of our smaller family gatherings at Thanksgiving have had more than twenty at table, the largest ones I remember had about 60, though we don't do that anymore.  Yet I don't remember there ever being that kind of fight over politics or other issues of the kind that I'm hearing about all over the radio and reading about online.  I don't know if it's because our family Thanksgivings have been pretty much alcohol free - though when I drank I used to have one or, at the most, two gins, neat to prepare myself for the ordeal, such as it was.   I don't remember being raised with inordinate strictness but apparently we were brought up to have manners, which also comes as a surprise.  I thought we were little brats. 

Or is it that all of this Thanksgiving family fight stuff just media filler, bull shit to fill up air-headed air-time with,  like the same kind of thing about fruitcake a couple of decades back.  I never understood, if they didn't like fruitcake, why they didn't just not eat it.  Or are they too stupid to realize that's an option?  Our media does lots of stupid, it's what they do, mostly, these days.